Haiti Stories / Istwa Ayiti

(Please come hear myself and others discuss Haiti at the Haiti Stories/Istwa Ayiti conference at UCLA this week. MD)

Conference: Haiti Stories / Istwa Ayiti

Saturday, January 29, 2011

1-6 pm

Free program

In a series of discussions moderated by author and journalist Amy Wilentz, scholars across several disciplines examine how Haiti is narrated and presented in the world, and how storytelling, in the broadest as well as narrowest senses, affects the country in general and in the aftermath of the earthquake. Speakers, from 1-4 pm, include:

Donald Cosentino, scholar of Haitian art, professor of world arts and cultures

Mark Danner, writer, journalist, and professor of journalism

Michael Deibert, writer and journalist

Jonathan Demme, filmmaker

Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health

Axelle Liautaud, designer and art collector

Bob Maguire, professor of international affairs and director of the Trinity Haiti Program

Michele Voltaire Marcelin, poet and artist

Catherine Maternowska, anthropologist, co-founder of Lambi Fund of Haiti

Jocelyn McCalla, senior advisor to Haiti's Special Envoy to the United Nations

Claudine Michel, professor of black studies

Joe Mozingo, writer, Los Angeles Times

Madison Smartt Bell, novelist and writer

Deborah Sontag, investigative reporter, New York Times

Maggie Steber, photojournalist

Loune Viaud, director of Strategic Planning and Operations, Zanmi Lasante

Damon Winter, photojournalist, New York Times

A reception from 4-6 pm closes the program.

Please note: seating for this conference is first-come, first-served.

Impunity or Justice – what will exiled leaders find returning to Haiti?

Impunity or Justice – what will exiled leaders find returning to Haiti?

Friday, 21. January 2011

Transparency International

(Read the original article here)

Marilyn Allien, head of La Fondation Heritage pour Haiti (LFHH), the Transparency International chapter in Haiti, reflects on what the return of former president Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier after 25 years in exile means for Haiti.

Truly, we in Haiti are having a very hard time digesting this event and what it means for governance and the rule of law in Haiti. At LFHH, we are in shock – it’s almost like another earthquake in terms of its implications, particularly for the victims and their family members who suffered under the Duvalier regime.

The local media are reporting that some people who were tortured more than 25 years ago are now compiling documents to lodge complaints. It is a pity that this was not done before. We know that the statute of limitations has run out on crimes of corruption – a case in point is the alleged stolen assets that are now frozen in Switzerland – but there are no statutes of limitations for crimes against humanity. However, at the hearing at the Prosecutor’s office on January 18, Duvalier was not charged with crimes against humanity.

After his hearing, Duvalier was allowed to return to his hotel but asked “to remain at the disposition of Haitian justice.”

What, we are asking ourselves, is Haitian justice today? In 2009 we at LFHH have looked at the Haitian pillars of justice as part of a National Integrity System review of governance systems and found them sorely lacking. Haiti’s Superior Council of Judiciary Power created by a law voted in 2009 and responsible for ensuring the integrity of magistrates and judges is yet to be operational as it is supposed to be headed by the President of the Supreme Court. This post has been vacant since 2004 and Haiti’s president has failed to nominate a new President of the Supreme Court. All these failings date to before the earthquake and its devastation and before the latest round of elections which have further weakened the system.

[Building up Justice: Haiti's Palace of Justice in ruins after the 2010 earthquake]

It would be optimistic to predict that justice will be done in the case of Jean-Claude Duvalier – who misruled Haiti for 15 years (François Duvalier, the father, was President for life during a period of 14 years) –but as we struggle to reconstruct our devastated island, it is this kind of optimism that keeps us going.

A good friend of mine, journalist Michael Deibert, wrote an article for CNN that encapsulates what many of us feel as we wait to see what will happen next. The return of Duvalier, he said is “a sharp reminder of how impunity remains a significant stumbling block as Haitians try to construct a more just and equitable society.”

And if that were not enough, news is now spreading through Haiti that

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, another former corrupt and murderous misruler of Haiti, is also trying to return to the island.

Haitians are still waiting to see if any of the perpetrators of crimes under the Duvalier and Aristide regimes will ever be brought to justice. This would be a big step forward for a nation struggling to build accountability and integrity into a new governance regime.

I whole-heartedly concur with what Michael Deibert wrote: “Frustratingly for the people of Haiti, far from being supported in their calls for justice, the abuses they have experienced have more often than not become a political football among international actors.”

What we are fighting for and advocating is a strong judicial system where impunity has no place. The shock of Duvalier’s return makes this all the more urgent.

A monster returns to Haiti

19 January 2011

A monster returns to Haiti

By Michael Deibert, Special to CNN

(Read the original article here)

Editor's note: Michael Deibert is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of "Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti" (Seven Stories Press).

