15237: Lemieux: NYTimes: A Haitian Survivor Mourns, and Keeps Fighting (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

March 29, 2003
A Haitian Survivor Mourns, and Keeps Fighting
By DAVID GONZALEZ


HE Haitian government wants Michèle Montas to believe that
common criminals killed her husband, Jean Dominique.

Never mind that he was the country's most famous journalist
and fiercest critic of government corruption. Never mind
that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and several
government ministers reportedly huddled with the
investigating judge before indictments were issued on
Monday. Never mind that someone tried to kill Ms. Montas
herself on Christmas Day, forcing her to silence Radio
Haïti-Inter, the station that she and her husband had run
since the 1970's.

In the through-the-looking-glass world of Haitian justice,
the indictment did not identify whoever ordered the April
3, 2000, assassination of Mr. Dominique. It did not
indicate a motive for why he was shot seven times, nor for
a series of other killings linked to the case. It merely
named the same six men — ex-convicts and former policemen —
who have been imprisoned for the crime for the last two
years, and who Ms. Montas says were just the shooter and
his accomplices.

Ms. Montas, a veteran of the "risky business" of journalism
in Haiti, where dozens of reporters have had to flee into
exile, had long feared a whitewash. But not one this
brazen. Until she knows who ordered the shooting, she will
stay in exile in New York, filing appeals from afar.

"We've had at least five people die in this case," she
said. "One suspect was lynched, another disappeared. The
judge is in exile in Miami. How can they say that they
cannot identify a brain behind this. Maybe the word brain
is too strong. Maybe I should say the money."

Easy money from drugs, sweetheart deals or old-fashioned
corruption drives much of Haiti these days, Ms. Montas
charges, while Mr. Aristide and his Lavalas party offer no
solutions and empty words.

A homecoming queen turned crusading journalist, she is tall
and elegant. Her hair pulled back smartly, she looks you
straight in the eye. On her blouse is a button with Jean's
smiling visage. It reads, "Jean Dominique is Alive in Every
Grain of Rice." The sentiment is both symbolic and literal:
he worked for years with peasant groups, and his ashes were
scattered in the waters that feed the Artibonite Valley,
once Haiti's breadbasket.

Her anger at how things went so wrong does not come from
some middle-class fear of the impoverished Haitian masses,
but from a deep sense of betrayal by Mr. Aristide. She and
her husband, like many Haitians, were inspired by the
former Roman Catholic priest, and hoped democracy would
flourish in their country after the departure in 1986 of
President for Life Jean-Claude Duvalier, known as Baby Doc.

"It was unthinkable this would happen under Lavalas, a
party Jean worked to put in power," she said. "We thought
things would change for participation and transparency. In
fact, nothing has changed and impunity reigns. In fact, it
is reinforced by the apparent inability of the president to
control the violence."


THE violence that has plagued Haiti through much of its 200
years touched her privileged upbringing when François
Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, consolidated his dictatorial
rule in the late 1950's. She was the comfortable daughter
of two university professors, and she was angry at the
repression sweeping through her country that claimed the
lives of an aunt and several cousins.

But even in that chaos, she found inspiration that would
later become her journalistic creed. In 1959, Papa Doc sent
his thugs to arrest a colonel and son who lived next door
to the Montas family. She still recalls how the volleys of
gunfire echoed through the neighborhood as she imagined the
father and son in a fierce gun battle. Instead, it was the
colonel's daughter who was keeping the thugs at bay.

"She was covering their retreat, and I never forgot that,"
Ms. Montas said. "A women showed me she could do it. It
meant we were not powerless. That one person could make a
difference."

Ms. Montas studied journalism at the University of Maine
and Columbia University, returning to Haiti in the early
1970's. She worked for newspapers where her education
helped little in overcoming the entrenched culture of
journalism as official stenography.

The meeting that would change her life came not at a radio
station or newspaper, but at the movies, where she
encountered a rugged yet rakish pipe-smoking man who, like
her, thought nothing of seeing three movies in a day. He
was Jean Dominique, a former agronomist who had become a
groundbreaking radio journalist, broadcasting stories about
politics and culture in Creole, not French.

She joined him at the station, and they became an elegant
couple who did stories on controversial topics that tested
how far they could push the limits — Jean called it
sniffing. They paid for their daring, as advertisers
fearful of government reprisals withdrew. By 1980, they
were forced into exile in New York, where she worked
producing radio programs for the United Nations.

They returned when Baby Doc left, and they resumed
broadcasting, as Mr. Aristide built the popular movement
that brought him to power in a 1990 election. A year later,
he was ousted in a military coup, the radio station was
shot at and ransacked, and the couple were once again in
exile in New York.

"We were amazed that could happen," she said. "Everything
we had put into this, our hopes, had failed. When Duvalier
had left, we felt there would be a new life. Of course,
that did not happen. But you had thought everything was
possible."

She would find out upon her return in 1994 that Haiti
seemed even harsher and Mr. Aristide, restored during an
American-led invasion, seemed remote and cautious. Mr.
Dominique soon worried about what he saw as corrupt
politicians and businessmen getting too close to Mr.
Aristide, who did little to distance himself, he said.

By late 1999, Mr. Dominique stepped up his criticism during
his broadcasts, singling out for special scorn Dany
Toussaint, a close adviser to Mr. Aristide long suspected
of drug running and political murders. The following year,
he was shot dead.

NOTHING surprises her now, least of all the fact that it
took nearly three years to bring the indictments for the
murder or that they did not identify who ordered the crime.


It is only the latest in a string of disappointments that
started with seeing the leader she and her husband once
loved become just another Haitian politician, she said,
paying street groups to rally for him, or worse.

"When he first lost power, then came back, he felt that was
not going to happen again," she said of the president. "If
that meant corruption, so be it. Jean-Bertrand Aristide
feels he can solve anything by throwing money at problems.
That is so different from the man I once knew, the priest,
the man of the people. Power is now the name of the game."

Mr. Dominique's death silenced neither Ms. Montas nor the
radio station, until recently. As the government missed
deadline after deadline for issuing indictments, a gunman
attacked her home this past Dec. 25, killing her bodyguard.
A few weeks later, she closed the station after her
reporters continued to receive threats.


TODAY Ms. Montas waits in New York, refusing the
government's entreaties that she return. "Members of the
government ask us to reopen the station because they say we
are giving them a bad image," she said. "People have died,
but this is giving them a bad image?"

The only image she dwells on now, is the one of Jean on a
video monitor, as she helps with "The Agronomist," a
documentary about her husband produced by the American
director Jonathan Demme. A few weeks ago, she sat inside
Mr. Demme's suburban New York studio, unblinking as she
watched Jean speak of Haiti, justice and exile.

When he smiled, she smiled. When he spoke, her shoulders
moved ever so slightly as she breathed that much faster.
And when his image faded away, she let out a nearly silent
sigh as her eyes moved away from the screen.

"I feel sadness and betrayal," she said. "Anger. A lot of
anger. Anger got me into this business in the first place.
To me, Jean's assassination changed the meaning of my life.
I am fighting to get justice. Not just for Jean, but the
country we fought for."


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