28863: Fenton (news) Ignoring murder in post-coup Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Anthony Fenton <fentona@shaw.ca>

Ignoring murder in post-coup Haiti
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2937&printer_friendly=1
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
http://www.fair.org
Extra! July/August 2006
Invisible Violence
Ignoring murder in post-coup Haiti
By Jeb Sprague
In an eight-minute report (6/5/05) in which she rode in a U.N.
armored personnel carrier and extolled the bravery of U.N. soldiers,
NPR correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro cited "human rights
organizations" as saying that "things have improved since the
Aristide days." The NPR report interviewed two members of the U.N.
force, one U.S. police trainer, one Haitian police official and
Gerard Latortue, the head of Haiti's unelected interim government. It
neglected to quote any victims of the violence perpetrated by the
Latortue regime or any human rights organizations critical of the
governmental-sponsored violence-perhaps because they might have
pointed out that such violence actually increased dramatically during
Latortue's time in power.

After Haiti's democratically elected leader, President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, was ousted in February 2004, the United States, Canada and
France put into place an interim government made up of members of the
opposition. Latortue, a wealthy Haitian-American, was installed as
the head of this government.

On April 30, 2004, the United Nations, under U.N. Resolution 1542,
established the U.N. Stabilization Mission to Haiti, known as
MINUSTAH, grouping more than 9,000 military and police personnel from
more than 40 countries under the leadership of Brazil and Canada. For
more than 26 months, the interim government used former members of
Haiti's disbanded military, along with U.N.-trained paramilitary
police, to crack down on the slum-dwelling supporters of the ousted
government and of Fanmi Lavalas, the political party which had voted
Aristide into office. During this period, the mainstream U.S. press
observed a virtual blackout on the state-sponsored violence
perpetrated by the U.S.-backed interim Haitian government.

Aristide under fire

For more than two-and-a-half years prior to the 2004 coup,
paramilitary rebels led by former Haitian police chief Guy Philippe
had attacked Haiti from bases in the Dominican Republic. They killed
civilians and government officials, targeted police stations, Haiti's
largest dam and even the presidential palace, all sparking further
violence. Government aid embargoes by both the Clinton and Bush
administrations further stripped bare the foreign aid-dependent
Haitian state.

Opposition-aligned political parties and anti-government "civil
society" organizations, however, received tens of millions of dollars
in training and support funds during that time from U.S., Canadian
and European aid agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International
Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Canadian
International Development Agency. With the Haitian currency, the
gourde, plunging in value, poverty-stricken Haitians struggled under
mounting prices and political destabilization.

Even under these conditions, the Aristide government continued to
invest in education, medical training and a program to fight human
trafficking, albeit with a yearly budget of approximately $300
million for a population of about 8 million. Daring to resist IMF
calls to privatize its public industries while raising the minimum
wage for Haitian garment industry workers and bringing suit against
France for $21 billion in colonial reparations, the Aristide
government accumulated powerful enemies.

Further political polarization resulted in violence, doggedly covered
by the mainstream U.S. press throughout Aristide's second
administration (2/01-2/04). One of Aristide's most widely publicized
North American critics counted approximately 212 politically
motivated deaths during Aristide's second government, attributing 50
of those killings to the opposition (Michael Deibert, Notes From the
Last Testament).

Murderous operations

By contrast, a National Lawyers Guild investigation documented that
"800 bodies" had been "dumped and buried" by the morgue in Port-au-
Prince in just the first week following the coup; the usual number
under Aristide was less than 100 a month (3/29-4/5/04). The
University of Miami Human Rights Investigation, a 10-day survey
(11/11-21/04) during the interim government, discovered piles of
corpses in Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince-victims of state
security and paramilitary forces (Boston Globe, 4/19/05). World Bank
official Carolyn Antsey told this reporter that "thousands died" as a
result of the February 2004 events.

Alternative press agencies, human rights organizations and
independent investigations, including Amnesty International, the New
York University School of Law, L'Agence Haitienne de Presse (AHP) and
Dr. Paul Farmer's Partners in Health, reported a concerted wave of
interim government violence and persecution, while much of the U.S.
mainstream press remained virtually silent.

Throughout 2004 and 2005, reports from the non-profit alternative
news service Haiti Information Project (HIP) uncovered killings of
Lavalas supporters carried out by members of the interim government's
Haitian National Police (HNP). HIP (7/05) also documented murderous
operations, with victims often shot in the head, committed by the
Brazilian and Jordanian contingents of MINUSTAH. The University of
Miami Human Rights Investigation, conducted by Boston immigration
lawyer Thomas Griffin in mid-November 2004, documented mass murder by
the HNP, mass graves, cramped prisons, no-medicine hospitals, corpse-
strewn streets and maggot-infested morgues-the interim regime's means
of dealing with the supporters of the ousted Aristide government.
Nine months after Aristide was removed, Griffin wrote,

U.S. officials blame the crisis on armed gangs in the poor
neighborhoods, not the official abuses and atrocities, nor the
unconstitutional ouster of the elected president. Their support for
the interim government is not surprising, as top officials, including
the minister of justice, worked for U.S. government projects that
undermined their elected predecessors. . . . U.N. police and
soldiers, unable to speak the language of most Haitians. . . resort
to heavy-handed incursions into the poorest neighborhoods that force
intermittent peace at the expense of innocent residents. The injured
prefer to die at home untreated rather than risk arrest at the
hospital. Those who do reach the hospital soak in puddles of their
own blood, ignored by doctors.

