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2005 World Press Freedom Review
International
Press Institute
Haiti
by Charles Arthur
The repercussions of the armed revolt and collapse of the Lavalas Family
party government in early 2004 continued to be felt, as armed groups,
many of them
with political affiliations, challenged the authority of the interim government
and frequently clashed with the national police force and troops of the United
Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Throughout the year, the
sprawling slum areas of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, were the scenes
of repeated, violent clashes, in which hundreds of people lost their
lives. The
situation in the rest of the country was less violent, and in many regional
towns became less tense from March and April onwards after the MINUSTAH finally
moved to displace groups of former soldiers and their allies. These groups
had held de facto power in many towns for more than a year.
As in previous years, many media outfits were active participants in a volatile
and polarised political scene. Others were drawn into the controversy and
conflict, whether politically engaged or not, merely by carrying out the
task of attempting
to report on the unfolding events. The main, Port-au-Prince-based media houses
- grouped in the National Association of Haitian Media (Association Nationale
des Médias Haïtiens, ANMH) - continued to take an
open position of support for the ouster of the Lavalas Family government
and of extreme hostility to the large swathes of the poor population who continued
to voice support for the exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The ANMH
radio stations in particular exercised a clear editorial line favouring the
Group of 184, a political platform led by the country's small private sector.
At the same time, these stations' news broadcasts consistently described
opponents
of the interim government, living in shanty-towns, such as Bel Air and Cité Soleil,
as "outlaws" and "terrorists". In reporting on violent
incidents and alleged human rights abuses, information supplied by the police
and comments given by political party leaders frequently took priority over
hard news-gathering.
A group of smaller media outfits - some of them sympathetic to the ousted
government, others attempting to steer an independent line - attempted to
report the news
from a different perspective, sending news crews to the scene of events and
interviewing eye-witnesses and community leaders in the shanty-towns. By
the end of the year, a clear division had emerged, with one section of the
media
slanting its broadcasts in such a way as to appeal to the preconceived opinions
and hardening prejudices of the small middle and upper classes, and another
actively seeking the voices of ordinary people and those critical of the
interim government, and thereby appealing more to the majority poor population.
The
latter group, composed of 10 radio stations, three television channels, one
newspaper and one news agency, coalesced into the Haitian Independent Media
Association (Association des Médias Indépendants d'Haïti,
AMIH). Against this backdrop, abuses of media workers' rights and infringements
of media freedom were all too commonplace.
On 14 January, a series of incidents in Port-au-Prince established a pattern
of relations for the media scene over the rest of the year. In the Village
de Dieu shanty-town police allegedly shot dead Abdias Jean, a reporter covering
a police operation against an armed gang. Eyewitnesses say Jean informed
the police of his profession but that the police shot him dead because they
did
not want further media coverage of alleged human rights abuses committed
during their operations. During the same police operation, officers also
mistreated
a news crew from the private television broadcaster, Radio Télé Ginen,
confiscating a video camera, and only returning it several hours later without
the cassette containing video of the police action. According to the director
of Radio Télé Ginen, the police reprimanded the station
for interviewing a masked gang member, and for concentrating on filming police
actions and ignoring crimes committed by the gangsters. On the same day,
in the troubled shanty-town of Bel Air, in another part of the capital, Claude
Bernard Sérant and Jonel Juste, two journalists from the Le Nouvelliste
newspaper, were badly beaten by supporters of the deposed President Aristide.
The attackers denounced the journalists' paper, and the other ANMH media
houses, for supporting the anti-Aristide movement.
News of the attack on the Le Nouvelliste journalists reinforced the reluctance
of journalists from outfits known for their opposition to the former government
to enter poorer areas of the city for fear of reprisals from Aristide supporters.
Meanwhile, both the police force and representatives of the interim government
kept up their criticism of the media whose journalists were prepared to go
into poorer areas of the capital. Although the authorities stated they were
concerned with the incitement of further violence and disorder, the fact
that many gangsters, and many of the inhabitants of the shanty-towns, claimed
allegiance
to the ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, led to allegations of censorship,
and, in particular, of an attempt to impede critical coverage of police operations.
A drive-by shooting on 4 February, when Radio Megastar journalist, Raoul
Saint-Louis, suffered a bullet wound to his hand as he talked outside the
station with his
wife and several colleagues, was interpreted by the station's staff as a
direct consequence of public criticism of the station by the police force
spokesperson.
Jessie Cameau Coicou had denounced Megastar for interviewing what she described
as "bandits." Responding to the criticism, Megastar's Jean Myrtho
Muraille said, "We will continue to defend the weakest ones, to denounce
summary executions, and to allow the disadvantaged to speak." Two days
after that comment was reported by another station, the Megastar offices
were raided by a group of heavily armed police. There was no apparent motive
for
the police deployment, and no arrests were made.
The numerous threats issued by the government communications agency (Conseil
National des Telecommunications, CONATEL) to Radio Solidarité to
change its frequency were also interpreted as the exercising of less than
subtle pressure on a station critical of the interim government and the police
force.
There was no apparent technical reason for the request to change a frequency
that the station had been using for the previous six years of its existence.
Media freedom advocates also expressed concerns about the late February decision
by the directorate of the capital's main public hospital to put an end to
journalists' right to enter the emergency ward, the morgue or the statistics
office in search
of information. The decision that henceforth journalists would have to apply
for special permission to enter the premises suggested that the authorities
wanted to obstruct media coverage of the mounting casualties from the continuing
violence in the city shanty-towns.
The issue rumbled on all year, and flared up again in July, when the interim
government's council of ministers threatened to impose sanctions on media
outlets and journalists promoting "hatred" or interviewing "outlaws".
In protest, on 5 August, newsrooms of the dozen radio and television stations
belonging to the AMIH stopped all newscasts for a day. Guyler Delva, head
of the Association des Journalistes haïtiens (Haitian Journalists'
Association, AJH) described the threat of sanctions as political persecution
designed to intimidate the media. In an interview with Radio Solidarité,
Delva said, "How can one know if the person being interviewed is a criminal,
if that person has not yet been arrested, put on trial, or found guilty." Delva,
who frequently clashed with the authorities over issues of media freedom
during the year, was himself the victim on 3 October when presidential body-guards
beat him and Méroné Jean Wilkens, of Radio Métropole,
as they arrived to cover the re-opening of the judicial courts.
Two other journalists lost their lives during the year. On 20 March, Laraque
Robenson, a reporter for Tele Contact radio in the south-western town of
Petit-Goâve,
was hit by cross-fire as he covered a clash between United Nations peacekeepers
and a group of former soldiers. He received medical care in the Dominican
Republic and Cuba, but died of his wounds on 4 April. On 14 July, Jacques
Roche, a well-known
journalist and political activist, was kidnapped, and four days later found
dead, having been tortured and shot several times. According to some reports,
part of the ransom demand was paid, but the kidnappers decided to kill him
when they discovered he hosted a television talk-show organised by members
of the Group of 184.
During the course of yet another year, the government failed to take any
initiatives to advance the judicial investigations into the earlier murders
of journalists,
Brignol Lindor and Jean Dominique.
In October, more than one hundred journalists and media owners signed a code
of conduct for the election period, but by the year's end, politically-biased
and heavily slanted news continued to be the norm, and investigative journalism
remained sadly, more or less, non-existent.
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