"Haiti Is Going From Catastrophe to Catastrophe"
Michael Deibert interviews Chavannes Jean-Baptiste
Inter Press Service
NEW YORK, Sep 23, 2008 (IPS) - Peasant leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste has been at the forefront of the struggles of Haiti's peasants for over 35 years. Born in the village of Papay in Haiti's Plateau Central, Jean-Baptiste helped found the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP) peasant union as well as the Mouvman Peyizan Nasyonal Kongre Papay (MPNKP), the latter a 200,000-member national congress of peasant farmers and activists.Jean-Baptiste's role is an important one in a nation where, over the past 50 years, 90 percent of the tree cover has been destroyed for charcoal and to make room for farming, with resulting erosion destroying two-thirds of the country's arable farmland.
For his work on behalf of Haiti's peasantry, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste was awarded the 2005 Goldman Environmental Prize, sponsored by the Goldman Environmental Foundation, the world's largest prize for grassroots environmentalists.
In recent weeks, a series of hurricanes have struck Haiti, killing what is thought to be hundreds of people and devastating the country's already-decrepit infrastructure. The United Nations now estimates that 800,000 people are in need of emergency food aid. Haiti is currently the location of a U.N. peacekeeping force numbering over 9,000 uniformed personnel.
IPS correspondent Michael Deibert, who covered Haiti as a journalist from 2000 until 2006, sat down with Chavannes Jean-Baptiste during his recent visit to the United States. The interview was conducted in Haitian Kreyol in Brooklyn, New York, on Sep. 14, 2008.
Read the full interview here.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Michèle Pierre-Louis visite Gonaïves, plongée dans la douleur et la désolation
Haiti/ Cyclones : Michèle Pierre-Louis visite Gonaïves, plongée dans la douleur et la désolation
Par Gotson Pierre
15 septembre 2008
(Read the original article here)
P-au-P., 15 sept. 08 [AlterPresse] --- La ville des Gonaives (Nord), ravagée par les derniers cyclones qui ont frappé Haiti, est plongée dans la désolation, observe sur place AlterPresse.
La « cité de l’indépendance » d’Haiti est devenue la « cité de la mort », se lamente le maire des Gonaives, Stephen Moise qui ne cache pas sa « honte » de recevoir la première ministre Michèle Pierre-Louis, dans les conditions d’une ville totalement inondée.
C’est le 13 septembre dernier que le chef du gouvernement a dirigé une délégation aux Gonaives où elle a effectué une « visite de solidarité », à bord d’un hélicoptère des Nations Unies, en compagnie de plusieurs de ses ministres, du sénateur Youri Latortue et du député Arsène Dieujuste, deux parlementaires de la région.
Une ville ravagée dans ses entrailles
Inondée à 90%, Gonaives présente l’image d’une ville qui aurait subi les affres d’une guerre, relève le maire, incapable de contenir son émotion.
La ville est ravagée dans ses entrailles, souligne-t-il.
Prisonnière des eaux et des flots de boue qui se sont déversés sur elle entre le premier et le 7 septembre 2008, Gonaives peine à se relever. Le va et vient incessant des habitants de divers quartiers, circulant dans l’eau boueuse qui leur arrive jusqu’aux genoux, donne l’impression d’un grand mouvement d’exode.
Où vont-ils ?, se demande-t-on, lorsqu’on voit femmes et hommes avançant dans cette eau infecte qui dégage, par endroit, une odeur de cadavres en putréfaction.
Transportant leurs effets personnels et parfois des enfants sur les bras, ils déambulent au milieu des carcasses de véhicules et de toutes sortes de débris abandonnés par les eaux en furie.
« Jai honte. J’ai demandé de désinfecter la ville pour pouvoir vous recevoir », laisse tomber le chef de la municipalité, qui salue la présence de la première ministre aux Gonaives, dans le cadre d’une démarche d’évaluation des dégâts en vue « d’apporter des réponses aux souffrances de la population » et de prendre des dispositions pour la « reconstruction » .
Stephen Moise dit croire en la bonne foi du gouvernement et de la communauté internationale, grâce auxquels le manque d’eau potable a été atténué, tandis que la question alimentaire demeure encore un casse-tête.
Ne pas sombrer dans la résignation
« Il ne faut pas sombrer dans la résignation », préconise Michèle Pierre-Louis, en présence d’une assistance composée d’élus locaux, de notables, de journalistes et des membres de la délégation venue de Port-au-Prince.
« Il nous faut prendre notre courage à deux mains pour reconstruire » la ville, ajoute-t-elle.
Elle assure que le gouvernement va faire tout ce qui est en son pouvoir pour apporter des secours aux populations sinistrées et pour qu’un tel « malheur ne se reproduise pas ».
Mais, la première ministre n’entend pas verser dans les promesses.
Elle le dit tout haut lorsque, juchée sur un camion de la Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation d’Haiti (MINUSTAH), elle s’adresse à quelques centaines de personnes réunies en face de la mairie.
« Vous devez vous mobiliser et être solidaires, parce qu’il nous faut reconstruire cette ville », lance Michèle Pierre-Louis, à travers un mégaphone que lui tend un agent de la police nationale.
« Même quand vous êtes en train de souffrir, chacun doit se sentir responsable et doit mettre la main à la pate pour sortir la ville de ce malheur », poursuit-elle.
Selon Michèle Pierre-Louis, le gouvernement va tenter de créer des emplois et prendre des dispositions urgentes pour libérer la ville des eaux assassines dont elle est encore l’otage.
Remettre la rivière La Quinte dans son lit
Plus tôt, prenant la parole à la mairie des Gonaives, le sénateur Youri Latortue, originaire de cette ville, explique comment la rivière La Quinte a abandonné son lit pour s’emparer de la cité. Pour lui, il est urgent que des travaux soient entrepris pour remettre cette rivière dans « son lit normal ».
D’autre part, Latortue constate que l’ensemble de la population est décapitalisée et que l’État doit prendre en main les besoins de cette dernière en matière de nourriture. Il suggère, en ce sens, que l’assistance humanitaire soit plus massive et que les rations alimentaires couvrent une durée de huit jours au lieu d’être quotidiennes.
Parallèlement, selon le sénateur, il faut prévoir les interventions nécessaires pour réaménager les bassins versants et curer les rivières.
En fait, selon l’ingénieur Gary Dupiton, un spécialiste qui a assisté aux échanges, les travaux à entreprendre sont immenses. Il faudrait, dit-il, reprofiler 800 km2 de montagne et entreprendre une opération intense de reboisement.
« Il n’y a pas deux solutions », prévient-il. Sinon, il va falloir évacuer la ville.
Faire face à ses responsabilités
Lourdes responsabilités, s’il en est !
Pourtant les acteurs politiques n’ont pas le choix. Il faudra éviter, à tout prix, qu’une troisième catastrophe de ce genre se répète, approuve le député Arsène Dieujuste, rappelant que le cyclone Jeanne avait fait, en 2004, plus de 3000 morts et disparus aux Gonaives.
« Il est venu le temps de l’action », souligne le député, qui invite le gouvernement à faire bon usage d’une récente loi sur l’État d’urgence votée par les deux chambres.
C’est dans ce cadre que le gouvernement projette de débloquer 600 millions de gourdes dans les prochains jours après les 51 millions, alloués à l’assistance aux communautés en difficulté.
Selon un dernier bilan provisoire, 326 personnes ont été tuées, 50 portées disparues, 186 blessées, tandis que 1 million de personnes sont sinistrées.