A few mainstream outlets occasionally reported on individual
incidents of violence perpetrated by the interim government. The
Miami Herald (3/1/05) reported: "Haitian police opened fire on
peaceful protesters Monday, killing two, wounding others and
scattering an estimated 2,000 people marching through the capital on
February 28 to mark the first anniversary of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide's ouster. . . . Peacekeepers, whose orders are to support
the police, stood by as the attack occurred. The police quickly
disappeared, leaving the bodies on the street."

On March 24, 2005, the Associated Press wrote: "Police opened fire
Thursday during a street march in Haiti's capital to demand the
return of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Witnesses said at
least one person was killed. . . . Associated Press reporters saw
police firing into the air and toward protesters." Another AP
dispatch (4/27/05) reported, "Police fired on protesters demanding
the release of detainees loyal to Haiti's ousted president Wednesday,
killing at least five demonstrators." On June 5, 2005, Reuters wrote,
"As many as 25 people were killed in police raids on Friday and
Saturday in the slums of Haiti's capital."

In one of the most graphic accounts to find its way into the
mainstream press, the Miami Herald wrote (9/1/05):

The police carried assault rifles and wore black masks. The gang they
accompanied had brand-new machetes. According to witnesses and U.N.
investigators, they stormed into a soccer match during halftime,
ordered everyone to lie on the ground and began shooting and hacking
people to death in broad daylight as several thousand spectators fled
for their lives. . . . Some were handcuffed and shot in the head by
police, witnesses said. Others were hacked to death.

Missing the story

But such forthright reporting was exceptional, particularly in the
most prominent news outlets. Studying the last two years of coverage
by three leading mainstream U.S. newspapers-the New York Times, Los
Angeles Times and USA Today-along with National Public Radio, Extra!
found that 98.6 percent of the pieces related to Haiti ignored the
role of state-sponsored violence and persecution. The few that did
mention them provided a few isolated examples, usually working to
discredit the documented incidents as partisan political allegations.
The human rights reports citing a high number of political prisoners
and killings by the interim government's HNP were rarely cited by the
mainstream press.

Following the 2004 coup, press accounts based on interviews with
interim government, MINUSTAH and U.S. government officials ensured
that an official version of events prevailed. These media outlets
demonized Lavalas supporters as "gangs" and "supporters of violence,"
and justified the foreign-backed destabilization and overthrow of the
constitutional government.

The New York Times published 642 pieces that mentioned Haiti between
March 1, 2004 and May 1, 2006-close to one a day. But only four dealt
with the violence against and persecution of members and supporters
of the former government. While the New York Times reported
(10/26/04) on the imprisonment of Father Gerard Jean-Juste, a pro-
Aristide priest imprisoned for political reasons, it failed to
investigate the nearly 1,000 other political prisoners, many underfed
and living in dilapidated jails for more than two years without being
charged.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times had 244 pieces mentioning Haiti from
March 1, 2004 to May 1, 2006, but only five discussed-briefly-the
violent persecution of Lavalas supporters. At the same time, the
paper managed to cover every single death of a MINUSTAH soldier.

Well over half of all the quotes in L.A. Times articles dealing
entirely with Haiti came from official sources. One L.A. Times
article covered the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yvon
Neptune (7/5/05), but failed to mention the evidentiary weakness of
the charges leveled against him by a U.S.-funded NGO (Baltimore Sun,
5/29/05), or that there were nearly a thousand other political
prisoners languishing in the jails of the interim government.

With a smaller international section, USA Today had 13 articles
specifically on Haiti between March 1, 2004 and May 1, 2006. Two
(1/4/05, 9/27/05) were critical of the Latortue government, citing
its involvement in human rights violations. One of these was followed
by a rebuttal from Roger Noriega (1/12/05), then assistant secretary
of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and a primary architect of
the 2004 coup. USA Today's pieces also showed an extreme source bias
toward U.S. government and U.S.-installed interim government
officials. In its articles, seven U.S. government officials, one U.N.
official and 16 Haitian government officials were quoted, compared
with only one human rights official and one member of Lavalas.

NPR, according to its website, had approximately 79 stories covering
Haiti between March 1, 2004 and May 1, 2006. Only three mentioned
violence against Lavalas supporters (10/4/04, 10/7/04, 1/25/06), all
of these placing the majority of the blame on pro-Aristide "political
and gang" violence, failing to interview victims of state-sponsored
or U.N. violence. The role of MINUSTAH and the HNP was almost
completely ignored.

The introductions of sources in articles covering Haiti illustrates
the reliance on official sources: "diplomats say," "an anonymous
diplomat says," "a source involved in the palace brainstorming," "a
U.S. diplomat in Port-au-Prince said," "U.N. officials say," "Haitian
police say," "USAID workers explain," "a member of Haiti's electoral
council said," "the new commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force
assured," "council members said," "interim officials say," "State
Department officials say," etc. Rarely, if ever, do we read what the
wounded, imprisoned and exiled say-the testimonies that don't sustain
the official story.


See FAIR's Archives for more on:
Haiti

Visit Jeb Sprague's Blog at http://freehaiti.net