Spring, 1932

The committee shattered the image of the investment banker as a man of probity whose first concern was the welfare or his customers and who operated in an institution that was a model of fair play...[It] was revealed that the most respected men on Wall Street had rigged pools, had profited by pegging bonds prices artificially high, and had lined their pockets with fantastic bonuses. The leading financial houses...invited insiders to purchase securities at a price much below that paid by the public...The bankers seemed bereft of a sense of obligation even to their own institution.

-William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940

A journalist ventures back to a troubled, seductive Haiti

01/18/2013 

A journalist ventures back to a troubled, seductive Haiti

By Michael Deibert

The Huffington Post

(Read the original article here)


In 1996, freshly graduated from university, I went into a local bookstore in Pennsylvania and picked up a volume that ultimately changed my life.

The book was The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier by journalist Amy Wilentz. Published seven years earlier, it was a chronicle of the fall and aftermath of 29 year Duvalier family dictatorship in that tumultuous Caribbean nation. The writing was crisp and insightful, the political and social drama it depicted Shakespearean, the long struggle it described of a nation trying to form a responsive democracy in the face of local tyrants and international meddling was Sisyphean. Within a year I was in Haiti, a relationship that continues to this day.

Now, 23 years after The Rainy Season, Wilentz, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, returns to the Magic Island with her new volume, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti.

Much has transpired since The Rainy Season, not least of all the apocalyptic January 2010 earthquake that leveled much of the capital and surrounding towns, killing tens of thousands of people. Haiti's two-time president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a figure who, as much as anything, Wilentz's first book helped solidify in the international imagination, was overthrown not once but twice, in 1991 and in 2004, in circumstances that couldn't have been more different. A United Nations peacekeeping mission, largely unloved and convincingly linked to a strain of cholera that has killed over 7,000 people, has been on the ground for nearly a decade.

Unlike many commentators on Haiti, Wilentz genuinely likes and is stimulated by the Haitians themselves, and, in between despairing observations, in both The Rainy Season and Farewell, Fred Voodoo, she manages to capture the beauty of Haiti, physical and spiritual, something that foreigners writing about the place rarely do.

But despairing and pessimistic would indeed seem to be the most apt adjectives for the book's take on Haiti's post-earthquake landscape.

After Wilentz adroitly points out that what was often commented upon as Haitian "resilience" after the earthquake was in fact more likely post-traumatic shock, she goes on to conclude that "misery in Haiti today is a job creator for the white man" and that "the aid superstructure in Haiti...has created exactly the circumstances in which it becomes indispensable." Acidly and perceptively, she compares the thousands of aid workers, journalists and others who descended on Haiti after the quake as the equivalent of loup garous, the parasitic werewolves of Haitian folk legend.

She wonders why, if in the earthquake's aftermath the international community was able respond so quickly to so many chronic needs in Haiti as access to clean water, these problems could not be addressed before. As she did in The Rainy Season, Wilentz also pays tribute to the political significance of vodou, Haiti's syncretic religion that is too often ignored or caricatured.

Some of the book's anecdotes - from a hapless Haitian-American couple trying to buy land to a relentlessly self-promoting American journalist to a rather overdone portrait of an American doctor - run a bit long, but Wilentz can be darkly humorous in the margins. One American adventurer is described as having "liked to drink a quart of whiskey a day and to chain women up...[His] marriages did not last long." When Wilentz delves into the details of the 2010 privatization of Haiti's state telephone company, Teleco, and the state's torturous relations with the communications giant Digicel and its Irish chairman Denis O'Brien, the book is revelatory.

The book's major shortcoming is an unwillingness to address directly the tangled legacy of Aristide, a man whom Wilentz, as much as any writer, helped to bring to international prominence.

Though in one passage she tellingly recalls Aristide truculently complaining that hundreds of checks sent from abroad to fund his "projects" were not large enough - "not worth cashing," in fact - Wilentz's rather forgiving view gives rather short shrift to voluminous evidence that complicates any benign picture of the former president.

When Wilentz writes about Aristide's paternal relationship with street boys when he was a priest, she omits the far darker turn that relationship eventually took, with Aristide's political party and government helping to organize youth gangs as a bludgeon to use against his political opponents. Those looking for an examination of why virtually the entire top command of Aristide's police force and the upper management of Teleco during his tenure subsequently ended up in prison for drug trafficking and corruption offenses will look in vain, as will those looking for an accounting of the government's often horrific collective punishment against its rivals.

