26247: Re: 26239: Simidor responds to JeanPierre (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: danielsimidor@yahoo.com

Kevin Pina is a watchdog, one tough critic wrote to me
yesterday, and to the extent that he gets in the face
of the PNH and MINUSTAH authorities with his camera,
am I too stupid or blind to see the deterrent value of
what he does?  Maybe so, I replied.  But as a Lavalas
propagandist (witness his assistant-manager job at
Telemax once Aristide had bought his way in at the
station), Kevin Pina also lies.  His "eyewitness"
account in March 2004 of U.S. Marines removing
Aristide from the palace "in handcuffs" is one such
lie that the average Lavalas apologist has yet to
concede as such.  The claim of 10,000 Lavalas members
killed before Sep. 2004 is another lie, borrowed from
a previous era (the 1991 coup).  Dangerous lies
calculated to "heighten the contradiction" ? to compel
the U.S. and the French to reverse their "mistake" and
restore Aristide in power.

Jean Jean-Pierre, for his part, pointedly refers to
Mr. Pina as an independent journalist and filmmaker.
No one seems to mind, but all those little white lies,
wink wink, this tacit complicity with a morally
bankrupt Lavalas regime, are so many paving stones on
Haiti's road to hell.  You don't need to be a legal
scholar to know that jumping over walls and
interfering with police investigations is against the
law in any country.  Kevin Pina knows this, he even
volunteered that he would have stopped or gone back if
the police had challenged him in the act.  But Haiti
doesn't have the means or the political will to
enforce its own laws against somebody with Mr. Pina's
clout.  That's why the investigating judge had to
allege some sort of physical assault to justify Pina's
arrest.  That's also why, come Monday morning, the
judge had to let him go regardless of what the law
says.

There is more.  Jean Jean-Pierre claims that when it
comes to the Constitution, it's all or nothing.  Come
now, brother Jean-Pierre!  I don't recall such
high-minded pronouncements from you when Aristide was
shredding the Constitution two years ago.  If you want
to talk about intellectual dishonesty, let's talk
about this nasty little habit you seem to share with
other Lavalas diehards of throwing in the same bag all
those who opposed the regime.  The last time I
checked, taking up arms to overthrow the government is
against the Constitution, calling on the president to
resign isn't.

Jean Jean-Pierre also derides my little comparison
("If it was here...") as "pure nonsense" on account,
if I understand his reasoning, of "the fascist regime
in Washington..."  Point #1: do you mean it is
ethically OK to revile a government as "fascist" and
then to embrace it ("I want to speak to MY embassy"
right now) at the first sign of trouble?  Do people
even know what "fascist" really means (Franco, Hitler,
Papa Doc, Pinochet, etc)?   Point #2: the scenario I
described would have been the same whether in Cuba,
France, Germany, Zimbabwe or Japan.  Are all those
countries also run by fascist regimes?  Or is it not,
as I pointed earlier, that Haiti is so weakened that
it cannot enforce its own laws against foreign
nationals?  Which is it, brother Jean-Pierre?  Are
journalists enjoying some uncommon freedoms under the
"fascist," "dictatorial" and "de facto" Latortue
government?  Or would you say that justice was better
served when it was meted out at the point of a machete
or gun by Constitution-minded "OPs" like JPP, Domi nan
Bwa and Bale Rouze?

Daniel Simidor




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