=?x-unknown?q?30411=3A__Simidor_=28news=29=3A__Ghosts=2C_Band?==?x-unknown?q?its_and_Cit=E9_Soleil__=28fwd=29?=

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <danielsimidor@yahoo.com>

Michael Deibert's blog, Wednesday, May 16, 2007:
http://michaeldeibert.blogspot.com/2007/05/ghosts-bandits-and-cit-soleil.html

Ghosts, Bandits and Cité Soleil

Recently, while perusing some new Haiti-related news
items, I came upon a piece titled, with typical sober
understatement, "Leni Riefenstahl goes to Haiti' on
the Haiti Action Committee website. The Haiti Action
Committee, for those who have been mercifully spared
taking any notice of them, is the largely lily-white
collection of Northern California "activists" that
coalesced in 2004 following the ouster of Haitian
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide after months of
massive street protests against his rule and an armed
rebellion in February of that year. Since then, the
organization's mission has seemed chiefly to excuse
all of the excesses of Mr. Aristide and his Fanmi
Lavalas political party, prevent the voting that
brought Haitian President Rene Preval back to office
last year, and attack the democratic left in Haiti at
every turn.

Written by one Charlie Hinton, whose previous
contributions to Haiti Action Committee website
included a piece accusing the progressive publication
In These Times of being part of "an international
media campaign designed to tarnish and discredit the
Aristide government," the article is mostly a fairly
routine denunciation of the Danish director Asger
Leth's upcoming documentary Ghosts of Cité Soleil,
which in part focuses on two young brothers I used to
know from the Port-au-Prince slum of Cité Soleil,
James Petit-Frere and Winston Jean-Bart, aka "Billy"
and "Tupac," both since slain in Haiti's political
wars. The Hinton article (also reprinted on the mirror
Haiti Solidarity website) is standard for this sort of
stuff - it accepts Aristide's claims that he was
"kidnapped" by U.S. forces at fact value despite
substantial evidence to the contrary - but what really
caught my eye was a statement from the American
filmmaker Kevin Pina stating that "Billy (James) and I
had a falling out over the question of his accepting
money from foreign journalists to hype this question
of Aristide and gangsters. The more they paid the more
outlandish became his claims "

Having seen neither Ghosts of Cité Soleil nor Kevin
Pina's new film, We Must Kill Bandits, I make no
judgment on the value or lack thereof of either of
them, but Kevin Pina's statement about someone I
considered a friend, now no longer around to defend
himself, is something I can comment on, all the more
so because, though he would probably be horrified
should anyone on the pro-Aristide fanatic fringe he
associates with find out, Kevin Pina and I actually
used to be pretty good friends.

But first a little about James Petit-Frere. I myself
was introduced to James on the steps of the Hotel
Oloffson in November 2001 by a French photographer
with over 20 years experience living and working in
Haiti, who spoke Kreyol fluently and had been visiting
Cité Soleil since it was known as Cité Simone (in
honor of the dictator Francois Duvalier's wife) in
1979. The photographer had known James, as had the
award-winning photographer Carol Guzy, since he was a
young boy, carrying photography equipment around for
reporters covering the Aristide-requested U.S.-lead
invasion of Haiti in 1994. Trenton Daniel, at the time
a Reuters reporter in Haiti and now ably reporting for
the Miami Herald in South Florida was also present at
that first meeting.

James hailed from Cité Soleil, and he was nothing if
not a child of Aristide. His mother, a community
activist, had been killed in Cité Soleil shortly after
the coup against Aristide in 1991, and his father
during the FRAPH paramilitary raid on the bidonville
in December 1993. Afterwards, for a time, he had
become a habitué of Aristide?s Lafanmi Selavi
organization and a favorite guide for English-speaking
journalists who wanted to visit his home district.
Following Tupac?s incarceration on kidnapping charges
he was never convicted of (after Tupac dared to
question his bosses among the Fanmi Lavalas grandees),
he had also become the leader of his older brother?s
group of armed pro-Aristide militants in the Soleil 19
section of the slum. Like all of the Cité Soleil
"militants," as they called themselves (save for the
truly psychotic among them), James was a complicated
human being, capable of great insight, warmth and
friendship, but also capable of real violence as a
result of both the situation they found themselves in
and personal proclivity (the majority of people in
poor neighborhoods like Cité Soleil never touched a
firearm in their lives but were merely innocent
bystanders - and victims - of the various armed group
vying for power in Haiti).

Over the years, I got to know Cité Soleil through the
eyes of James and his friends. I met his wife, Helena,
and their children, and accompanied people from the
slum to the public beaches north of Port-au-Prince
when they would rent a tap-tap to take their families
to frolic in the polluted water there for the day.
Though he had difficulty reading, James did his best
to work his way through John Lee Anderson's massive
and brilliant biography of the Argentine revolutionary
Ernesto "Che" Guevara and really did believe, as
Aristide frequently told the young gunmen at meetings
which took place at Haiti's National Palace and at
Aristide's private resident in the suburb of Tabarre,
that he was at the vanguard of a much-needed and
long-awaited change to empower the poor majority in
Haiti. As the situation in Haiti deteriorated, though,
and as the gunmen in the slums continued to be
alternately courted and killed by political and police
officials of the Fanmi Lavalas political party, the
dance between the Cité Soleil boys and their patrons
in the government became one of extreme mutual
circumspection. Following Aristide's flight into
exile, the boys followed their former leader's lead by
heading abroad for a time, but both found themselves
back in Haiti in late 2004. Winston "Tupac" Jean-Bart
was slain by police working in collusion with the gang
leader Robinson "Labanye" Thomas in September 2004.
James himself, wounded in a gun battle with police,
dragged from his hospital bed and arrested, escaped in
an early 2005 jailbreak only, by all reports, to be
recognized by police and killed a short time later, a
terrible waste of human potential that still bothers
me to this day. The circumstances of James' alleged
murder were re-confirmed to me by the Martissant gang
leader Wilkens "Chien Chaud" Pierre, when I visited
that neighborhood in July 2006. Wilkens himself was
killed later that year.