Wilentz herself treads very close to an apt, though inexact, parable for Aristide's rise and fall, when she accurately concludes that, culturally and politically, Haiti most closely resembles "French West Africa."

Like Aristide, Côte d'Ivoire's former president Laurent Gbagbo was once viewed as a champion of democracy as he led opposition to the long dictatorship of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. And like Aristide, once in power Gbagbo began to mimic in every particular the very worst and most anti-democratic tendencies of those he once railed against. After serving as president from 2001 until 2011, Gbagbo was extradited to the International Criminal Court in the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. Aristide returned to Haiti from exile in 2011. He is currently being sued by account holders ruined in a government-endorsed cooperative scheme during his administration and some of those same street children he once allegedly championed.

Writing in a marriage of memoir and critique, Wilentz's true strength is in honestly documenting the Haiti that foreigners who visit there construct for themselves, concluding that, despite its image of misery, for the misfits, idealists, adventurers and opportunists that wash up on its shores, Haiti is "a welcoming, accepting place where you can be yourself."

A hard sell, perhaps, to those who know only the Haiti of violence and calamity, but a sentiment that rings very - almost painfully - true to those who have seen and been moved by one of the nation's many other faces. Farewell, Fred Voodoo shows us a few of them and hopefully will provoke readers to look still further.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).

Cape Florida Light, Key Biscayne

Reporter depicts events surrounding Haiti earthquake

Reporter depicts events surrounding Haiti earthquake

By Michael Deibert

The Miami Herald

The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

Jonathan M. Katz, Palgrave Macmillan, 320 pages, $26.00

(Please read the original article here)

Jonathan M. Katz’s new book about the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010 is fascinating but frustrating. An Associated Press reporter who lived in the country for two years before the disaster, Katz brings an on-the-ground flavor to his depiction of events that is more vivid than those in the more ponderous tomes published in the wake of the calamity.

Katz’s description of the day of the earthquake — a day that could have killed him — is wrenching and terrifying, and his descriptions of the often-callous diplomacy in its aftermath are bitterly convincing. His minute dissection of the failure of most of the promised aid and the misdirection of much of what did arrive is a valuable contribution to understanding how the international community should respond to such crises in the future. Even more chilling is his account of the indifference and subsequent obfuscation of the United Nations mission in Haiti and the fact that its troops introduced a cholera epidemic to the country that killed at least 7,000 people.

But Katz’s sharp lens turns fuzzier when he writes about the Haitians themselves. Early on, he states that he relied on his fixer — a driver/translator/guide — “for everything” during his time in Haiti, and so the account we see is what that fixer showed him, not the account of a journalist venturing forth to immerse himself in the country on its own terms. That’s a pity; Katz is a talented writer, and surely he had interesting thoughts about the subject. His window into Haiti’s byzantine political culture also seems to come from a single source, a former government minister who cannot on his own puzzle out the entire riddle of Haiti’s venomous political landscape.

Katz’s desire to see straight lines where tortuous twists and turns lie means that he tends to oversimplify complex situations. This habit become most problematic when he tries to assess Haiti’s history before he got there. Puzzlingly, nowhere in The Big Truck That Went By does he mention one of the events that probably more than any other destroyed Haiti’s rural agriculture and accelerated the urban migration to the destined-to-be-wrecked capital: a U.S.- Canadian funded program that, in the 1980s, succeeded in destroying 1.2 million of the Kreyol pigs that formed the backbone of the peasant economy.

Legislative elections in 2000 that saw journalists and opposition politicians murdered and their homes and party headquarters burned down are said to have suffered from “alleged fraud.” The chronology of the late-2003/early-2004 armed rebellion that (along with massive street demonstrations) would eventually bring down the government of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is also fudged, with Katz blaming the action on a “small band of well-armed rebels.” In fact, the movement began among a street gang of former loyalists in the northern city of Gonaives, incensed in their belief that Aristide had murdered their chieftain.

Even given Katz’s admirable doggedness as a journalist, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of love for Haiti in this book. Not for its mist-shrouded mountains, its azure coastal waters, the seductive gingerbread architecture that still rears up unexpectedly in its provincial towns or — with the exception of his fixer and the story of an earthquake-displaced family he movingly chronicles — the Haitians themselves. The Haitians in fact seem to rather irritate Katz, constantly bending his ear with unwanted conversations to the point where he can “hardly ask for directions.” At one moment, he admits that, despite having lived in the country for almost three years, he had rarely “let his guard down” with Haitians, which translates into a lack of intimacy with and insight about the people at the heart of the story.