Haiti se relèvera difficilement de cette épreuve et les perspectives économiques sont sombres. On s’attend à une flambée des prix des produits de consommation courante, qui aggravera la crise alimentaire éclatée en avril 2008.
De vastes régions de culture vivrière sont rendues momentanément inutilisables, à cause des inondations qui les ont inondées et emporté des récoltes entières, alors que les infrastructures routières ont été fortement endommagées, laissant de nombreuses zones dans l’isolement.
Dans l’Artibonite, ou 10,000 hectares de terres cultivables sont sous les eaux, le constat est impressionnant. Les rivières sont partout dans le désordre le plus complet.
A perte de vue : des traces de plantations ravagées par la violence des vents et des eaux, des arbres géants mis par terre, de grands cocotiers gisant dans des cours d’eau et ce qui reste de quelques villages sèche au soleil après avoir été pris au piège des bourrasques.
Dix jours après les premières inondations, les riverains, qui contemplent encore avec étonnement la destruction de pans importants de la route du Nord (entre Ennery et Gonaives), ne peuvent pas croire qu’en l’espace d’une nuit, la chaussée soit devenue un énorme précipice et le pont jeté à la dérive dans le lit de La Quinte.
Faire renaitre l’espoir
Le premier défi est simplement, parait-il, de faire renaitre l’espoir, quand toute une population se retrouve brusquement sinistrée.
« Même l’archevêque est dans le besoin », déclare le docteur Yolène Suréna qui coordonne les activités de la Protection Civile aux Gonaives.
« Nous avons faim, nous avons soif, nous n’en pouvons plus », crient les riverains que croise ou que dépasse le cortège de Michèle Pierre-Louis.
« On a pu distribuer de la nourriture à 20 000 personnes », informe Joel Boutroue, représentant résident du Programme des Nations Unies pour le Développement (PNUD), qui salue l’effort de la communauté internationale. Mais, les sinistrés ne sont pas moins de 200,000 à 250,000 aux Gonaives, selon le sénateur Latortue.
« Ce qu’il faut, c’est remettre la population debout », admet le fonctionnaire onusien, coordonnateur de l’aide humanitaire en Haiti, dont les besoins immédiats sont estimés à 108 millions de dollars, suivant un appel a l’aide lancé par l’ONU.
Par Gotson Pierre
15 septembre 2008
(Read the original article here)
P-au-P., 15 sept. 08 [AlterPresse] --- La ville des Gonaives (Nord), ravagée par les derniers cyclones qui ont frappé Haiti, est plongée dans la désolation, observe sur place AlterPresse.
La « cité de l’indépendance » d’Haiti est devenue la « cité de la mort », se lamente le maire des Gonaives, Stephen Moise qui ne cache pas sa « honte » de recevoir la première ministre Michèle Pierre-Louis, dans les conditions d’une ville totalement inondée.
C’est le 13 septembre dernier que le chef du gouvernement a dirigé une délégation aux Gonaives où elle a effectué une « visite de solidarité », à bord d’un hélicoptère des Nations Unies, en compagnie de plusieurs de ses ministres, du sénateur Youri Latortue et du député Arsène Dieujuste, deux parlementaires de la région.
Une ville ravagée dans ses entrailles
Inondée à 90%, Gonaives présente l’image d’une ville qui aurait subi les affres d’une guerre, relève le maire, incapable de contenir son émotion.
La ville est ravagée dans ses entrailles, souligne-t-il.
Prisonnière des eaux et des flots de boue qui se sont déversés sur elle entre le premier et le 7 septembre 2008, Gonaives peine à se relever. Le va et vient incessant des habitants de divers quartiers, circulant dans l’eau boueuse qui leur arrive jusqu’aux genoux, donne l’impression d’un grand mouvement d’exode.
Où vont-ils ?, se demande-t-on, lorsqu’on voit femmes et hommes avançant dans cette eau infecte qui dégage, par endroit, une odeur de cadavres en putréfaction.
Transportant leurs effets personnels et parfois des enfants sur les bras, ils déambulent au milieu des carcasses de véhicules et de toutes sortes de débris abandonnés par les eaux en furie.
« Jai honte. J’ai demandé de désinfecter la ville pour pouvoir vous recevoir », laisse tomber le chef de la municipalité, qui salue la présence de la première ministre aux Gonaives, dans le cadre d’une démarche d’évaluation des dégâts en vue « d’apporter des réponses aux souffrances de la population » et de prendre des dispositions pour la « reconstruction » .
Stephen Moise dit croire en la bonne foi du gouvernement et de la communauté internationale, grâce auxquels le manque d’eau potable a été atténué, tandis que la question alimentaire demeure encore un casse-tête.
Ne pas sombrer dans la résignation
« Il ne faut pas sombrer dans la résignation », préconise Michèle Pierre-Louis, en présence d’une assistance composée d’élus locaux, de notables, de journalistes et des membres de la délégation venue de Port-au-Prince.
« Il nous faut prendre notre courage à deux mains pour reconstruire » la ville, ajoute-t-elle.
Elle assure que le gouvernement va faire tout ce qui est en son pouvoir pour apporter des secours aux populations sinistrées et pour qu’un tel « malheur ne se reproduise pas ».
Mais, la première ministre n’entend pas verser dans les promesses.
Elle le dit tout haut lorsque, juchée sur un camion de la Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation d’Haiti (MINUSTAH), elle s’adresse à quelques centaines de personnes réunies en face de la mairie.
« Vous devez vous mobiliser et être solidaires, parce qu’il nous faut reconstruire cette ville », lance Michèle Pierre-Louis, à travers un mégaphone que lui tend un agent de la police nationale.
« Même quand vous êtes en train de souffrir, chacun doit se sentir responsable et doit mettre la main à la pate pour sortir la ville de ce malheur », poursuit-elle.
Selon Michèle Pierre-Louis, le gouvernement va tenter de créer des emplois et prendre des dispositions urgentes pour libérer la ville des eaux assassines dont elle est encore l’otage.
Remettre la rivière La Quinte dans son lit
Plus tôt, prenant la parole à la mairie des Gonaives, le sénateur Youri Latortue, originaire de cette ville, explique comment la rivière La Quinte a abandonné son lit pour s’emparer de la cité. Pour lui, il est urgent que des travaux soient entrepris pour remettre cette rivière dans « son lit normal ».
D’autre part, Latortue constate que l’ensemble de la population est décapitalisée et que l’État doit prendre en main les besoins de cette dernière en matière de nourriture. Il suggère, en ce sens, que l’assistance humanitaire soit plus massive et que les rations alimentaires couvrent une durée de huit jours au lieu d’être quotidiennes.
Parallèlement, selon le sénateur, il faut prévoir les interventions nécessaires pour réaménager les bassins versants et curer les rivières.
En fait, selon l’ingénieur Gary Dupiton, un spécialiste qui a assisté aux échanges, les travaux à entreprendre sont immenses. Il faudrait, dit-il, reprofiler 800 km2 de montagne et entreprendre une opération intense de reboisement.
« Il n’y a pas deux solutions », prévient-il. Sinon, il va falloir évacuer la ville.
Faire face à ses responsabilités
Lourdes responsabilités, s’il en est !
Pourtant les acteurs politiques n’ont pas le choix. Il faudra éviter, à tout prix, qu’une troisième catastrophe de ce genre se répète, approuve le député Arsène Dieujuste, rappelant que le cyclone Jeanne avait fait, en 2004, plus de 3000 morts et disparus aux Gonaives.