As for Kevin Pina. I was first introduced to Kevin at
the beginning of 2001 by the American anthropologist
Nina Clara Schnall, who knew of my interest in making
sure that all voices in Haiti's political drama be
heard. Knowing that Kevin lived in a very
working-class (if they only had work) neighborhood in
the upper Delmas Road region, Nina and I visited to
attend a meeting of the Organisation de la Providence
Unie pour le Développement Socio-Economique de
Pétionville (SOPUDEP). When I returned to Haiti to
take over the job as Reuters correspondent in
Port-au-Prince in the fall of 2001, Kevin and I saw
one another fairly regularly. Though he never mentions
it (and though he frequently assails any appearance of
conflict of interest in others), Kevin at the time was
a frequent employee of the Aristide government-run
Television Nationale d'Haiti (TNH), and received
regular payments from the Aristide government for his
work there. I visited him at the station several times
and he often complained about how late the Aristide
government was in paying him (a concern, as an often
freelance journalist, that I could relate to). We
attended quite a few meetings of Fanmi Lavalas
political organizations together an often discussed
the political goings-on over beer and griot either at
my home in Pacot or Kevin's house in Delmas, back when
foreigners in Haiti could still seem to discuss
politics on a civilized, non-dogmatic level.

Interestingly enough, Cité Soleil was one of the
engines for our growing apart. When I started going
down there with James and many of his friends, seeing
the firepower they had, seeing them meet (visibly
armed) with the police, seeing them sitting around a
table with Aristide at the National Palace, I felt
that I could no longer ignore the Aristide
government's obvious reliance on paramilitary and
extra-judicial actors to enforce its will. In fact, as
I allude to in my book, Notes from the Last Testament:
The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press), it got
to the point where the militants would call me when
the National Palace instructed them to attack this or
that demonstration to A) tell me I would have a good
story the following day or B) be careful. At that
point, having never taken me up on my offer to meet
with them, Kevin told me that the militants were
"lying" to me. Again I told him to come see for
himself. Again he refused. To my knowledge, despite
Kevin's claim in the Hinton article that he introduced
James and Tupac "to several foreign journalists," up
until mid-2003, contact between the two was virtually
non-existent, though that situation may have changed
over the last few months of Aristide's reign. Tupac
only exited jail in the famous January 1, 2004
"escape," and to the best of my knowledge he and Kevin
never had any sort of substantial contact at all. With
plenty of contacts in (and respect from) various
international journalists who worked in Haiti, James
didn't really need anyone's largess in terms of making
introductions for him.

After some among these self-same militants were sent
out to beat up the university students over the summer
of 2002 (who were protesting against Aristide's
attempt to stuff the university administration with
Lavalas die-hards), the students, people who had lost
their money in a government-endorsed pyramid
investment scheme, and the political actors who had
always hated Aristide began to link up. The weekend of
a huge demonstration in Cap Haitien in November 2002,
I invited Kevin to drive up with me as I knew he was
working on a film about the Haitian political scene.
Again, he refused. It turned out to be the largest
demonstration against Aristide (with many peasants)
that had taken place in the country up to that point.
After that, we didn't have much to say to one another.
To me, when someone closes their eyes and their mind
to what's going on in front of them, that with every
violent action against his opposition that Aristide
was provoking an ever-bigger and more uncontrollable
reaction, and that the arming of the gangs was bound
to blow up in his face (as it did in the city of
Gonaives following the September 2003 murder of Amiot
"Cubaine" Metayer), it is simply counterproductive to
the struggles of the poor people that government
claimed to represent and a betrayal of one's
journalistic mission to tell the unvarnished,
unpleasant truth. Out of the respect I hold for
friendships, be they defunct or not, I've never
criticized Kevin publicly, but this recent slur
against James, someone I considered a friend, someone
no longer around to defend themselves, compels me to
speak. In the years that I knew him, I never once saw
James exaggerate the Aristide government's collusion
with the armed gangs in the slums and to say that he
did so, and what's more did so for money, is a
grievous misrepresentation, pure and simple

James Petit-Frere and those like him where never feted
in the grand salons of the Lavalas barons like former
Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and Aristide government
spokesman Mario Dupuy, they were never pampered and
received like the regime's spokesman such Annette ?So
Anne? Auguste when they traveled abroad. Indeed, for
these guys, going across the border to the Dominican
Republic represented that height of exotic
international travel. James, his brother and hundreds
of other young men like them were disposable; to
Haiti's economic elite, to Jean-Bertrand Aristide and
the Fanmi Lavalas government and to its foreign
supporters, and to the interim government that came
after. Once they outlived their usefulness to any
particular political patron, they had a very short
life-expectancy, and they knew it. I have often been
criticized for, in my articles, trying to give some
insight into the lives of these young boys, with both
Jean-Bertrand Aristide's supporters and opponents
seeking to discredit their views and experiences at
every turn for the bitter mirror they turn on the
irresponsibility of Haiti's economic and political
classes.

Though I still bear Kevin Pina no ill will, it is
unfortunate that he could not restrain himself from
libeling the dead, who gave the ultimate measure of
devotion, misguided or not, in trying to change their
country. It is also unfortunate that, after all his
time in Haiti, Kevin Pina could not come up with a
more accurate and truthful depiction of the political
battles that have claimed the lives of so many young
men and women such as my dear, dead friend James. They
deserved much better than to be used as political
footballs by the cynical, the deluded and the naive.



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