Katz is a writer of considerable talent, with an often mordant and memorable turn of phrase. Had he schooled himself more thoroughly in Haiti’s history and immersed himself to a greater extent among its people before setting pen to paper, he could have produced a knockout of a book. Despite its many virtues, ultimately The Big Truck That Went By represents another example of what Katz himself exposes so thoroughly of the international community’s involvement with Haiti: Something of a missed opportunity.


Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).

End of the year

Farewell 2012, with all your tragedies and triumphs. Bienvenido, 2013.

2012: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

This past year, my attention was sharply focused on two places near and dear to my heart: the Caribbean nation of Haiti and the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. Though I was not as prolific in churning out articles as I have been in the past, with my attention largely focused on completing my forthcoming book on the Democratic Republic of Congo and commencing work on a new book looking at Northern Mexico, I hope that this oeuvre will nevertheless be useful for those of you trying to make sense of this often-tangled world we live in.

With hopes for peace, both personal and geopolitical, for all in 2013.  

All best, 

MD


Letter from Haiti for the Huffington Post (28 November 2012)

The Fall of Goma for the Huffington Post (20 November 2012)

Oil discovery ignites political tensions in Uganda for fDi Intelligence (11 April 2012)    

After Charles Taylor, Justice for Haiti? for the Huffington Post (26 April 2012) 

How Invisible Children's Kony 2012 Will Hurt - And How You Can Help - Central Africa for the Huffington Post (9 March 2012)

The Problem with Invisible Children's "Kony 2012" for Huffington Post (7 March 2012)

North Kivu’s False Peace for African Arguments (29 February 2012) 

In northern Uganda, a difficult peace for Le Monde diplomatique (26 February 2012)

Books in 2012: A Personal Selection

Though intense work on my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books) and a new project looking at Mexico meant that I wasn’t able to read as much for pleasure as I ordinarily would (something I hope to remedy in the coming year), some interesting tomes nevertheless crossed my radar. Here are some of the most intriguing of them.  

With all best wishes for 2013,  

MD

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe  

The Nigerian author’s bitter and brilliant 1966 novel about “the corroding effect of privilege” in post-independence Nigeria sees Achebe turning his sharp eye to the acquisitiveness and moral turpitude of the country’s political elite to nearly as great an impact as he examined the destruction of traditional society in a more famous novel, 1958’s Things Fall Apart.

Up Above the World by Paul Bowles   

Chilly, distant and more than a little strange, the American author’s take on Guatemala reminds one of the lineage of U.S. literature that traces back to Edgar Allan Poe, and how the knowledge that comes from actually being in the world, as opposed to just writing about it, adds to the power of the printed page.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain   

At times overly-garrulous but nevertheless entertaining and enjoyable, Anthony Bourdain’s tale of a misspent youth passed between cuisine high and low was something I have been wanting to get around to reading for a long time and am glad that I finally did.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett  

A linguistic detective story and a thrilling and respectful account of the author’s years living among the Pirahã in the Brazilian Amazon, this book shows how even the most arcane academic pursuits can be riveting in the rights hands. Though the Pirahã can, quite frankly, sometimes come off as petty, vengeful, cachaça-swilling brutes, Everett’s hard-won insistence that we meet them on their own terms is a refreshing antidote to armchair academia posing as insight. A most unique and enjoyable read.

Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellin Cartel - An Astonishing True Story of Murder Money and International Corruption By Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen   

An engrossing account of the early to mid period Medellín cartel - Pablo Escobar., Jorge Luis Ochoa Vázquez y su familia, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha  and Carlos Lehder - and their American enablers and Colombian and American pursuers. Published back in 1989, the book hearkens back to the days when journalists, well, actually knew something about the subjects they wrote books about. 

Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism by Tony Hodges   

A highly informative if often rather dry account of Angola post-1975 independence to the dawn of the 21st century.

 Beyond the Mexique Bay by Aldous Huxley  

Interesting if often somewhat unpleasantly misanthropic portrait of the writer’s travels through Mexico and Guatemala. Huxley seems as if he would have been a most disagreeable traveling companion: Pissy, prissy, at time unthinkingly bigoted and always, it seems, pining for dear old  England.

Michael Manley: The Making of a Leader by Darrel E. Levi  

An illuminating biography of the nearly-forgotten leader of Jamaica’s People’s National Party, this now-sadly-out-of-print portrait is sympathetic but never hagiographic, recalling such forgotten bits as the sadistic brutality of Manley’s Jamaican education and his brief stint as a journalist, and casting a light back to a time when Jamaica was an important player on the regional stage.

