12390: Newsday: Being a Journalist in Haiti Is a Very 'Risky Business' (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Being a Journalist in Haiti Is a Very 'Risky Business'

Clarence Page
Clarence Page is a syndicated columnist based at the
Chicago Tribune.

June 18, 2002


PORT-AU-PRINCE - As a Graham Greene fan, I tried in vain to
contain my excitement as I sat for the first time on the
veranda of the Hotel Oloffson with Richard A. Morse, the
young "voodoo rock" musician from Connecticut who runs the
place.

Down below us, through the century-old balcony's ornate
wooden fretwork and ocean of palm greenery, is the hotel
pool in which Greene's Doctor Philipot was found dead. The
Oloffson was the Trianon in "The Comedians," Greene's take
on the nightmare regime of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier.

Morse dodges the inevitable comparisons to Mister Brown,
the Trianon's proprietor. "I came to study voodoo rhythms,"
he says. "The hotel is my day job." Yet, Haiti is Haiti,
"the best nightmare on earth," as American writer Herbert
Gold, another Oloffson visitor, called it. One still feels
the gloom and doom as gothic as the Trianon's towers and
balconies that Greene described under the Duvalier regime.

Hardly anyone appears to be staying at the Oloffson or any
other Haiti hotel, I notice, other than journalists and aid
workers.

"It had the air of a Charles Addams house in a number of
The New Yorker," Greene wrote of the Trianon's gothic
atmosphere. Outside the Oloffson's walls and gate, I detect
that gothic gloom and doom in the rest of Haiti, too. The
atmosphere seems less dictatorial, yet still fouled with
the aroma of dead bodies here and there during the watch of
Haiti's first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide.

I have come with a pair of colleagues on a "mission" from
the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, of
which I am a board member. Morse approves. "After all," he
observes, "after they come for the journalists, the
musicians are next." His smile says he is joking, his eyes
tell me he is serious. Just outside the walls of his hotel
grounds, the noisy, narrow and dusty streets of Haiti's
capital are decorated with the name and charismatic face of
one dead journalist.

"Justice for Jean Dominique," says a banner stretched
across busy streets. He was gunned down April 3, 2000,
ambushed in the parking lot of Radio Haiti Inter, the
popular radio station that he owned and used as a platform
for hard-hitting reports and commentary.

Another journalist, Brignolle Lindor, was hacked to death
in December by a mob apparently connected to an
"Organization Popular," one of the grass-roots community
service groups that have become politically charged
militias with their own warlords.

Two journalists were jailed in May without charges or
medical attention for 13 days, along with a dozen suspects
from the political protest they were covering when it
turned into a fight. They were released after the
Association for Haitian Journalists lodged protests and
court action. One journalist, slashed by a machete in the
melee, may lose an eye.

"Those in power are not accustomed to being challenged, not
used to a free press," said Guyler Delva, the association's
director. Assaulted by Aristide opponents when Aristide was
in exile, Delva, a newspaper reporter, more recently has
been threatened by Aristide supporters. Such are the
hazards of attempting objectivity in Haiti.

The suspects in the Dominique case are numerous. Three
suspected gunmen were put in custody in a country where
thousands sit in overcrowded jails awaiting trial. But even
in this high-profile case, efforts to prosecute the
suspected masterminds behind the assassination appear to
have stalled.

Meanwhile, the nation's journalists pursue their jobs,
trying to shrug off the chilling effect brought on by a new
rein of terror and uncertainty. "Journalism in Haiti always
has been a risky business," says Dominique's widow.

When Aristide talks to journalists, he pledges, as he did
in January, to "do everything in my power so that
journalists can do their jobs without interference." Yet,
his information minister recently notified the media about
a new press law under consideration that would enable the
government to determine who is a journalist and other
matters that should be decided by one's audience.

Sounds like journalism in Haiti will continue to be a risky
business.

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