(CNN) -- The return to Haiti this week of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the scion of a family dictatorship that misruled that Caribbean nation for 29 years, is a sharp reminder of how impunity remains a significant stumbling block as Haitians try to construct a more just and equitable society.

Returning to the same airport from which he fled in 1986, Duvalier (popularly known as "Baby Doc" to distinguish him from his more unhinged dictator father, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier), looked stunned and confused, as if the Port-au-Prince to which he returned -- still leveled from a 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people -- had changed beyond recognition.

Unfortunately for Haiti's people, however, some things about the nation -- which produces sinuous music, acidly brilliant novelists and stunning art, along with grinding poverty and political unrest -- have yet to change.

Though Duvalier presided over his sputtering police state without the gleeful ruthlessness of his father, his tenure in Haiti's presidential palace was nevertheless perhaps best summed up by a prison on the outskirts of the Haitian capital called Fort Dimanche, where enemies of the state were sent to die by execution, torture or to simply waste away amidst conditions that were an affront to humanity.

The figure of the rotund Duvalier -- who was questioned yesterday by a Haitian judge about a few of his government's many transgressions -- and his spendthrift wife presiding over such a desperately poor country might have been farcical were the results not so grim.

Haitians' great hopes after Duvalier's flight were sobered considerably amidst ever-greater bloodletting, as pressure groups such as the Duvalier's former paramilitary henchmen, the army, the country's rapacious elite and others vied for the spoils of power.

The election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the head of a broad-based coalition in 1990 was followed by a coup only seven months after his inauguration. Three long years of paramilitary terror followed before Aristide was returned by a U.S.-led military mission to Haiti in 1994. The leaders of the regime that oversaw the terror, again, fled to their comfortable repasts abroad.

But happy endings are hard to come by in Haiti. As Duvalier whiled away his time, using his ill-gotten fortune in Europe, the newly returned Aristide set about creating a thuggish style of governance that the younger Duvalier's father would have found very familiar.

Corrupted elections in 1997 and 2000 favored Aristide's loyalists, and important statutes of Haiti's 1987 constitution -- such as those forbidding the cult of personality and protecting the independence of the judiciary -- were trampled.

By the time Aristide returned to Haiti's national palace in 2001, a network of armed partisans reminded many Haitians of the ruthless methods of rulers past. Then, 18 years after Duvalier's flight, Aristide followed him into exile in February 2004, amid street protests and a rebellion spearhead by formerly loyal gang members.

The grotesque excesses of Duvalier are perhaps the most well known, but to date, none of these men have seen the inside of a prison cell for the actions of their respective regimes. Victims of the Duvaliers' network of enforcers -- the Tontons Macoutes -- have waited in vain for justice and even seen former Duvalierist officials recycled in succeeding, supposedly "democratic," governments.

Nor has anyone yet been held accountable for several large-scale killings by government security forces -- or the slaying of at least 27 people in the town of St. Marc in February 2004 that occurred as the Aristide government drew to its inevitable denouement .

Frustratingly for the people of Haiti, far from being supported in their calls for justice, the abuses they have experienced have more often than not become a political football among international actors.

During the height of the excesses of Duvalier fils, Ron Brown, then acting as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee and later serving as Bill Clinton's secretary of Commerce, lobbied the U.S. Congress on behalf of the dictator, pocketing more than half a million dollars for his efforts.

In the present day, a U.S.-based organization called the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, linked at the hip with Aristide's U.S. attorney, Ira Kurzban, has worked to discredit the calls for justice of the survivors of the massacre in St. Marc. Kurzban's law firm made millions representing the Aristide government.

Like Duvalier before him, Aristide continues to enjoy a gilded exile, this time in South Africa, where his comfortable lifestyle is bankrolled by South African taxpayers.

And now Duvalier, one of Haiti's waking nightmares, is back in his native land. Will he face justice? What will that justice look like in a place where recently political actors saw fit to rig an election amidst the ruins of a country that has yet to even begin to recover from last year's apocalyptic tremor?

The aforementioned great writers of Haiti no doubt find it all bitterly symbolic.

Out of the ruins of the Duvalier torture prison, Fort Dimanche, now abandoned, grew a slum. Its residents called it Village Demokrasi. Democracy Village.

It is here where, as Duvalier returns from 25 years of exile and Haiti marks as many years of the international community's questionable ministrations, that residents try to stave off hunger pangs with cakes made out of clay and seasoned with cubes of chicken or beef bouillon.

There is symbolism in that, too.