The Rwanda Crisis : History of a Genocide by Gérard  Prunier   

Far more authoritative than Philip Gourevitch’s better-known We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, this book by one of the world’s greatest living Africa scholars looks at the background of one of the last century’s great crimes and why the world failed to stop it.

Defeat is the Only Bad News: Rwanda Under Musinga, 1896-1931 by Alison Liebhafsky des Forges  

As an authoritative account of the reign of the Rwandan monarch Yuhi V (born Yuhi Musinga), this book by one of the world’s great Africa scholars, whose life was tragically cut short, examines the complex links of Tutsi royalty with at first German and then Belgian colonial powers in Rwanda.

Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist's Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland by Basharat Peer  

A welcome addition to the dearth of literature on the conflict in India-controlled Kashmir by the Kashmiris themselves, Peer’s book nevertheless sometimes reads like confusingly-organized journalist’s notes in search of unifying thread, robbing the overall narrative of any great cumulative emotional impact. Peer is particularly effective when writing about his immediate circle of family and friends, though, and the book adds some sickening details of India’s excesses in its most restive region but, to my mind, the most authoritative Kashmiri voice on the conflict remains the late poet Agha Shadid Ali, whose collection The Country Without a Post Office was one of the highlights of my 2010 reading season.

Everlasting Bass, Miami Art Basel

Photo © Michael Deibert

Letter from Haiti

Letter from Haiti 

By Michael Deibert

The Huffington Post

(Please read the original article here)

During late November, the clouds hung low over Port-au-Prince, pregnant with the threat of rain. When it did issue forth, life in Haiti's overpopulated capital, partially destroyed in a January 2010 earthquake but still vibrant between the Caribbean Sea and looming mountains, continued irrepressibly on. Moto-taxi drivers plied the streets in their jaunty raincoats, and people continued hawking anything there was to sell under any surface providing shelter from the deluge.

In the middle of one Saturday afternoon, with clouds rumbling down from the mountainside, a group of about 200 young men commandeered the central Place St. Pierre square in the tony suburb of Petionville, halting traffic and periodically hurling bottles in various directions (one of which shattered at my feet). The lads thumped their chests for about three hours before moving on. Their message was that life was too expensive for people in Haiti and that Haiti's President Michel Martelly, whom they said they had previously supported, wasn't doing enough to ameliorate the situation.

Martelly, in his previous life perhaps the most well-known (and most frequently cross-dressing) purveyor of the sinuous Haitian music known as konpa and popularly known as Sweet Micky or Tèt Kale (Bald Head), was not even in the country at the time, a fact not lost on the protesters.

In office since May 2011, Martelly was winding up a long trip to Europe during which he addressed the European Parliament, attended the Ibero-American Summit in Spain and met with the Pope at the Vatican. He was even absent from Haiti during the must-attend 18 November anniversary of the Battle of Vertières, the 1803 clash during which the rebel Haitian army defeated the French near the northern city of Cap-Haïtien and thus paved the way for Haiti's declaration of independence soon thereafter.

"He wants to work well for the people," said a middle-aged taxi driver named Jackson plying the road near the airport, summing up popular sentiment. "But the problem is his entourage."

Elected to succeed René Préval, the only democratically-elected president in Haiti's 208 year history to finish his term in office (a feat the wily, white-bearded Préval managed twice), the political novice Martelly inherited a to-do list that would have daunted even the most skilled politico.

Much of the country's capital was leveled and some 200,000 people believed killed in the January 2010 earthquake, which at one point had left at least 1.5 million people homeless. Tent encampments dotted the capital and its environs and a cholera epidemic, almost certainly brought to the country by the rather-unloved UN peacekeeping mission in place since the 2004 ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has thus far killed more than 7,500 people.

The most basic services and healthcare remain out of reach of much of the nation's 10 million inhabitants, scattered in far-off provincial districts reached by badly decayed roads. A gradual diminution of Haiti's security situation since the tumultuous ballot that led to Martelly's election culminated last month with the spectacular arrest of Clifford Brandt, scion of one of Haiti's wealthiest families, as the alleged mastermind behind a long-running kidnapping ring.

Also arrested as part of the gang was the commander of a security unit from Martelly's National Palace (there has been no suggestion the president himself was involved), who entered prison as Calixte Valentin, a Martelly advisor accused of murder, exited it. Former members of the country's army, demobilized but not constitutionally disbanded by Aristide in 1995, continue to agitate for the force's reinstatement despite the existence of a police force - the Police Nationale d'Haïti or PNH - currently numbering some 10,000 recruits. A battle over the composition of the country's electoral council has raged for months.