« Il est venu le temps de l’action », souligne le député, qui invite le gouvernement à faire bon usage d’une récente loi sur l’État d’urgence votée par les deux chambres.
C’est dans ce cadre que le gouvernement projette de débloquer 600 millions de gourdes dans les prochains jours après les 51 millions, alloués à l’assistance aux communautés en difficulté.
Selon un dernier bilan provisoire, 326 personnes ont été tuées, 50 portées disparues, 186 blessées, tandis que 1 million de personnes sont sinistrées.
Haiti se relèvera difficilement de cette épreuve et les perspectives économiques sont sombres. On s’attend à une flambée des prix des produits de consommation courante, qui aggravera la crise alimentaire éclatée en avril 2008.
De vastes régions de culture vivrière sont rendues momentanément inutilisables, à cause des inondations qui les ont inondées et emporté des récoltes entières, alors que les infrastructures routières ont été fortement endommagées, laissant de nombreuses zones dans l’isolement.
Dans l’Artibonite, ou 10,000 hectares de terres cultivables sont sous les eaux, le constat est impressionnant. Les rivières sont partout dans le désordre le plus complet.
A perte de vue : des traces de plantations ravagées par la violence des vents et des eaux, des arbres géants mis par terre, de grands cocotiers gisant dans des cours d’eau et ce qui reste de quelques villages sèche au soleil après avoir été pris au piège des bourrasques.
Dix jours après les premières inondations, les riverains, qui contemplent encore avec étonnement la destruction de pans importants de la route du Nord (entre Ennery et Gonaives), ne peuvent pas croire qu’en l’espace d’une nuit, la chaussée soit devenue un énorme précipice et le pont jeté à la dérive dans le lit de La Quinte.
Faire renaitre l’espoir
Le premier défi est simplement, parait-il, de faire renaitre l’espoir, quand toute une population se retrouve brusquement sinistrée.
« Même l’archevêque est dans le besoin », déclare le docteur Yolène Suréna qui coordonne les activités de la Protection Civile aux Gonaives.
« Nous avons faim, nous avons soif, nous n’en pouvons plus », crient les riverains que croise ou que dépasse le cortège de Michèle Pierre-Louis.
« On a pu distribuer de la nourriture à 20 000 personnes », informe Joel Boutroue, représentant résident du Programme des Nations Unies pour le Développement (PNUD), qui salue l’effort de la communauté internationale. Mais, les sinistrés ne sont pas moins de 200,000 à 250,000 aux Gonaives, selon le sénateur Latortue.
« Ce qu’il faut, c’est remettre la population debout », admet le fonctionnaire onusien, coordonnateur de l’aide humanitaire en Haiti, dont les besoins immédiats sont estimés à 108 millions de dollars, suivant un appel a l’aide lancé par l’ONU.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Matt Damon, Wyclef Jean visit Haiti city in ruins
Matt Damon, Wyclef Jean visit Haiti city in ruins
GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) — Cries of adulation — and hunger — followed Haitian-born singer Wyclef Jean and actor Matt Damon as they toured flood-ravaged Gonaives on Sunday to call attention to widespread suffering in the marooned city.
Tropical Storm Hanna and Hurricane Ike submerged the Haitian city and cut off roadways. Where waters have receded, streets remain a stinking mud bath and homes are carpeted with muck and encrusted pots, pans and laundry.
"I'm speechless, I can't believe it," said Damon, looking down from a U.N. helicopter at people living on the rooftops of flooded homes.
The four-hour visit passed in a blur of stenches, colors and noise. A man on a bicycle tried to keep up with Damon and Jean's truck, shouting, "I love you, Wyclef." Jean raised his hand, but couldn't smile back.
"It's inhumane. I wish there was a word in the dictionary. No human should be living like this," said Jean, who became famous through his Grammy-winning band, The Fugees, and later emerged as a solo artist.
As they turned onto the flooded Rue Christophe, another pickup packed with women sloshed within arm's reach. Face-to-face with the celebrities, the women cried, "We're hungry!" A young man calf-deep in water raised both arms and shouted, "Fix our roads. Fix our city!"
Damon and Jean encouraged help for the United Nations to raise more than US$100 million for 800,000 Haitians in need after four tropical storms and hurricanes have struck the country since mid-August.
Jean's Yele Haiti charity is helping the World Food Program and the Organization of American States-affiliated Pan American Development Foundation distribute food to 3,000 families. The convoy visited a school shelter Sunday to hand out cooking oil and bags of beans.
Proud and tumultuous Gonaives is where Haiti declared independence from France in 1804 as the world's first black republic. Bloody 1985 protests led to the downfall of the father-son Duvalier dictatorship and in 2004 a deadly march fomented the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Fears that unrest is simmering here has led U.N. officials to distribute food at night under Argentine soldiers' guard. Haitian officials have discussed building new settlements for vulnerable residents above the current city.
Once emergency aid started arriving four days after the storm, the U.N. agencies began ratcheting up food distributions to reach as many as 12,000 people a day. More than 120,000 people are in shelters in the Artibonite region, which includes Gonaives, desperate for water and food, the Haitian government reported.
Damon and Jean waded through knee-deep floodwaters and climbed a stage outside the Gonaives cathedral, where 500 people have taken refuge in the choir gallery.
The pair did not go into the cathedral, but Jean sang for a few minutes to a crowd outside. When he later tried to leave, people swept him into the streets. Admirers, some asking for money, clung to U.N. trucks as they drove away.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Aristide's American Profiteers
THE AMERICAS
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
Aristide's American Profiteers
Wall Street Journal
July 28, 2008; Page A13
(Read the original article here)
This column has long followed the story of Jean Bertrand Aristide's Haiti, two U.S. telephone companies and a few American political insiders. Many questions remain unanswered and now both companies are back in the news.
On July 10 the Federal Communications Commission hit IDT Corp. with a $1.3 million fine for "willfully and repeatedly failing to file with the commission" its contracts with Haiti's telecom monopoly, Teleco Haiti, in 2003 and 2004.
Not only should those contracts have been filed, they should have been made public. Now that they have been made public, we learn that Teleco Haiti granted IDT the right to terminate calls in Haiti at less than half the official settlement rate, and that IDT agreed to deposit all payments not at Teleco Haiti, but in an offshore account in the Turks and Caicos managed by a company called Mont Salem.
Long-distance revenues were one of Haiti's few sources of hard currency. Yet after President Aristide left office in 2004, Teleco Haiti's coffers were found to be empty. Still, IDT may have played only a small role in the alleged looting of Teleco Haiti.
A far more interesting actor is Fusion Telecommunications. It may have been terminating traffic in the country as far back as the mid-1990s, not long after Bill Clinton used the U.S. military to restore the coup-deposed Mr. Aristide to power. But we don't know if this is true because Fusion's contracts, which should also be public under FCC rules, have been shrouded in secrecy.
The FCC decision against IDT is a victory for former IDT employee Michael Jewett. He filed suit in federal court in Newark, N.J., in 2004, alleging that the company fired him because he objected to an illegal deal between it and Teleco Haiti.
Much of what Mr. Jewett described in his complaint turned out to be in the contract. But there's more. He also alleged in court documents that he was told that the Mont Salem account belonged to Mr. Aristide. IDT denies this.
Mr. Aristide's Haitian critics have long alleged that Fusion was getting a preferred connection rate in return for kickbacks to the strongman. This, they say, allowed Fusion to dominate the U.S.-Haiti route, something that would have made company insiders rich. Haitians told me in 2001 that Fusion even had an office inside Haiti Teleco.
