18120: Montas' Lone Crusade For Justice (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: sidatire@hush.com

Lone Crusade For Justice/ Widow hopes film helps spur Haiti to prosecute
husband's assassins

By Ron Howell
STAFF WRITER

January 25, 2004

Michele Montas has traveled a long way since she was homecoming queen
at the University of Maine in 1965.

She became a journalist, returned to her native Haiti and married a crusading
radio announcer.

Now Montas is on a solitary quest to get Haiti to prosecute and punish
those who assassinated her husband, Jean Dominique, as he was about to
begin the station's morning news broadcast nearly four years ago.

Her tale is a lonely search for justice.

"Beyond that," Montas says, "there is a love story, a very strong one."

She recounted that story in a recent interview, and does so in "The Agronomist,

" a documentary being considered for an Oscar nomination. Final selections
will be announced on Tuesday.

The documentary captures the mostly tragic sweep of Haiti's modern history
through Dominique's life, from his privileged childhood to his journalistic
campaign against corruption and human rights abuses.

These days, Montas' greatest hope is that thousands will see the Jonathan
Demme film when it is released for general viewing in April, and they
will pressure Haiti to conduct a serious investigation into the Dominique
case.

"If we can't find justice in the courts of Haiti, then we have to find
it in the court of public opinion," Montas, 57, said at her Upper East
Side residence, where she is living in exile and working for the United
Nations.

Montas earned her master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism in 1969, but soon after returning to Haiti in 1972,

 she would learn how risky the reporting business was.

Then in her early 20s, Montas fell in love with a charismatic radio announcer
who, like her, came from the mulatto upper classes. She and Dominique,

 17 years older than she, shared a passion for movies, and in fact met
at a theater. More ominously, they shared a desire to end decades of
abuses suffered by Haiti's poor.

An agronomist, or agricultural expert, who had spent his younger years
working with peasants, Dominique valued Montas for her formal training
in journalism. She began working with him at Radio Haiti Inter, a station
he had recently purchased, and they began living together.

Angry over the couple's populist newscasts, henchmen of dictator Jean-

Claude Duvalier laid siege to the station in 1980, torturing a staffer
and causing Montas and Dominique to flee for their lives.

In exile in New York City, their love affair deepened and they married
in 1983 at City Hall. "Jean was extremely idealistic," Montas recalled
last week. "I used to call him Don Quixote, but what he was fighting
was stronger than windmills."

Montas and her Don Quixote returned to their parched nation in the sun
in 1986 after Duvalier gave up power and moved to France, and they quickly
became enamored of a Catholic priest who seemed fearless in his demand
for justice.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide's election as president in 1990 was "a tremendous
moment of hope for Jean," Michele says in "The Agronomist."

But the moment was brief.

The husband and wife team went into a second exile in New York in 1991,

 after soldiers overthrew Aristide and began a bloody campaign of terror
against his supporters. Three years later they followed Aristide back
to Haiti when he was restored to power by U.S. troops.

By most accounts, Aristide changed as the years passed, tolerating, even
appointing, politicians linked to the old Duvalier regime.

Back at his radio station, Dominique began to rail against corruption
he saw in Aristide's Lavalas party. In one eerie recording before his
death, the agronomist-turned-journalist complained about threats from
Dany Toussaint, a former top military officer and Lavalas politician,

 who today is a senator. Dominique suggested he might be killed by Toussaint
loyalists. In truth, Dominique made many enemies of left-wingers, right-

wingers and businesspeople. The list of those who might have wanted him
dead was long, his wife acknowledges.

On the morning of April 3, 2000, as he walked through the doors of Radio
Haiti Inter, Dominique, 70, was shot seven times by a gunman. A security
guard also was killed. Montas, arriving in her own car minutes later,

 saw the carnage.

Days later Montas took Dominique's cremated remains to the fertile Artibonite
Valley, where he was adored by peasant farmers, and poured his ashes
into the river. Then she went back to work, starting each morning by
playing an audiotape of Dominique's voice saying, "Bon jour, Michele."
She would answer, "Bon jour, Jean," and announce the number of days elapsed
since the killing.

She reported the news and she criticized Aristide and the Lavalas party
for not demanding a serious investigation into her husband's murder.

On Christmas Day 2002, Montas' bodyguard was fatally shot by assassins
minutes after he dropped her off at her home. Last February, she succumbed
to threats against her and her staff and closed the station, fleeing
once again to New York.

About three weeks after Montas' departure, Haitian Justice officials
announced indictments of six men. But critics say those men were street
criminals who were almost certainly acting on orders. Authorities released
three of the men on a legal technicality and a fourth escaped from prison
three weeks ago.

"Since the beginning of this investigation the Haitian government has
shown no willingness to deeply investigate the case and find the authors,

" said Carlos Lauria, a program coordinator for the New York-based Committee
to Protect Journalists.

A Haitian Justice official told Newsday that the High Court of Justice
is reviewing the case.

"After the decisions are presented the judicial system will continue
to move the case forward in the pursuit of justice," said Privat Precil,

 director-general of the Ministry of Justice, in an e-mail statement.

Montas, who lives alone but has two brothers in the New York area, is
working these days at an administrative job at the United Nations. Seven
other Radio Haiti Inter employees also are in exile.

Some say Montas' search for justice is hurt by spiraling unrest in Haiti.
Opponents are demanding that Aristide leave office. Two weeks ago, Mayor
Michael Bloomberg canceled a trip to Haiti after warnings that it was
too dangerous.

Though dissatisfied with Aristide's lack of passion for solving her husband's
murder, Montas does not want to see him toppled. "There could be worse
than Aristide," she said. "There could be chaos."

Don't expect a resolution of the Dominique deadlock anytime soon, one
human rights advocate said.

"With the current crisis, and all energy going into that, I do not see
the government or justice system making bold moves in any arena for the
time being," said Brian Concannon Jr., a human rights lawyer in Haiti.

But Montas is optimistic. To her, obstacles are so many windmills that
can, with determination, be taken down. After all, she once won a homecoming
crown without knowing a thing about football.

"Jean gave his life fighting for good things in Haiti," Montas said.
"I'm hoping this film will at least make people aware of Haiti and aware
of that fight that he fought. Maybe the film will accomplish things that
he wasn't able to do in his life."
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.




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