"A stabilization process is taking place albeit a fragile one," says Mariano Fernández, the Chilean diplomat who heads the UN's peacekeeping mission, known by its acronym MINUSTAH, which is envisioned to be scaled back to around 6,300 military personnel in coming months. "We continue planning to reduce and reconfigure MINUSTAH in the coming years depending on the stability of the conditions."

The last caveat is an important one. Haiti's security forces have enjoyed a steadily-improving reputation since the 2006 inauguration of Martelly's predecessor Préval. It has been a marked change from Aristide's 2001-2004 tenure, when politically-connected partisans were inserted into the PNH regardless of their competency or culpability in various crimes, or that of a 2004-2006 interim government when police often made little distinction between armed pro-Aristide gangs and ordinary residents of the capital's poorer neighborhoods.

Until recently, the PNH were headed by Mario Andrésol, widely regarded as one of the most honest and competent officials in the country and who was replaced by Gotson Aurélus in August. Since then, something of a delicate realignment has been taking place. It is widely believed that Secretary of State for Public Security Reginald Delva exercises more operational control over the PNH than Minister of Justice Jean Renel Sanon, his nominal boss. A former senator, Joseph Lambert, now a Martelly advisor, is also spoken of as wielding influence beyond what one would expect.

Though the Brandt arrest was greeted with a gasp in much of the international community (this is, after all, the strata of society most international actors interact with) in Haiti the view was more circumspect.

"The bourgeois control the police with their money, and a lot of police officers also provide security for businesses and the private sector because there is no control, and they can receive more money for their work," says Pierre Espérance, the Executive Director of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, Haiti's most prominent human rights organization. "Each kidnapping gang has its connection with the police."

Despite such realities, one of Martelly's chief plans of attack appears to be an attempt to re-band Haiti and change its relentlessly negative image from a place solely of natural disaster, coups, misery and death to one of a place open to investment and boasting a vibrant and tourist-friendly culture.

Though this approach has been rather too smugly sneered at by the international chattering class that comments on Haiti, most people I spoke with in the country actually saw its value and supported it in principle, even if they didn't quite understand why the president was spending so much time abroad.

There is some evidence that Martelly's approach may be succeeding. The president, ever the extrovert natural showman, would seem a perfect fit for such a campaign. In July, the president even declared a three day out-of-season Carnaval des fleurs (Carnival of Flowers) designed to highlight the country's flair for music and pageantry. The camps from the central part of the capital have mostly been cleared, but with some to their inhabitants relocated to a windswept moonscape situated on denuded land on a road leading north out of the city

A new industrial park in the country's north - which itself has hardly been free from controversy - was opened in October, with, among others, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British billionaire Richard Branson in attendance. The lure of potential gold reserves in northern Haiti has brought a number of international mining companies, some with questionable records, to stake claims on huge swathes of land, creating economic potential but only of the most fraught kind.

Though the vast overpopulation of the capital - a consequence in part of international economic policies inflicted upon Haiti - helped lead to the vast death toll from the earthquake, the decentralization of economic and political power from Port-au-Prince still remains an agonizingly slow and complex process. Privately, many in Haiti's business community, intensely nationalistic at heart despite their comfortable economic status, complain the country has been "invaded" by foreign companies and non-governmental organizations.

In some economically struggling communities, the feeling is one of hopes delayed if not dashed entirely.

"We liked Martelly and we thought he would help a lot of people," says Pè Nico, a diminutive young man whose moniker ("Father Nico") belies his youthful appearance. "But this neighborhood has always been forgotten."

Pushing 30 years old but looking barely into his 20s and resplendent in a Miami Heat baseball cap, Pè Nico leads an armed faction in the capital's quartier populaire of St. Martin, an area of deeply-rutted roads and at times precarious-looking structures from which the PNH and MINUSTAH appear completely absent.

Pè Nico's baz say they voted - "99%" in their words - for Martelly. In their neighborhood, once a war zone and still subject to occasional bouts of violence, residents have been tending to the Partnership for Peace and Prosperity in Saint Martin, under whose aegis members of the private sector operating in the zone and local community leaders have sought dialogue and improvement in living conditions there. The two sides began talking in 2007 and, even through the earthquake and after, they are still talking. It is perhaps a hopeful sign.

I had known Martelly very slightly in his previous life as Sweet Micky. We spent a memorable evening more than a decade ago cruising through Port-au-Prince in his SUV with a loaded pistol between us as he bemoaned the state of Haiti and the irresponsibility of its leaders both political and economic, a scene depicted in a book I later wrote about the country.