The chairman of Fusion's board was and still is Marvin Rosen, who was the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 Clinton fund-raising scandals. During the late 1990s, Joseph P. Kennedy II and Thomas "Mack" McLarty, both prominent Democrats, were on the board. Fusion has previously denied any wrongdoing.
In February 2007, the FCC told me that its "Haiti file," containing contracts, had vanished from its records room. To re-create the missing file, it asked IDT, Fusion and other companies for copies. Fusion produced one, from 1999, that it says matched the one it had filed.
In December, I filed an application to see that contract under the Freedom of Information Act. Eight months later the company is still blocking my request. Company lawyers have met with the FCC to argue for confidentiality.
Why Fusion would fight so hard to keep what is supposed to be a public contract out of the public's view is a good question. Here's one possible reason: A civil action filed by the Republic of Haiti in November 2005 in Florida charged that Aristide operatives gave "rate concessions" to various telephone companies, and these "included Fusion Telecommunications." The suit also charged that Teleco "allow[ed] certain carriers to 'settle' allegedly disputed Teleco billings on favorable terms," and that Fusion was one of them. These, the civil action notes, "were not in Teleco's interest" and "violated U.S. law."
The Florida suit -- which was withdrawn after a change of government in 2006 but can be reinstated if the plaintiff desires -- also alleges that "the fraudulent scheme to steal Teleco revenues was carried out in part through defendant Mont Salem," which "serve[d] as a front for the interests of the Aristide Group." It says that "at Aristide's direction," two carriers were instructed to make payments to Mont Salem. One was a Canadian company. The other was IDT. And further: "At Aristide's direction Teleco's then-counsel also caused Teleco to request at least one other carrier, Fusion, to make payments through Mont Salem."
The FCC is set to decide by Sept. 26 on whether the Fusion contract should be public. Its IDT decision sets a precedent, and Americans deserve to know what happened between the Clintonistas and Mr. Aristide. Haitians also deserve accountability. Mr. Aristide, who fled Haiti in 2004 under a cloud of corruption charges, is living in South Africa but trying to make a return to power in Haiti. If he succeeds, Haiti's future will remain as dim as its past. The FCC should give a full accounting on whether some of his past enablers were high-ranking American politicians.
Write to O'Grady@wsj.com
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
Aristide's American Profiteers
Wall Street Journal
July 28, 2008; Page A13
(Read the original article here)
This column has long followed the story of Jean Bertrand Aristide's Haiti, two U.S. telephone companies and a few American political insiders. Many questions remain unanswered and now both companies are back in the news.
On July 10 the Federal Communications Commission hit IDT Corp. with a $1.3 million fine for "willfully and repeatedly failing to file with the commission" its contracts with Haiti's telecom monopoly, Teleco Haiti, in 2003 and 2004.
Not only should those contracts have been filed, they should have been made public. Now that they have been made public, we learn that Teleco Haiti granted IDT the right to terminate calls in Haiti at less than half the official settlement rate, and that IDT agreed to deposit all payments not at Teleco Haiti, but in an offshore account in the Turks and Caicos managed by a company called Mont Salem.
Long-distance revenues were one of Haiti's few sources of hard currency. Yet after President Aristide left office in 2004, Teleco Haiti's coffers were found to be empty. Still, IDT may have played only a small role in the alleged looting of Teleco Haiti.
A far more interesting actor is Fusion Telecommunications. It may have been terminating traffic in the country as far back as the mid-1990s, not long after Bill Clinton used the U.S. military to restore the coup-deposed Mr. Aristide to power. But we don't know if this is true because Fusion's contracts, which should also be public under FCC rules, have been shrouded in secrecy.
The FCC decision against IDT is a victory for former IDT employee Michael Jewett. He filed suit in federal court in Newark, N.J., in 2004, alleging that the company fired him because he objected to an illegal deal between it and Teleco Haiti.
Much of what Mr. Jewett described in his complaint turned out to be in the contract. But there's more. He also alleged in court documents that he was told that the Mont Salem account belonged to Mr. Aristide. IDT denies this.
Mr. Aristide's Haitian critics have long alleged that Fusion was getting a preferred connection rate in return for kickbacks to the strongman. This, they say, allowed Fusion to dominate the U.S.-Haiti route, something that would have made company insiders rich. Haitians told me in 2001 that Fusion even had an office inside Haiti Teleco.
The chairman of Fusion's board was and still is Marvin Rosen, who was the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 Clinton fund-raising scandals. During the late 1990s, Joseph P. Kennedy II and Thomas "Mack" McLarty, both prominent Democrats, were on the board. Fusion has previously denied any wrongdoing.
In February 2007, the FCC told me that its "Haiti file," containing contracts, had vanished from its records room. To re-create the missing file, it asked IDT, Fusion and other companies for copies. Fusion produced one, from 1999, that it says matched the one it had filed.
In December, I filed an application to see that contract under the Freedom of Information Act. Eight months later the company is still blocking my request. Company lawyers have met with the FCC to argue for confidentiality.
Why Fusion would fight so hard to keep what is supposed to be a public contract out of the public's view is a good question. Here's one possible reason: A civil action filed by the Republic of Haiti in November 2005 in Florida charged that Aristide operatives gave "rate concessions" to various telephone companies, and these "included Fusion Telecommunications." The suit also charged that Teleco "allow[ed] certain carriers to 'settle' allegedly disputed Teleco billings on favorable terms," and that Fusion was one of them. These, the civil action notes, "were not in Teleco's interest" and "violated U.S. law."
The Florida suit -- which was withdrawn after a change of government in 2006 but can be reinstated if the plaintiff desires -- also alleges that "the fraudulent scheme to steal Teleco revenues was carried out in part through defendant Mont Salem," which "serve[d] as a front for the interests of the Aristide Group." It says that "at Aristide's direction," two carriers were instructed to make payments to Mont Salem. One was a Canadian company. The other was IDT. And further: "At Aristide's direction Teleco's then-counsel also caused Teleco to request at least one other carrier, Fusion, to make payments through Mont Salem."
The FCC is set to decide by Sept. 26 on whether the Fusion contract should be public. Its IDT decision sets a precedent, and Americans deserve to know what happened between the Clintonistas and Mr. Aristide. Haitians also deserve accountability. Mr. Aristide, who fled Haiti in 2004 under a cloud of corruption charges, is living in South Africa but trying to make a return to power in Haiti. If he succeeds, Haiti's future will remain as dim as its past. The FCC should give a full accounting on whether some of his past enablers were high-ranking American politicians.
Write to O'Grady@wsj.com
Thursday, July 17, 2008
McCain 'Trailblazer' Burned
McCain 'Trailblazer' Burned
The FCC hits James Courter's IDT with a $1.3M fine for a cloudy deal in Haiti.
IDT, the New Jersey telecommunications outfit run by one of John McCain's top fundraisers, Jim Courter, was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission for failing to file a contract for telephone service to Haiti in 2004.
Its work with Haiti has been put under scrutiny since a former employee, Michael Jewett, then IDT's manager for the Caribbean, sued the company. His suit claims he was fired when he balked at negotiating a scheme that routed a portion of the company's long distance revenue from Haiti calls to a shell company owned by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Jewett's suit alleges that the deal cut IDT's long-distance payments to Haiti to 8.75 cents a minute, from 23 cents, the legal tariff, which mainline U.S. carriers such as AT&T were paying.
Payments went to an offshore shell company, Mount Salem in the Turks & Caicos, which sent 3 cents to Aristide and the rest to the Haiti telecommunications company.
