28900: Potemaksonje (comment) RSF, IRI, NED, Abdias Jean, Dominique (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

from potemaksonje@yahoo.com



The Corbett List remarks by Morse, RSF, and RV provide
no information that contradicts the story by
Barahona/Sprague at
http://www.counterpunch.com/barahona08012006.html

The Counterpunch article acknowledges the alleged
involvement of former Fanmi Lavalas member Danny
Toussaint in the death of Dominique (who ran in the
recent election without being criticized by RSF, nor
the opposition)  and in the second to last footnote in
the article it reads that "Three suspects (Ti Lou,
Guimy and Markington) were arrested in connection with
Dominique's murder under the Aristide government but
they mysteriously escaped in a 'prison mutiny' under
Latortue's watch in February of 2005 and were never
apprehended".

NED funding (Example: Cuba program) were only put on
the RSF website after Diana Barahona exposed them in
her past article on Counterpunch.  The NED has
admitted its IRI-RSF funding for the three grants. RSF
does not list its NED/IRI grants until they are
exposed this has been its consistent practice.

Also it is rather shocking that RSF, Morse, and RV
ignore RSF's failure to report on the murder of Abdias
Jean exposed by the Counterpunch article.

No evidence shows Aristide had a role in the death of
Dominique just like no evidence shows he promoted
necklacing, which RSF also claimed.  An accepted myth
reported over and over again transforming itself into
the accepted narrative.  For more on RSF see another
article by Diana Barahona:

Its Secret Deal with Otto Reich to Wreck Cuba's
Economy.  Repoters Without Borders Unmasked. By Diana
Barahona
http://www.counterpunch.org/barahona05172005.html

May 17, 2005

Its Secret Deal with Otto Reich to Wreck Cuba's
Economy

Reporters Without Borders Unmasked

By DIANA BARAHONA

When Robert Menard founded Reporters Without Borders
twenty years ago, he gave his group a name which
evokes another French organization respected worldwide
for its humanitarian work and which maintains a strict
neutrality in political conflicts  Doctors Without
Borders. But RSF (French acronym) has been anything
but nonpartisan and objective in its approach to Latin
America and to Cuba in particular.

> From the beginning, RSF has made Cuba its No. 1
target. Allegedly founded to advocate freedom of the
press around the world and to help journalists under
attack, the organization has called Cuba "the world's
biggest prison for journalists." It even gives the
country a lower ranking on its press freedom index
than countries where journalists routinely have been
killed, such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico. RSF has
waged campaigns aimed at discouraging Europeans from
vacationing in Cuba and the European Union from doing
business there  its only campaigns worldwide intended
to damage a country's economy.

The above is not a matter of chance because it turns
out that RSF is on the payroll of the U.S. State
Department and has close ties to Helms-Burton-funded
Cuban exile groups.

As a majority of members of Congress work toward
normalizing trade and travel with Cuba, the extremist
anti-Castro groups that have dictated U.S. Cuba policy
for 40 years continue working tirelessly to maintain
an economic stranglehold on the island. Their support
for RSF is part of this overall strategy.

Havana-based journalist Jean-Guy Allard wrote a book
about RSF's leader (El expediente Robert Ménard: Por
qué Reporteros sin Fronteras se ensaña con Cuba,
Quebec: Lanctôt, 2005) which lays out the pieces of
the puzzle regarding Menard's activities, associations
and sources of funding in an attempt to explain what
he calls Menard's "obsession" with Cuba. On April 27
this year the pieces began to come together: Thierry
Meyssan, president of the Paris daily, Red Voltaire,
published an article in which he claimed Menard had
negotiated a contract with Otto Reich and the Center
for a Free Cuba (CFC) in 2001. Reich was a trustee of
the center, which receives the bulk of its funding
from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The contract, according to Meyssan, was signed in 2002
around the time Reich was appointed Special Envoy to
the Western Hemisphere for the Secretary of State. The
initial payment for RSF's services was approximately
24,970 euros in 2002 ($25,000), which went up to
59,201 euros in 2003 ($50,000).