When I visited Haiti in August 2011, just after Martelly's election, I found popular support for the colorful, eccentric president among the pep la, as Haiti's struggling class (which is to say almost everybody) is known, still high.

Despite the eroding of that hope when confronted with the immense challenge of governing Haiti and his own missteps, Haitians still seem to be giving Martelly the benefit of the doubt.
So many factors - rising food prices, civil unrest underwritten by various malefactors, another natural calamity - could change that. But in a country whose leaders have often promoted themselves through terror and abuse, Martelly - whose signature colour is pink - has offered something of a change of tone, however unorthodox.

On my last day in Haiti, purely by chance, my path overlapped with that of Michel Martelly.

Waiting at the airport to board my flight home, I saw Martelly's American Airlines plane fly in from Miami. As if on cue and so apt for a showman, the cloudy gloom that had plagued the capital for days broke and rays of brilliant golden sunshine spilled out of a blue sky. Diplomats, Haitian police officers in their crisp khaki uniforms and every airport worker that could sneak away from their job were standing there to greet him. He was going to be inaugurating a new arrival hall, they told me, then this week he would be leaving again, this time for Cuba.

Martelly disembarked from the plane, his bald head and smiling visage visible among the mostly smaller Haitians.

They cheered.


Michael Deibert's forthcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, will be published by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute and the Social Science Research Council. His previous book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005), was praised by the Miami Herald as "a powerfully documented exposé" and by the San Antonio Express-News as "a compelling mix of reportage, memoir and social criticism."

Port-au-Prince, Thursday morning

The Fall of Goma

The Fall of Goma 

By Michael Deibert

The Huffington Post 

(First published here)

When the provincial capital of Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo fell to rebel forces today, the rapidity of the rebel advance was shocking, but the fait accompli failure of both Congo's armed forces and the country's United Nations mission was not.

As 2012 dawned, the international community and the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo - known by its acronym, MONUSCO (formerly MONUC) - were hailing the peace and stability that a 2009 deal with the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) rebel group had supposedly brought to the eastern part of this vast country.

Formed by renegade general Laurent Nkunda, the CNDP's ostensible goal was the protection of Congo's Tustsi ethnic group and the defeat of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), the main Hutu-led military opposition to the Tutsi-led government of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda. The FDLR, though a severely degraded force from what it once was, has its roots in Rwanda's 1994 genocide when several hundred thousand Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by extremist Hutu supremacist elements.

Succored by Rwanda, Nkunda nevertheless proved himself to be a headstrong and unreliable negotiating partner with the regional powers and with the government of Congo's president, Joseph Kabila, who Nkunda openly talked about toppling. Kabila's father, Laurent Kabila, had seized power with Rwandan help in 1997 only to then go to war with his former patrons and die by an assassin's bullet a little over three years later.

As a result of his recalcitrance, Nkunda was jettisoned and replaced at the negotiating table by another CNDP leader, Bosco Ntaganda, who had been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague in January 2006 on three counts of war crimes allegedly committed while he was helping to command another rebel group in Congo's Ituri region, a time during which he earned the sobriquet "the Terminator."

The deal struck between the Kabila government and Ntaganda's CNDP in March 2009 saw the rebels become a registered political party and their forces integrated within the official armed forces, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC). Bosco Ntaganda became an important powerbroker in the province of North Kivu, the Rwanda and Uganda-border region of which Goma is the capital.

Far from a road to Damascus moment, the agreement was rather a modus vivendi by cunning, ruthless political operators.

Kabila, reelected in a highly controversial 2011 ballot, has fashioned a government that is in many ways a younger, more sophisticated version of his father's. Relying on a narrow circle of trusted individuals and a network of international alliances, Kabila's power is built on a patronage base rather than a political base. This model was dealt a serious blow when one of Kabila's most trusted advisors, Augustin Katumba Mwanke, a man who often handled Kabila's most delicate financial and political transactions, was was killed in a plane crash this past February.

Across the border, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, for so long a darling of western donors and development workers, has for many years presided over a tight-lidded dictatorship where government critics meet either death (opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, killed in Rwanda in July 2011), exile (former general Kayumba Nyamwasa, wounded in a shooting in South Africa in June 2010) or both (Inyenyeri News editor Charles Ingabire, shot dead by an unknown gunman in Kampala last December).