History lesson

Douze janvier

As we approach a day when I am sure every do-gooder, opportunist, crank, cynic and other assorted character will be weighing in with verbose and sanctimonious tomes on this melancholy anniversary, I just wanted to keep things brief.

Haitians, to the many of you that toil everyday for the necessities of life with so little reward to show for your efforts, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that you have been dealt such a cruel hand by nature and fate, and I am sorry that your own leaders and ours have failed you so miserably time and time again. Thank you for the kindnesses, small and large, that you have shown me during the long time I have spent traversing your city lanes and your country roads. I really do hope, to the bottom of my soul, that 2011 is a bit kinder to you, and I will do my best to contribute what I can.

With love,

MD

The Guardian's Haiti Problem

(Reading the last absurd magnum opus from Centre for Economic and Policy Research co-director Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian - a paper whose coverage I generally respect - I felt compelled to respond in the Comments section. Though this is something I almost never do, I felt that response, included below, might be of some general interest. MD)

As a contributor to the Guardian from time to time myself, I have written in the past to Cif editor Matt Seaton and asked when, perhaps, the newspaper would be willing to publish an Op-Ed on Haiti from someone a bit more knowledgeable about the country than Mr. Weisbrot, who has spent virtually no time there, doesn't speak the language and knows almost nothing of it's history.

I had previously written to Mr. Seaton following Mr. Weisbrot's previous screed, taking issue with, among other things, Mr. Weisbrot's statement that Jean-Bertrand Aristide is Haiti’s “most popular political leader” and that his Fanmi Lavalas party was banned from the ballot.

As his government drowned in violence, impunity, corruption and nepotism, Mr. Aristide was overthrown in February 2004 by a mass movement that encompassed sectors of Haitian society I had never seen agree on anything before or since. I saw it. I was there. And if Mr. Seaton didn't believe me, I advised him to ask other journalists - actual journalists who were on the streets of Haiti and not behind a desk in Washington somewhere like Mr. Weisbrot. I also stated that I could recommend some for him to talk to, if he liked, if he don't want to take my word for it as a Creole-speaking reporter who has covered the country for some 15 years.

While the banning of Fanmi Lavalas as a party is technically true (and something I opposed), in Haiti's most recently corrupted ballot, virtually all of the major figures of the Lavalas party - Yvon Neptune, Leslie Voltaire, Nawoon Marcellus, Yves Christalin, etc - participated, albeit as part of different political groupings. A Haitian acquiantance who was instrumental in the constriction of the original (late 1980s/early 1990s) Lavalas movement wrote to me that "Fanmi Lavalas has all its people in the election, it’s a blan’s (foreigner's) myth that they were excluded and I have been 3 times to Haiti between August and last week. My feeling is that it’s a made-for-foreign-consumption issue.”

Here we read again that Fanmi Lavalas is "the most popular political party in the country."

I opposed the exclusion of the party named Fanmi Lavalas (now a shadow of its former self) from Haiti's recent ballot, but a look at the 2006 elections - the country's last nationwide ballot in which Fanmi Lavalas participated and which Weisbrot also absurdly denounced - is instructive.

Fanmi Lavalas gained only 4 seats in the country's senate, the same amount as political parties such as the Fusion des Sociaux-Démocrates Haïtienne (FUSION) and the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte (OPL). By comparison, the Lespwa party of Haitian President René Préval won 11 seats. In Haiti's lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, Fanmi Lavalas failed to win a single seat in 6 of the country's 10 departments, while Lespwa won seats in all but two. and Fusion won seats in six departments. In the Chamber, Lespwa garnered a total of of 19 seats, the Alliance Démocratique (Alyans) took 13 seats and the OPL 10 seats. Fanmi Lavalas won only 6 seats.

I asked Mr. Seaton where on earth he and Mr. Weisbrot get their history from to thus call Fanmi Lavalas the country's most popular political party and was met with a curt dismissal, as if somehow facts are not important when writing about a country like Haiti.

So much for freedom of debate in the pages of the Guardian, alas. And so much for the paper's discussion of Haiti veering very far from the rigid ideological line to which Mr. Seaton appears to hew.

Because Haiti is a poor country with few among its number able to write in English in papers such as the Guardian, people who are appallingly ignorant of it, its history and its people are allowed to inveigh in a way that a Haitian would never be allowed to about, say, the United States or the UK. To some of us who have spent a great deal of time there, this is really disgraceful. If facts are indeed “sacred,” then the Guardian owes Haiti's people, who struggle for the necessities of survival, better than they are giving them at present. At least some sort of diversity of views is in order, I think.

I would advise the paper to try digging up an actual Haitian to write about Haiti sometime. It may seem like a radical move, but in a country that boasts perhaps the most impressive intellectual and literary tradition in the Caribbean, I can recommend quite a few.