Lucie Morillon, RSF's Washington representative,
confirmed in an interview on April 29 that they are
indeed receiving payments from the Center for a Free
Cuba, and that the contract with Reich requires them
to inform Europeans about the repression against
journalists in Cuba and to support the families of
journalists in prison. Morillon also said they
received $50,000 from the CFC in 2004 and that this
amount was consistent from year to year. But she
denied that the anti-Cuba declarations on radio and
television, full-page ads in Parisian dailies,
posters, leafletting at airports and an April 2003
occupation of the Cuban tourism office in Paris were
aimed at discouraging tourism to the island.

RSF's emphasis on tourism is the key to understanding
it's role. After the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union,
Eastern bloc support for Cuba's economy soon came to a
halt and what Cubans call the "special period" began.
Almost all of Cuba's sugar harvest had been sold to
the communist bloc throughout the Cold War era and in
return the island imported two-thirds of its food
supply, nearly all its oil and 80 percent of its
machinery and spare parts from the same sources.
Suddenly 85 percent of Cuba's foreign trade vanished.
Deprived of petroleum, Cuban industries and
transportation ground to a halt. For the first time in
many years malnutrition on the island began to appear
as rations were reduced to little more than rice and
beans.

Washington saw the withdrawal of Soviet subsidies in
1989 and subsequent natural disasters that destroyed
crops on the island as a chance to deal a deathblow to
the Castro regime. The Miami extreme right, led by the
Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), began to
draw up plans to work with sympathetic government
agencies toward that end. "Nothing nor no one will
make us falter. We do not wish it, but if blood has to
flow, it will flow," wrote CANF chair Jorge Mas Canosa
(Hernando Calvo Ospina, Bacardi: The Hidden War,
London: Pluto Press, 2002).

But Cuba disappointed the plotters by surviving. A
centerpiece of the island's economic recovery was the
government's decision in 1992 to develop the tourism
industry, which has gone a long way to replace the
desperately needed foreign exchange the country had
lost. Consequently, it came as no surprise that those
wishing to see Cuba starve would want to damage its
tourism-based economy through every conceivable form
of sabotage. On the extreme end, Miami terrorists
began to infiltrate the island to attack hotels and
other tourist targets. Terrorist Luis Posada Carriles,
who recently sought asylum in the U.S., organized a
string of bombings of hotels in 1997 in which an
Italian tourist died. Not only did Posada admit this
to the New York Times in 1998, but he acknowledged
that the leaders of CANF had bankrolled his operations
and that Mas Canosa was personally in charge of
overseeing the flow of funds and logistical support to
carry out the operations. Terrorist Orlando Bosch is
also suspected of playing a major role in these
attacks.

Another project for bringing about the downfall of
Cuba's revolution was the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. Title
IV allows the U.S. to impose sanctions against foreign
investors in Cuba whose investments allegedly involve
properties expropriated from people who are now U.S.
nationals. This law, which was intended to force
foreign companies and countries to refrain from doing
business with Cuba, was written by leaders of the
CANF, Bacardi lawyers and Otto Reich. Helms-Burton
also provided additional funding to support Cuban
dissidents with the intent of destabilizing the
government  an aspect of great interest to exile
groups. Organizations outside Cuba would be in charge
of these funds, and this has developed into a
lucrative business for them. USAID alone has
distributed more than $34 million in funds related to
Cuba since 1996, including its support of Otto Reich's
CFC.

In an interview with Colombian journalist Hernando
Calvo Ospina (Calvo and Declercq, The Cuban Exile
Movement, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2000), Menard said
his group had been supporting dissidents in Cuba since
September 1995 and has always considered Cuba "the
priority in Latin America." Coincidentally or not, the
Helms-Burton Act was already making its way through
Congress in January 1995. After Clinton signed the
bill into law in 1996, he sent a special ambassador to
Europe to meet with NGOs whose work involved Cuba to
propose they support the dissident movement. RSF
attended one such meeting in Paris in late 1996. RSF
was also represented at a meeting called by Pax
Christi Netherlands at the Hague to create a pressure
group against the Cuban government and support the
dissident movement, according to Calvo.