[Along with other neighbors who have seen fit to intervene in Congo over the years, Rwanda has been happy to help itself to large amounts of the Congo's extensive mineral wealth, as documented in a 2001 United Nations report]

As a number of people (myself included) warned at the time, the peace deal as implemented was a marriage of convenience destined for a nasty divorce. Unfortunately, the international community itself gave an additional seal of approval when, against the advice of their own Office of Legal Affairs, UN forces backed Congo's army as the latter launched Operation Kimia II ("Quiet" in Swahili) in March 2009 against the FDLR.

Despite the common knowledge that Ntaganda - a wanted accused war criminal - was acting a de facto deputy commander for Congolese forces during Kimia II, MONUC's command hid behind transparently false Congolese government assurances that Ntaganda was not involved.

According to one investigation, between January and September 2009 more than 1,400 civilians were slain in the provinces of North and South Kivu, at least 701 by the FDLR and the rest by Congolese and Rwandan government-allied forces. Over the same time period in the same provinces, over 7,500 women and girls were raped and over 900,000 people forced to flee their homes.

Despite these excesses, the UN signed a Joint Operational Directive with Congo's army as it launched yet another operation against the FDLR, this one dubbed Amani Leo ("Peace Today"), during January 2010. Immaculée Birhaheka of the Promotion et Appui Aux Initiatives Feminines (Promotion and Support for Women's Initiatives) pleaded that "the name of the military operation has changed, but the situation remains the same: Women are still being killed, maimed, abused like animals."

They would have been wise not to look to the UN for help. Though the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo is the largest in the world at nearly 17,000 military personnel, it is still cartoonishly small for a country the size of Western Europe.

Nor has the mission shown any great appetite for adhering to its mandate, which charges it with working "to ensure the protection of civilians, including humanitarian personnel, under imminent threat of physical violence."

In May 2002, when dissident soldiers mutinied against their commanders in the central city of Kisangani, MONUC troops did almost nothing as those commanders (including Laurent Nkunda) oversaw the killing of at least 80 civilians and a ghastly bout of rape. Two years later, in the city of Bukavu, Nukunda was again present as a series of ethnically-based attacks in and around the city saw looting, raping and murder take place as MONUC did little to aid common citizens. In November 2008, CNDP forces led by Bosco Ntaganda killed at least 150 people in the town of Kiwanja despite the fact that 100 UN peacekeepers were stationed less than a mile away.

Once part of the official apparatus in North Kivu, as pressure grew (as it inevitably would) on Ntaganda to break the parallel chains of command within the FARDC-integrated CNDP units, and with chorus of calls demanding his arrest, the warlord finally decided that the pressure was too much.

By early April of this year, former CNDP members began to desert their posts in North Kivu and fighting broke out around the province. By May, the deserters had named their group the Mouvement du 23 mars, or M23, a reference to the date of the 2009 peace accords between the CNDP and the Kabila government. They operated, as they always had, with strong Rwandan backing.

In July, saying that the Obama administration had "decided it can no longer provide foreign military financing appropriated in the current fiscal year to Rwanda," the United States announced - for the first time since 1994 - that it was suspending military aid to the Kagame regime, citing "evidence that Rwanda is implicated in the provision of support to Congolese rebel groups, including M23." That same month, the Netherlands announced that it was suspending five million euros ($6.2 million) in aid to Rwanda, a decision it said was directly linked Kigali's support of M23. The following day, the British government also announced the freezing of £16 million of aid.

[The recent decision of the UK's international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, to restore aid to Rwanda on his last day on the job resulted in a storm of controversy and a pledge by his successor that she would gather evidence in terms of Rwanda's linkage with M23 before deciding on any new aid.]

But today, with almost-certain Rwandan (and Ugandan) backing and with, by all accounts, barely token opposition from UN forces stationed there, the M23 seized Goma. And tonight, as the United Nations and the international community stand by, the people of Congo are once again at the mercy of those who have tormented them in the past.

The approach of the international community thus far, both in exercising its mandate to protect civilian lives in Congo and in holding the outside supporters of Congo's rebel groups to task, has thus far proved woefully insufficient.

As word of Goma's fall spread throughout Congo, reaction was immediate. Buildings belonging to Kabila's political party - with many Congolese accusing the president of caving in to the Rwandans - were burned in the cities of Kisangani and Bunia, and UN buildings were pelted by stones in the latter town.

The fall of Goma may prove a defining moment, for both the Congolese government and for the gulf between the actions and the words of the international community in the Democratic Republic of Congo.


Michael Deibert's forthcoming book, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, will be published by Zed Books in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute and the Social Science Research Council.