12 January 2011 and Us

"It is understandable that organizations actually working all year long in Haiti would use the time around the earthquake’s anniversary to talk about their activities, and even to publicize and make their case. I only ask them not to organize public commemorations, celebrations, or inaugurations of any kind on 12 January 2011. My suggestion is to choose any other date in January, except the 12th. Leave the 12th to the Haitians, finally to remember our dead alone. I ask our foreign friends to give us a day at least. Just one day. Leave us alone on 12 January 2011, and every January 12th for years to come. I say again: I ask for just one day each year, from 2011 onward, to mourn our dead, remember them, and reflect on what is happening to us, and how and why we got where we are today. We need to find some peace that day, alone with our own."

Haiti : 12 January 2011 and Us

Thursday 6 January 2011

By Ericq Pierre

Submitted to AlterPresse on 5 January 2011

(Read the original article here)

The anniversary of the earthquake is in one week, on January 12. Never before had Haiti seen so many victims from a single catastrophe in so short a time. Never had Haitians experienced such solidarity, nor received so much attention from abroad and from the international community. So much attention that they never had time to mourn their dead as befitted, with a few rare exceptions. We did not fittingly mourn our dead, because they were too numerous. Because many were still buried in rubble. Because too many people were around us. Because there were too many victims, too many walking dead. Never was a dilemma so great: to mourn the dead, or those soon to die.

We did not mourn our dead as befitted, and of that we are not proud. Nor do we feel solace. We do not like mourning in public, especially in front of foreigners, and we were uncomfortable with the idea of mourning with the whole world watching. Because the whole world had come to aid us, and to watch us mourn. Unwilling watchers, but watchers all the same. Despite appearances, we dislike making a spectacle of ourselves. Some do so all day long, but one must not conclude that Haitians feel no reluctance to display their emotions in public.

So this numerous and massive presence of foreign friends come to our aid has become a heavy burden. Too many came, and have not gone. They came with too many propositions, too many resources, too many promises. They make too many decisions. They came with too much knowledge, and not enough know-how. So many embraced us, that in the end they embarrassed us. How can that be? With the warmth of their embrace, we are almost suffocating. Do they even realize this?

On 12 January 2011, therefore, several organizations active in Haiti will try to use the earthquake’s anniversary to raise their visibility to Haitians and convince their financial supporters of the importance of their activities in Haiti over the past year. They will also stress the need for their contribution to continue for years to come. With little tangible or visible reconstruction, notably the absence of dwellings for the million homeless and little progress in clearing away rubble, these organizations along with certain local authorities are preparing to showcase their vision for this half of the island on 12 January. They will do interview after interview, and distribute videocassettes describing the prowess of their organizations and the sacrifices made by their staff in coming to the Haitians’ aid. Some will repeat for the umpteenth time that Haiti receives the most aid of any country in the world, after Afghanistan. And all will rehash
their support for the Haitian people using new or recycled figures.

For some NGOs, the fight against cholera will also be on the 12 January agenda, although there was some disappointment that it appeared where not expected. The thinking was that cholera would appear first in the camps, then spread throughout the country. Several organizations had given advance notice of this breakout in the camps, but it happened the other way around. The cholera began in Artibonite, not the survivor camps, and spread to the rest of the country with a vengeance. UN/MINUSTAH should accept the consequences of the scientific conclusions on the origin of this scourge in Haiti. So far, too little seems to be made of this fact.

It is understandable that organizations actually working all year long in Haiti would use the time around the earthquake’s anniversary to talk about their activities, and even to publicize and make their case. I only ask them not to organize public commemorations, celebrations, or inaugurations of any kind on 12 January 2011. My suggestion is to choose any other date in January, except the 12th. Leave the 12th to the Haitians, finally to remember our dead alone. I ask our foreign friends to give us a day at least. Just one day. Leave us alone on 12 January 2011, and every January 12th for years to come. I say again: I ask for just one day each year, from 2011 onward, to mourn our dead, remember them, and reflect on what is happening to us, and how and why we got where we are today. We need to find some peace that day, alone with our own.

I hope our foreign friends understand, that the embassies understand, that multilateral and bilateral agencies understand, that the NGOs understand, that MINUSTAH, the UN, the OAS, CARICOM, and all “friends of Haiti” understand. We need to be alone, to rediscover ourselves. Fellow Haitians have even told me that they feel a certain nostalgia for the time when we were all alone. Things were not so good, it’s true, but things are not so good today either, when we are not alone. We would like to keep 12 January all to ourselves. One might say it is the only gesture of sovereignty we can really make for now. I’m also counting on Bill Clinton and his team to understand, and on P.J. Patterson, too.

Best wishes for 2011.