Courter, a former New Jersey Republican congressman, is one of 20 McCain national finance co-chairs, and joined the campaign in February 2007. He's a "Trailblazer" for McCain, meaning he raised at least $100,000. The IDT PAC has contributed $84,850 in 2008.
The F.C.C. said IDT had violated the law by "willfully and repeatedly" failing to file its Haiti agreements regarding rates and other matters.
The filings were required under the commission's International Settlements Policy, which called for the same best rates for all U.S. carriers. The goal was to ensure "a competitive playing field" and prevent dominant carriers on the foreign end of a U.S.-international route from leveraging their market power to the detriment of U.S. carriers and consumers.
IDT had had its share of run-ins with regulators even before the F.C.C. fine handed down Wednesday. Jewett's allegations are also being investigated by the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the company's filings with the S.E.C. The I.R.S. is also reportedly looking at the company, according to published reports.
An IDT spokesperson declined to comment.
Adrian Corr, a Turks & Caicos lawyer who was legal counsel for Aristide at Miller Simons O'Sullivan and who ran Mount Salem, confirmed that Aristide owned the shell.
Jewett's lawyer, seeking to read the Haiti contracts at the Federal Communications Commission, discovered that the entire file had disappeared. The F.C.C. directed IDT and other carriers to refile their contracts. IDT's showed payments to the Turks & Caicos shell company.
Jewett's suit charges that IDT evaded the rules and kept competitors in the dark. Documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests this year also revealed that IDT failed to file contracts with dozens of other telecoms around the world.
The S.E.C. and I.R.S. are looking into IDT's tax returns for 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. Any discount or ill-gotten gain, such as the difference between 8.75 and 23 cents, is taxable.
In a quarterly S.E.C. report filed June 6, IDT's balance sheet shows $365 million "income taxes payable," meaning the sum is put aside for back taxes. The figure was zero last year.
All the executives below Courter involved with the Haiti deal are gone. The June report announced the "involuntary" departure of the chief legal officer.
Top-tier Republicans have also bailed out.
William Weld, former G.O.P. governor of Massachusetts, was head of corporate governance at IDT but resigned after the Jewett complaint was unsealed in July 2005.
IDT announced in October 2006 that its entire board would not seek reelection, including former congressman and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, former Minnesota Senator Rudy Boschwitz, and former Washington Senator Slade Gorton.
"Why do you put very powerful politicians on your board. Because you like them, you think they’re capable and they buy you protection," said Herbert Denton, president of the New York investment firm Providence Capital, which owned IDT stock. "Why do they leave at the same time? I speculate there’s something rotten in Denmark."
IDT, the New Jersey telecommunications outfit run by one of John McCain's top fundraisers, Jim Courter, was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission for failing to file a contract for telephone service to Haiti in 2004.
Its work with Haiti has been put under scrutiny since a former employee, Michael Jewett, then IDT's manager for the Caribbean, sued the company. His suit claims he was fired when he balked at negotiating a scheme that routed a portion of the company's long distance revenue from Haiti calls to a shell company owned by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Jewett's suit alleges that the deal cut IDT's long-distance payments to Haiti to 8.75 cents a minute, from 23 cents, the legal tariff, which mainline U.S. carriers such as AT&T were paying.
Payments went to an offshore shell company, Mount Salem in the Turks & Caicos, which sent 3 cents to Aristide and the rest to the Haiti telecommunications company.
Courter, a former New Jersey Republican congressman, is one of 20 McCain national finance co-chairs, and joined the campaign in February 2007. He's a "Trailblazer" for McCain, meaning he raised at least $100,000. The IDT PAC has contributed $84,850 in 2008.
The F.C.C. said IDT had violated the law by "willfully and repeatedly" failing to file its Haiti agreements regarding rates and other matters.
The filings were required under the commission's International Settlements Policy, which called for the same best rates for all U.S. carriers. The goal was to ensure "a competitive playing field" and prevent dominant carriers on the foreign end of a U.S.-international route from leveraging their market power to the detriment of U.S. carriers and consumers.
IDT had had its share of run-ins with regulators even before the F.C.C. fine handed down Wednesday. Jewett's allegations are also being investigated by the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the company's filings with the S.E.C. The I.R.S. is also reportedly looking at the company, according to published reports.
An IDT spokesperson declined to comment.
Adrian Corr, a Turks & Caicos lawyer who was legal counsel for Aristide at Miller Simons O'Sullivan and who ran Mount Salem, confirmed that Aristide owned the shell.
Jewett's lawyer, seeking to read the Haiti contracts at the Federal Communications Commission, discovered that the entire file had disappeared. The F.C.C. directed IDT and other carriers to refile their contracts. IDT's showed payments to the Turks & Caicos shell company.
Jewett's suit charges that IDT evaded the rules and kept competitors in the dark. Documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests this year also revealed that IDT failed to file contracts with dozens of other telecoms around the world.
The S.E.C. and I.R.S. are looking into IDT's tax returns for 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. Any discount or ill-gotten gain, such as the difference between 8.75 and 23 cents, is taxable.
In a quarterly S.E.C. report filed June 6, IDT's balance sheet shows $365 million "income taxes payable," meaning the sum is put aside for back taxes. The figure was zero last year.
All the executives below Courter involved with the Haiti deal are gone. The June report announced the "involuntary" departure of the chief legal officer.
Top-tier Republicans have also bailed out.
William Weld, former G.O.P. governor of Massachusetts, was head of corporate governance at IDT but resigned after the Jewett complaint was unsealed in July 2005.
IDT announced in October 2006 that its entire board would not seek reelection, including former congressman and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, former Minnesota Senator Rudy Boschwitz, and former Washington Senator Slade Gorton.
"Why do you put very powerful politicians on your board. Because you like them, you think they’re capable and they buy you protection," said Herbert Denton, president of the New York investment firm Providence Capital, which owned IDT stock. "Why do they leave at the same time? I speculate there’s something rotten in Denmark."
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Former AP Haiti correspondent Michael Norton dies
Former AP Haiti correspondent Michael Norton dies
By PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer
15 June 2008
Michael Norton — who spent nearly two decades covering Haiti's coups, rebellions and disasters for The Associated Press — died Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 66.
Norton chronicled the turmoil that followed former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier's ouster, spent almost a decade watching the rise and fall of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and wrote compelling accounts of Haiti's crushing poverty that has created a cycle of despair in the country.
His wife said he died in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where they lived.
Born in Minneapolis, Norton left the United States in 1969 for Ireland, but soon moved to Paris, where he found work as an English teacher and fell in love with Haitian singer and activist, Toto Bissainthe.
The couple moved to Haiti in 1986, just months after "Baby Doc" Duvalier was forced into exile following a popular uprising. Bissainthe died in 1994.
Known for his trademark ponytail and corncob pipe, Norton began working for the AP in 1988 after hosting a series of local radio shows in English, French and Haitian Creole.
For many journalists who covered Haiti, a visit to Norton's house on the outskirts of Petionville was one of the first steps toward understanding Haiti's turbulent undercurrent.
Unlike many who covered Haiti from hotels, Norton lived like many Haitians — struggling through power cuts, water shortages, street violence and constant political upheaval.
"I swore I would never sacrifice the truth to any cause, no matter how good," Norton recently recalled of his time in Haiti.
It was this conviction that often enraged Haiti's power brokers.
In 2004, when anti-Aristide groups reported a turnout of 60,000 people at a protest in Port-au-Prince, the capital, Norton stuck to his principles.