Wi, Nou Kapab

Congratulations.

Why I am voting For Barack Obama in Florida in 2012

During the primary season of 2008, I wrote on this blog about why I was voting for then-candidate and now-President Barack Obama for the nomination of the Democratic party.

As everyone knows, since then Obama won primary and then the presidency. Despite being somewhat underwhelming in his first term to those of us who expected a more progressive agenda, it must also be admitted that he has been hamstrung at every juncture by the most extremist and hateful opposition party that I have seen in the United States in my lifetime. Despite that and many disappointments, the Obama administration has managed to get a number of very important things done.

I've been a frequent critic of the Obama administration's policies on a range of issues, but I truly believe at this moment - however flawed - his reelection is what stands between us and the enveloping darkness of the Christian sharia fanatics, Dickensian robber barons and science-denying flat earthers of the Republican Party, as exemplified by Mitt Romney and his even-more repulsive running mate, Paul Ryan. So I will do my part to try and put Florida in the Democratic column tomorrow.

If you believe that the United States should have a middle class and not be a nation of masters and serfs, if you believe that women should control their own healthcare decisions, if you believe that our LGBT friends should enjoy the same rights that we do and if you believe that climate change is a reality and not a myth, I think you should, too, and vote for Barack Obama.

Desayuno, Día de los Muertos, Mexico City

Very brief thoughts on the killing of U.S. ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens in Benghazi

I wake today to the news that U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three embassy staff personnel were killed in the Libyan city of Benghazi in an assault believed to have been carried out by Ansar al-Sharia, an al Qaeda-style Sunni Islamist group tin that country. The ostensible excuse for the attack was the promotion by fringe U.S. evangelist Terry Jones of a film produced by an Israeli-American property developer that allegedly (I have not seen the film) insults Islam.

I never met J. Christopher Stevens but reading his biography as a former Peace Corps volunteer and English teacher in Morocco fluent in both Arabic and French, he certainly seemed a good choice for the role in which he served. I can only help but think again that people are free to believe anything they wish as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others, and that I've never seen religion produce anything other than a toxic brew when mixed with politics, whether speaking of fundamentalist Islam or Christianity as injected into the dispute in Northern Ireland. A compassionate liberal humanism is the only approach that makes any sense at all when approaching the world. Secular liberal democracy is something that I think is worth dying for.

Verdade

"I must give the readers not the book they want but the book they don't want."

 - Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes in conversation with Anthony Bourdain.

Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair

4 years of research, a year and a half of writing and 897 footnotes later: Welcome the world, little book. And thank you so much, Congo.

I would also like to personally thank my Kickstarter backers:  Erin Siegal, Michele Roumain, Lori DiBacco, Ezra Fieser, Tomas van Houtryve, Jon-Marc Seimon, Chris and April Deibert, Emily Leuning, Cari Luna, Gergana Koleva, Ben Deibert, Natasha Del Toro, Karen Ferriere, Reyna Clancy, Susan Carlile, Kelly Lyons Schober, Emily Hatfield, Brian Blessinger, Sutton Stokes, Stephen Leahy, Jan Voordouw, Nomi Prins, Susanne and Joseph Feeks, Nancy Rebal, Ashley Eckel, the World Future Council, Matthew Moran, Andrew McConnell, Erika Stokes, Marika Lynch, Sean O'Neill, Summer Jauneaud, Hilary Wallis, David Doherty, Jean M. Dorsinville, Patrick Brun, Sharon Brun, Jabe Bloom, Reginald Dumas, Gennike Mayers, Robert Morison, Richard Boncy, Jean Roger Laraque, Erline Andrews, Ben Fountain, David Searcy, Diane Banowetz, Patrick Moynihan, Francesca Romeo, Eve Sibley, Sarah Anderson, Gerry Hadden, Alex Morel, Jann Deibert, Louisa Dykstra, Art Beyond Borders, Emily Breon, Pooja Bhatia, Merritt Tierce  and Noelle Theard.

Thank you all so much. I couldn't have done it without you.

A grant from the International Peace Research Association also proved essential to the book's completion.

Asante.

MD

Morning Coffee

Photo © Michael Deibert

Fin de semana, café cubano, Miami

Photo © Noelle Théard

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

In addition to being one of the nicest guys I know, my friend Ben Fountain also happens to be one of the best American writers of fiction alive today. If you liked his terrific 2006 book of short stories Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, grab his new novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a book about war, class and commerce that is one of the best books of the year.

Here is Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times and By Jeff Turrentine's review in the Washington Post.