16526: Edouard - Journalists aren't alone in Haiti's elusive justice (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Felix Edouard <loveayiti@hotmail.com>

Journalists aren't alone in Haiti's elusive justice

PAUL TASH
Times Editor
and President
By PAUL TASH, Times Editor and President
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 21, 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PORT-AU-PRINCE - A little after 2 last Thursday afternoon, the diminutive
president of Haiti sat at one end of a very long wooden table in an even
longer room in the National Palace, an elegant oasis that looks out onto the
hills of hardship just beyond the steel fence.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was defending his government's record for protecting
journalists against threats and violence. Considering how poor the country
is, and how fragile its police force and court system are, Haiti's record of
keeping the peace and protecting its citizens - including its journalists -
is downright respectable, Aristide was telling an American delegation.

What if New York City, with about as many people as Haiti has, had to cope
with Third World troubles? The electricity often blacks out in Haiti,
sometimes for days at a time. What would happen to public order in New York,
Aristide challenged the Americans, if the power went out - even for one
hour?

Within two hours, the question became much more than the rhetorical point
that Aristide was pressing to a delegation from the Committee to Protect
Journalists, a U.S.-based group that pushes for press freedom around the
world and throws a lifeline to journalists in hot water. (Over the past five
years, the St. Petersburg Times has donated roughly $100,000 to CPJ, and I
serve on its board.)

By CPJ's reckoning, Haiti is the most violent country for journalists in the
Western Hemisphere, after Colombia. In the last four years, journalists
there have been harassed, beaten and kidnapped; at least two were murdered.
One was hacked to death by a crowd with machetes after a mayor said there
should be "zero tolerance" for the reporter.

The other was one of Haiti's most prominent broadcasters, who was an
Aristide supporter. Assassins were waiting in the radio station's courtyard
when the broadcaster got out of his car one morning. His widow kept the
station going for a while, but she fled to the United States after her own
bodyguard was shot to death last Christmas. More than a dozen other
journalists have also gone into exile.

Those journalists who remain behind keep up their work despite the risks,
over-riding their fears. While our delegation was in Haiti, one radio
station got an anonymous fax warning that one reporter at each of several
stations would be murdered by week's end, apparently an empty threat. The
owner of another station said he doesn't let his wife drive his car, to keep
her from becoming the target of harm intended for him.

Max Chauvet publishes Le Nouvelliste, Haiti's daily newspaper, and
acknowledges that investigative reporting is off-limits: "If you have
investigative journalists, they are going to get killed." He pointed to one
of his reporters, who is the head of the Haitian journalists' association.
"If Guyler wants to do this (investigative reporting), I will tell him to
get a life insurance policy."

In the old days of dictatorship, it was easier to tell where trouble was
coming from, said several of the journalists we met during a three-day
visit. These days, the government doesn't lock up anybody for what they
write or say. Indeed, the commentary on Haitian radio - the primary medium
in a country where many can't read and are too poor to have TVs - is widely
reported to be raucous.

But the government also has a very mixed record of finding and locking up
the people who threaten and attack journalists. More than three years after
the murder of Jean Dominique, the radio station owner shot to death in his
station's courtyard, three of the six men first charged as the gunmen have
been released, and the authorities are no closer to learning who might have
been behind the murder.

Some government officials scoff that journalists hype their fears of
violence as a way to get visas so they can come to the United States. The
minister for justice, a veteran of the Duvalier dictatorships, protests that
even though he is 76, he walks around the central market and drives himself
to work without a bodyguard. "I want to change the face, the image that
people around the world have of my country," said Calixte Delatour.

But several blocks away, a young man in street clothes with an automatic
rifle walked through cars in a traffic jam, ordering cars to the sidewalks
on either side of the street, clearing a path for a caravan of three
government cars. It carried more men with rifles, the barrels resting on gun
mounts fixed to rolled-down windows.

Even as the president defended his government's efforts to bring justice to
Haiti, Aristide described the judicial system as "broken" and "sick." There
are only 4,000 police officers for 8-million people, and when the police
academy recently graduated several hundred new recruits, there were no
uniforms for them. After two weeks on the job, Haiti's new police
commissioner fled to the United States last June, complaining of political
interference.

The government's grip on order is so tenuous that when one gangster went to
jail, his cohorts rammed a stolen tractor through the prison walls - setting
the gangster free, along with 150 other prisoners.

Many journalists complain that the government could do more if it wanted,
but the threats and violence often originate with "popular organizations" -
sort of political clubs, except with guns - with ties to Aristide's
government. A month ago, an opposition group tried to stage a rally in
Port-au-Prince's largest slum, a stronghold for Aristide. A riot erupted,
and several journalists covering the rally got hit with rocks. Observers
said it was a minor miracle that nobody was killed. (Some government
officials claimed that five people were killed, but a Western diplomat in
Port-au-Prince confided to our group that the bodies didn't look fresh.)

Facts in Haiti get pretty fuzzy, and it is hard to tell how much more peril
journalists face than other people. Just getting by is a struggle. Streets
in the capital are lined with people selling little bits of food, like
bananas or eggs, or clothing. I saw one vendor by a stack of tree saplings
that had been cut and trimmed of their branches. I asked our driver: What
are those for? Construction, he answered. Along the streets downtown, men
were welding and chiseling on the husks of old cars.

"We have all the ills that you can think of in Haiti to deal with," Prime
Minister Yvon Neptune sighed during a meeting with our group. "Any citizen
can be at risk."

None of us was suggesting that security for journalists is Haiti's only, or
even its biggest, challenge. But it must be hard for anybody in Haiti to
feel very safe when some of its most public citizens can be routinely
threatened and regularly hurt, and nothing much happens as a result.

If the Aristide government is serious about changing Haiti's image, both
inside and outside the country, it will have to create a greater sense of
security for all its citizens, including journalists. Bringing some bad
people to justice, especially if they are politically well-connected, would
be a good place to start.

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