In September 1998 Menard traveled to Havana to recruit
people to write stories for RSF to publish. He later
told Calvo in his interview, "we give $50 a month each
to around twenty journalists so they can survive and
stay in the country." But Menard's first
representative in Cuba, veteran journalist Nestor
Baguer, disputed that description of the relationship
in interviews he gave to Granma after he revealed that
he had been working for state security while posing as
a dissident. Baguer maintained that RSF would only pay
for articles turned in, and that they had to attack
the Cuban government. He did not consider most of the
so-called independent journalists to be either
independent or journalists; few had received any
formal training and he was forced to severely edit
their copy  something he called a "terrible penance."

Baguer recalled the first conversation he had with the
RSF head in the back of a rental car: "What he wanted
was for it to come straight from here. It seems before
he was getting fed from Miami. But he wanted to have
his Cuban source so it would be more credible." Noting
the small amounts Cubans were paid for their articles,
Baguer speculated Menard was doing a "great business"
(Allard).

In May 2004 the State Department issued a report to
the president by the Commission for Assistance to a
Free Cuba. The report recommends $41 million in
funding to promote Cuban "civil society" and
specifically targets Cuban tourism. In Chapter I,
"Hastening Cuba's Transition," part V, headed, "Deny
Revenues to the Castro Regime," there is a subheading,
"Undermine Regime-sustaining Tourism," which says,
"Support efforts by NGOs in selected third countries
to highlight human rights abuses in Cuba, as part of a
broader effort to discourage tourist travel. This
could be modeled after past initiatives, especially
those by European NGOs, to boycott tourism to
countries where there were broad human rights
concerns."

It does not take much to figure out which "European
NGOs" have been boycotting tourism to Cuba. RSF is
mentioned by name in the report in reference to its
support for a jailed journalist whose writings it had
published.

RSF's patron at the CFC, Otto Reich, has a long
history as a U.S. hit-man in Latin America. This
includes helping to spring Orlando Bosch from prison
in Venezuela while Reich was U.S. ambassador to that
country under President Bush Sr. Bosch was in prison
for blowing up a Cuban civilian passenger airplane,
killing 73. His accomplice, Luis Posada Carriles, had
already bribed his way out in 1985 and was working for
the CIA in El Salvador, supplying the Contras from the
Ilopango air base. Otto Reich was a major figure in
the Iran-Contra scandal. Under the current Bush
administration, Reich helped coordinate repeated
attempts to oust Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He
was transferred to the NSC in November 2002, and while
there he oversaw the February 2004 coup against
Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide  an event in
which RSF enthusiastically participated with a smear
campaign against the Haitian leader.

Although Reporters without Borders' attacks on Castro,
Chavez and Aristide are perfectly alligned with the
State Department's policies, and though she admitted
RSF was receiving money from Reich, Morillon denied
that the governmant funding the group receives in any
way affects its activities. She pointed out that RSF's
$50,000 payments from the CFC and a January grant of
$40,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy only
constitute a fraction of the organization's budget.
This is true, but Menard has other rich rightist
friends in Europe and the U.S., including CFC director
Manuel Cutillas, head of Bacardi. CFC's executive
director is Frank Calzon, another former director of
CANF.

According to a January 20, 2004 article in El Nuevo
Herald ("Reporters Without Borders Announces Campaign
to Democratize Cuba"), Menard visited Miami that week
and received a hero's welcome. He was lionized in the
press and honored by exile leaders at a dinner at Casa
Bacardi. He met with the Cuban Liberty Council (a
split-off from the CANF), the editors of The Miami
Herald and Mayor Manny Diaz. Menard was also a guest
on a Radio Mambí program hosted by government-funded
exile leader Nancy Pérez Crespo, director of Nueva
Prensa, a website which posts articles phoned in by
Cuban dissidents. In the media he announced that RSF
would be holding a meeting on March 18 with European
political leaders in Brussels, headquarters of the
European Union, to promote democratization in Cuba.