Using police standards for counting crowds, he reported a far lower number. The result: death threats, angry mobs and Norton's name singled out on opposition radio programs.
David Beard, who was the AP's Caribbean news editor from 1992 to 1995, said Norton "helped a generation of readers worldwide understand the despair, joy, and mysteries" of Haiti.
"His diligence and respect for the nation translated as well for writers, reporters, and policymakers who followed his path," Beard said in an e-mail from Boston, where he works as editor of The Boston Globe's Web site.
Norton tirelessly covered Haiti until the end, leaving with a final scoop.
Through sources he had built over 20 years, Norton was the first journalist to report that Aristide was ousted Feb. 29, 2004, after a three-week revolt led by gangs and former soldiers.
He left soon after to seek medical attention for a melanoma that had returned.
"He sustained me through difficult times with unconditional friendship," said Dan Whitman, a friend of Norton's who worked at the U.S. Embassy in 1999-2001. "Though our professions put information to somewhat different purposes, we had an identical interest in accuracy."
Norton's most colorful stories came from covering Haiti's regular Voodoo pilgrimages. The religion was officially sanctioned during his time in the country.
"We just lost a Haitian journalist, someone who belonged to us," said Joseph Guyler Delva, a Haitian reporter who heads an association of local journalists and recalled Norton's fluency in Haitian Creole, a blend of French and African words and syntax.
He said Norton, who was white, was never considered a "foreign" correspondent by Haitians.
Norton joined the AP's San Juan bureau in 2004, returning to Haiti briefly in 2006, to cover the election of Rene Preval as president.
He retired months later, listening to jazz and writing poetry until the end.
He penned several books, including "And When the Weeds Began to Grow," and his latest, "Eschatology," which was published this year. Another book, written in Spanish, was titled, "A quien pueda interesar" or "To Whom It May Concern."
He often said two books that captured Haiti best were "Alice in Wonderland" and "Exodus."
"You can't piece together points of view," Norton said in 2007 of writing about Haiti.
"You can stack them or align them. But that is like bringing together all the trees in the forest, which becomes impenetrable, like forging a fence from wooden planks. You have to depend on your own intuition, your own capacity to enter into another world, to fall with Alice (in Wonderland) down the hole and subsequently not to lose your sanity or be persnickety about the incomprehensible."
Norton is survived by his wife, Domnina Alcantara de los Santos.
___
Paisley Dodds was the AP's Caribbean news editor from 2000 to 2005.
By PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer
15 June 2008
Michael Norton — who spent nearly two decades covering Haiti's coups, rebellions and disasters for The Associated Press — died Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 66.
Norton chronicled the turmoil that followed former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier's ouster, spent almost a decade watching the rise and fall of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and wrote compelling accounts of Haiti's crushing poverty that has created a cycle of despair in the country.
His wife said he died in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where they lived.
Born in Minneapolis, Norton left the United States in 1969 for Ireland, but soon moved to Paris, where he found work as an English teacher and fell in love with Haitian singer and activist, Toto Bissainthe.
The couple moved to Haiti in 1986, just months after "Baby Doc" Duvalier was forced into exile following a popular uprising. Bissainthe died in 1994.
Known for his trademark ponytail and corncob pipe, Norton began working for the AP in 1988 after hosting a series of local radio shows in English, French and Haitian Creole.
For many journalists who covered Haiti, a visit to Norton's house on the outskirts of Petionville was one of the first steps toward understanding Haiti's turbulent undercurrent.
Unlike many who covered Haiti from hotels, Norton lived like many Haitians — struggling through power cuts, water shortages, street violence and constant political upheaval.
"I swore I would never sacrifice the truth to any cause, no matter how good," Norton recently recalled of his time in Haiti.
It was this conviction that often enraged Haiti's power brokers.
In 2004, when anti-Aristide groups reported a turnout of 60,000 people at a protest in Port-au-Prince, the capital, Norton stuck to his principles.
Using police standards for counting crowds, he reported a far lower number. The result: death threats, angry mobs and Norton's name singled out on opposition radio programs.
David Beard, who was the AP's Caribbean news editor from 1992 to 1995, said Norton "helped a generation of readers worldwide understand the despair, joy, and mysteries" of Haiti.
"His diligence and respect for the nation translated as well for writers, reporters, and policymakers who followed his path," Beard said in an e-mail from Boston, where he works as editor of The Boston Globe's Web site.
Norton tirelessly covered Haiti until the end, leaving with a final scoop.
Through sources he had built over 20 years, Norton was the first journalist to report that Aristide was ousted Feb. 29, 2004, after a three-week revolt led by gangs and former soldiers.
He left soon after to seek medical attention for a melanoma that had returned.
"He sustained me through difficult times with unconditional friendship," said Dan Whitman, a friend of Norton's who worked at the U.S. Embassy in 1999-2001. "Though our professions put information to somewhat different purposes, we had an identical interest in accuracy."
Norton's most colorful stories came from covering Haiti's regular Voodoo pilgrimages. The religion was officially sanctioned during his time in the country.
"We just lost a Haitian journalist, someone who belonged to us," said Joseph Guyler Delva, a Haitian reporter who heads an association of local journalists and recalled Norton's fluency in Haitian Creole, a blend of French and African words and syntax.
He said Norton, who was white, was never considered a "foreign" correspondent by Haitians.
Norton joined the AP's San Juan bureau in 2004, returning to Haiti briefly in 2006, to cover the election of Rene Preval as president.
He retired months later, listening to jazz and writing poetry until the end.
He penned several books, including "And When the Weeds Began to Grow," and his latest, "Eschatology," which was published this year. Another book, written in Spanish, was titled, "A quien pueda interesar" or "To Whom It May Concern."
He often said two books that captured Haiti best were "Alice in Wonderland" and "Exodus."
"You can't piece together points of view," Norton said in 2007 of writing about Haiti.
"You can stack them or align them. But that is like bringing together all the trees in the forest, which becomes impenetrable, like forging a fence from wooden planks. You have to depend on your own intuition, your own capacity to enter into another world, to fall with Alice (in Wonderland) down the hole and subsequently not to lose your sanity or be persnickety about the incomprehensible."
Norton is survived by his wife, Domnina Alcantara de los Santos.
___
Paisley Dodds was the AP's Caribbean news editor from 2000 to 2005.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Michael Deibert responds to Peter Hallward
Michael Deibert responds to Peter Hallward
On my blog last month, I posted a lengthy review of the book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, written by Middlesex University Professor Peter Hallward [1].
As I noted at the time, the work - composed chiefly of interviews with supporters of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and often unreliably-referenced secondary source material - appeared to represent an attempt by Hallward, who had visited Haiti only twice during its writing and never bothered to learn to speak its poetic native Kreyol language, to excuse the excesses of Aristide’s 2001-2004 second mandate and argue that the president, far from being an exacerbating force in Haiti’s multitude of problems, was instead the hapless victim of a vast plot by local and foreign adversaries. Having first visited Haiti in 1997, and reported on the country for a variety of media outlets from 2000 until 2006, I knew Hallward’s thesis to be an incorrect one, and set about outlining what I found to be some of the more pernicious falsehoods with which he attempted to back it up.
This month, Peter Hallward, writing on the website Haiti Analysis [2], itself a veritable font of fanatical pro-Aristide propaganda, chose to respond to my critique of his book in an article that was subsequently reprinted on the website of MRZine.
