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 upporting 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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