"In Brussels we want to propose elementary measures
which can be applied to Cuba as a country that
violates human rights," Menard said. "Weren't the
European bank accounts of terrorists frozen? Why can't
that be done in the case of Cuba?" Menard was on a
roll. He said the Brussels event would be just the
beginning of new campaigns carried out by RSF in the
European media to denounce repression in Cuba. Allard
alleges Frank Calzon was also present at the meeting
in Brussels, but the executive director refused to
comment when he was reached by phone at the CFC.

So loyal is Robert Menard to his patrons at the State
Department that he wrote an open letter to the
European Commissioner for Development, Louis Michel,
on the eve of the diplomat's visit to Cuba this March
(www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=12411). The
European Union had decided to adopt a more
constructive position with respect to Cuba, suspending
economic sanctions that were imposed in June 2003 at
the urging of Bush ally, former Spanish President Jose
Maria Asnar. The State Department's Richard Boucher
condemned the decision to suspend sanctions on Cuba,
as long as "objectives haven't been reached," and in
his letter to Michel, Menard likewise urged the
European Union to keep the pressure on Cuba.

In addition to its other sources of funding, RSF
receives free publicity from Saatchi and Saatchi, the
third pillar of the world's fourth-largest marketing
and public relations conglomerate, Publicis Groupe.
Publicis enjoys a near-monopoly on French advertising
and as a result, slick RSF propaganda is featured at
no cost to the organization in Parisian dailies and
supermarkets. It also enjoys free printing of the
books it sells by Vivendi Universal Publishing. All of
these services have to be factored into RSF's budget.
Although the reason for Publicis Groupe's astounding
generosity is not known, it is worth noting that a
major Publicis client is Bacardi, whose 2001
advertising budget was just under $50 million.

Diana Barahona is a freelance journalists and a member
of the Northern California Media Guild. She has been
an election observer in Venezuela and El Salvador and
written other articles on RSF for the Guild Reporter
(www.newsguild.org). She can be reached at
dlbarahona@cs.com.








Also See Sprague's Reply to RSF's Reply:

Reply to RSF:
I want to respond to the email from RSF News Editor
Jean-Francois Julliard. The IRI and RSF have
continually denied the funding BUT Jim Brown, former
FOIA officer at the NED, has admitted that the grants
exist. Another employee of the NED along with
documents (via FOIA request) from the NED also confirm
that NED grants to the IRI include RSF funding. This
is the tangled web of grantees and sub-grantees. These
are IRI 2002-022/7270, IRI 2003-027/7470 and IRI
2004-035/7473.

Next.
I would like to suggest that RSF talk with the family
members of Abdias Jean and the witnesses to his
murder. I have a documented conversation with RSF's
Haiti desk officer admitting that RSF has not only
failed to interview the family of Abdias Jean but has
also failed to contact/interview the witnesses to his
murder. Meanwhile the police (under Latortue) have
admitted to carrying out the killing. The RSF has
still not said a word about the killing of Abdias.

Other press freedom organizations, such as UNESCO,
have spoken out. UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro
Matsuura stated, ?I strongly condemn the killing of
Abdias Jean who appears to have been shot dead for
carrying out his professional duty to inform the
public? and on January 21, 2005 the Inter American
Press Association wrote a letter to Interim Prime
Minister Gerald Latortue stating, ?On behalf of the
1,300 newspaper members of the Inter American Press
Association throughout the Western Hemisphere, we
express our condemnation over the murder of reporter
Abdias Jean, and we ask for an immediate investigation
to find those responsible and demand that there be the
necessary safeguards for a free press in Haiti.?

RSF has had a clear and obvious lack of objectivity in
its reporting on Haiti. I stand by all of the
information printed in our article at
http://www.counterpunch.com/barahona08012006.html







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