Preoccupied as I am with reporting on the struggles of disenfranchised and disadvantaged peoples from often remote and violent locations (Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, India-administered Kashmir, Haiti itself), I confess that I haven’t had the time or inclination to keep up with every self-justifying bit of moral and intellectual acrobatics performed by the affluent foreign commentators that have comprised the bulk of support for Haiti’s disgraced former president since his ouster in February 2004. Given the array of very serious problems that confront Haiti these days - a dysfunctional parliament, spiraling food costs and attendant demonstrations, rampant deforestation and environmental degradation - the attention of those concerned with the country’s fate may indeed also be better focused elsewhere rather than on a protracted back-and-forth between two foreign intellectuals over a book of negligible interest or value to alleviating those ills.
However, briefly, in the interest of correcting the historical record which he seems content to muddy, I will respond to Peter Hallward’s response of my review of his book here.
Though Hallward writes that my 2005 book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) was “applauding the overthrow” of the second Aristide government, a more accurate characterization might be that it was mourning the fraying of the broad social-democratic coalition that ousted the Duvalier dictatorship for power in 1986 and first brought Aristide to office in 1990, along with criticizing Aristide’s own role in that collapse. Having seen first hand the hopes that Haiti’s poor majority had invested in Aristide, and the way those hopes were cynically betrayed, far from glee and joy at the events of the president’s second mandate, to me the only appropriate response seemed to be sadness and regret at the waste of opportunity and human potential. Writers like Peter Hallward don’t seem to give much credence to emotions such as those when strident sloganeering will do, but I have found in my years in Haiti that political life there exists, not in black and white, but in varying shades of grey, where today’s democrat can be tomorrow’s despot and yesterday’s oppressor can be viewed as today’s unlikely liberator.
Hallward states in his response that I suggested that he deliberately misquoted Anne Hastings, the director of Haiti's lauded micro-credit institution Fonkoze, as coming out in full-throated defense of the Aristide government in his interview with her. Though Hallward may be bothered by a guilty conscience at this point, I said nothing of the sort. Writing to Hasting, who I have known for the better part of the decade as someone who stayed above the fray of Haitian politics to better continue Fonkoze‘s work of aiding Haiti‘s poor, I simply asked whether or not Hallward’s quotation of her was accurate. She responded in a 27 January 2008 email as follows [3]:
I don't think I have ever said or ever would say that. I am always very careful to say I don't know whether there is substance or not. It is up to the Haitian people to make their decision.
In his response to my review, Peter Hallward confirms that his quotation of Anne Hastings was erroneous. Whether it was intentional or not, I have no idea, but it does point to what, in my view, is a troubling pattern in Hallward’s work. Though I can’t claim omniscience in decoding Peter Hallward’s intentions when it comes to presenting such a curiously selected litany of false information as objective history, I do find, given his stated sympathies to the Aristide government and the Fanmi Lavalas party before starting his book or even visiting Haiti, that all of his “errors” should conveniently support his erroneous thesis rather suggestive. Nearly every one of the main claims in Damming the Flood - that the 2000 elections that returned Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power were free and fair, that the Aristide government was not actively involved in arming and organizing street gangs to crush its political opposition, that the government still retained a great deal of popular support in late 2003/early 2004 - are false, and demonstrably so, by the historical record as I laid out in my original review.
When Hallward, writes, for instance, that the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH) Haitian human rights organization was part of "a very partial list of the recipients of USAID, IFES and/or IRI support" during the years leading up to the 2004 overthrow of Aristide, that is false. In his response to my review, Hallward tries to wriggle out of being caught in this obvious inaccuracy by writing that “NCHR’s receipt of USAID money… (is) a matter of the US Congressional record.” In my reviews of the sources of funding for NCHR Haiti (which later became RNDDH), I have found no evidence of money distributed to the group’s Port-au-Prince office by USAID. Seeking further confirmation, I wrote to Pierre Esperance, the group’s director, and he responded on 10 April 2008 with the following email [4]:
RNDDH has never and will not accepted funds from US government.
Though RNDDH/NCHR did receive funding from organziations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Lutheran World Federation and a one-time grant from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), I still have found no eveidence of the group receiving funding from the United States government.
As to the Hallward’s characterization the massacre of anti-government militants in the northern city of Saint-Marc in February 2004 (along with innocent civilians), as always with Peter Hallward, any vile attack carried out by forces loyal to Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a “clash,” much as the vicious attack on protesting university students on 5 December 2003 (one of the defining moments in the end of Aristide’s second government) was “a brawl.” If Hallward doesn’t view the massacre at least 27 human beings and attendant atrocities such as gang rape which, given the presence of Unite de Securite de la Garde du Palais National d’Haiti personnel and gang members from the capital dressed in police uniforms, was certainly carried out with government knowledge, as a “crime against humanity,” it is hard to know what would qualify as such.
Peter Hallward could have written a perfectly reasonable, factual book outlining why he thought the second Aristide government as it existed deserved to be allowed to finish its mandate, however appalling its excesses, and why the convergence of forces against the president and his political party (many of them thrown together by Aristide’s own actions) would, in the long run, cause even greater harm to Haiti’s poor majority than the violent, corrupt and despotic actors who ruled Haiti from 2001 until 2004.
That is not, however, what Hallward did.
Based on a review of his secondary source material and discussions with some of his primary sources, I have concluded that Hallward, either through intention or through a series of extraordinarily ideologically fortuitous mistakes, time and again printed false information that flies in the face of the documented record and, indeed, the transcripts of his own interviews.
As for Peter Hallward’s statement that I view his book as being written by “an ignorant outsider,” I will simply say this: We are all, those of us of foreign birth who write on Haiti, outsiders to one degree or another. The question is whether or not, that being the case, we operate in good faith when chronicling events in this small, impoverished country. Over the better part of a decade, encouraged by the example of many brave Haitian journalists, I did my best to act in good faith while reporting from a vast array of locales around Haiti about the desire of the Haitian people for a responsive and responsible government to address their legitimate grievances and historic disenfranchisement. I did so often at considerable personal risk and for little or no financial reward. It was the least I owed the long-suffering people there who entrust outsiders such as myself with trying to help the world understand their story.
Finishing Damming the Flood, I believe knowing whether or not Peter Hallward operated in similar good faith is open to debate, but the evidence is not encouraging.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).
1. A Review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment , March 16, 2008.
2. One of the “editors” of Haiti Analysis, a seemingly-eternal graduate student named Jeb Sprague, first announced his presence to me by emailing me (unsolicited) a graphic photo of the bullet-riddled, blood-soaked bodies of a Haitian mother and her children along with a smiley-face emoticon. I was left shrugging that perhaps Sprague suffered from some sort of mental illness, as he viewed the dead mother and her toddlers appropriate material for some sort of cheap joke.
3. Email from Anne Hastings, 27 Janaury 2008
4. Email from Pierre Esperance, 10 April 2008.
(Author's note: This response was submitted to MRZine editor Yoshie Furuhashi who, apparently in the interest of stifling and obscuring discussion on the subject of Haiti, refused to print it. So much for free debate.)
On my blog last month, I posted a lengthy review of the book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, written by Middlesex University Professor Peter Hallward [1].
As I noted at the time, the work - composed chiefly of interviews with supporters of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and often unreliably-referenced secondary source material - appeared to represent an attempt by Hallward, who had visited Haiti only twice during its writing and never bothered to learn to speak its poetic native Kreyol language, to excuse the excesses of Aristide’s 2001-2004 second mandate and argue that the president, far from being an exacerbating force in Haiti’s multitude of problems, was instead the hapless victim of a vast plot by local and foreign adversaries. Having first visited Haiti in 1997, and reported on the country for a variety of media outlets from 2000 until 2006, I knew Hallward’s thesis to be an incorrect one, and set about outlining what I found to be some of the more pernicious falsehoods with which he attempted to back it up.
This month, Peter Hallward, writing on the website Haiti Analysis [2], itself a veritable font of fanatical pro-Aristide propaganda, chose to respond to my critique of his book in an article that was subsequently reprinted on the website of MRZine.
Preoccupied as I am with reporting on the struggles of disenfranchised and disadvantaged peoples from often remote and violent locations (Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, India-administered Kashmir, Haiti itself), I confess that I haven’t had the time or inclination to keep up with every self-justifying bit of moral and intellectual acrobatics performed by the affluent foreign commentators that have comprised the bulk of support for Haiti’s disgraced former president since his ouster in February 2004. Given the array of very serious problems that confront Haiti these days - a dysfunctional parliament, spiraling food costs and attendant demonstrations, rampant deforestation and environmental degradation - the attention of those concerned with the country’s fate may indeed also be better focused elsewhere rather than on a protracted back-and-forth between two foreign intellectuals over a book of negligible interest or value to alleviating those ills.
However, briefly, in the interest of correcting the historical record which he seems content to muddy, I will respond to Peter Hallward’s response of my review of his book here.
Though Hallward writes that my 2005 book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) was “applauding the overthrow” of the second Aristide government, a more accurate characterization might be that it was mourning the fraying of the broad social-democratic coalition that ousted the Duvalier dictatorship for power in 1986 and first brought Aristide to office in 1990, along with criticizing Aristide’s own role in that collapse. Having seen first hand the hopes that Haiti’s poor majority had invested in Aristide, and the way those hopes were cynically betrayed, far from glee and joy at the events of the president’s second mandate, to me the only appropriate response seemed to be sadness and regret at the waste of opportunity and human potential. Writers like Peter Hallward don’t seem to give much credence to emotions such as those when strident sloganeering will do, but I have found in my years in Haiti that political life there exists, not in black and white, but in varying shades of grey, where today’s democrat can be tomorrow’s despot and yesterday’s oppressor can be viewed as today’s unlikely liberator.
Hallward states in his response that I suggested that he deliberately misquoted Anne Hastings, the director of Haiti's lauded micro-credit institution Fonkoze, as coming out in full-throated defense of the Aristide government in his interview with her. Though Hallward may be bothered by a guilty conscience at this point, I said nothing of the sort. Writing to Hasting, who I have known for the better part of the decade as someone who stayed above the fray of Haitian politics to better continue Fonkoze‘s work of aiding Haiti‘s poor, I simply asked whether or not Hallward’s quotation of her was accurate. She responded in a 27 January 2008 email as follows [3]:
I don't think I have ever said or ever would say that. I am always very careful to say I don't know whether there is substance or not. It is up to the Haitian people to make their decision.
In his response to my review, Peter Hallward confirms that his quotation of Anne Hastings was erroneous. Whether it was intentional or not, I have no idea, but it does point to what, in my view, is a troubling pattern in Hallward’s work. Though I can’t claim omniscience in decoding Peter Hallward’s intentions when it comes to presenting such a curiously selected litany of false information as objective history, I do find, given his stated sympathies to the Aristide government and the Fanmi Lavalas party before starting his book or even visiting Haiti, that all of his “errors” should conveniently support his erroneous thesis rather suggestive. Nearly every one of the main claims in Damming the Flood - that the 2000 elections that returned Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power were free and fair, that the Aristide government was not actively involved in arming and organizing street gangs to crush its political opposition, that the government still retained a great deal of popular support in late 2003/early 2004 - are false, and demonstrably so, by the historical record as I laid out in my original review.
When Hallward, writes, for instance, that the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH) Haitian human rights organization was part of "a very partial list of the recipients of USAID, IFES and/or IRI support" during the years leading up to the 2004 overthrow of Aristide, that is false. In his response to my review, Hallward tries to wriggle out of being caught in this obvious inaccuracy by writing that “NCHR’s receipt of USAID money… (is) a matter of the US Congressional record.” In my reviews of the sources of funding for NCHR Haiti (which later became RNDDH), I have found no evidence of money distributed to the group’s Port-au-Prince office by USAID. Seeking further confirmation, I wrote to Pierre Esperance, the group’s director, and he responded on 10 April 2008 with the following email [4]:
RNDDH has never and will not accepted funds from US government.
Though RNDDH/NCHR did receive funding from organziations such as Christian Aid, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Lutheran World Federation and a one-time grant from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), I still have found no eveidence of the group receiving funding from the United States government.
As to the Hallward’s characterization the massacre of anti-government militants in the northern city of Saint-Marc in February 2004 (along with innocent civilians), as always with Peter Hallward, any vile attack carried out by forces loyal to Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a “clash,” much as the vicious attack on protesting university students on 5 December 2003 (one of the defining moments in the end of Aristide’s second government) was “a brawl.” If Hallward doesn’t view the massacre at least 27 human beings and attendant atrocities such as gang rape which, given the presence of Unite de Securite de la Garde du Palais National d’Haiti personnel and gang members from the capital dressed in police uniforms, was certainly carried out with government knowledge, as a “crime against humanity,” it is hard to know what would qualify as such.
Peter Hallward could have written a perfectly reasonable, factual book outlining why he thought the second Aristide government as it existed deserved to be allowed to finish its mandate, however appalling its excesses, and why the convergence of forces against the president and his political party (many of them thrown together by Aristide’s own actions) would, in the long run, cause even greater harm to Haiti’s poor majority than the violent, corrupt and despotic actors who ruled Haiti from 2001 until 2004.
That is not, however, what Hallward did.
Based on a review of his secondary source material and discussions with some of his primary sources, I have concluded that Hallward, either through intention or through a series of extraordinarily ideologically fortuitous mistakes, time and again printed false information that flies in the face of the documented record and, indeed, the transcripts of his own interviews.
As for Peter Hallward’s statement that I view his book as being written by “an ignorant outsider,” I will simply say this: We are all, those of us of foreign birth who write on Haiti, outsiders to one degree or another. The question is whether or not, that being the case, we operate in good faith when chronicling events in this small, impoverished country. Over the better part of a decade, encouraged by the example of many brave Haitian journalists, I did my best to act in good faith while reporting from a vast array of locales around Haiti about the desire of the Haitian people for a responsive and responsible government to address their legitimate grievances and historic disenfranchisement. I did so often at considerable personal risk and for little or no financial reward. It was the least I owed the long-suffering people there who entrust outsiders such as myself with trying to help the world understand their story.
Finishing Damming the Flood, I believe knowing whether or not Peter Hallward operated in similar good faith is open to debate, but the evidence is not encouraging.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).
1. A Review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment , March 16, 2008.
2. One of the “editors” of Haiti Analysis, a seemingly-eternal graduate student named Jeb Sprague, first announced his presence to me by emailing me (unsolicited) a graphic photo of the bullet-riddled, blood-soaked bodies of a Haitian mother and her children along with a smiley-face emoticon. I was left shrugging that perhaps Sprague suffered from some sort of mental illness, as he viewed the dead mother and her toddlers appropriate material for some sort of cheap joke.
3. Email from Anne Hastings, 27 Janaury 2008
4. Email from Pierre Esperance, 10 April 2008.
(Author's note: This response was submitted to MRZine editor Yoshie Furuhashi who, apparently in the interest of stifling and obscuring discussion on the subject of Haiti, refused to print it. So much for free debate.)
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