Haiti -Silencing the Haitian Spring

...Since then, most of the supporters of Francois Duvalier's widow have been banished from the national palace, and her powers eliminated...

...on those of small merchants, civil servants, soldiers, lower ranking officers, increasingly pushed away from the economic pie...

...Outside Haiti's borders a "Haitian problem"--more than a million refugees, most of them illegal arrivals- have spilled over on to the territories of major aid donors...

...Moreover, Haiti's democratic season, or at least, the appearance of such, was partially protected by the Carter administration's strong human rights stand which subtly linked approval of aid projects to respect for citizens' rights...

...Eliminating Haiti's "messengers" has not eliminated social ills nor the existing consciousness, within a large sector of Haitian society, of what freedom could mean in improving their daily lives...

...Little is yet known, however, about the members of the Christian Democratic Party, labor union activists and young students, all NACLA Reportupdate update update update from lower income groups, arrested in droves after the jailing of independent journalists...

...These gains, articu- lated and nourished by a few independent media and some grassroots organizations, seem to have vanished like jellyfish on a hot sandy beach...

...July 1980: More than three hundred high school students march in protest over state exams which they believe are aimed at limiting their access to higher education...

...Jailing the Messengers Since that November day, more than 200 Haitians-members of the two opposition parties, the leader of the Social Christian Party, human rights activists, independent journalists, labor and rural development organizers, intellectuals and students-have been jailed, forced to hide or seek diplomatic protection...

...In the most intensive press coverage of Haiti in ten years, foreign news media spotlighted all information coming out of Haiti in the days that followed...

...Thus, it is not surprising that Radio Nationale, the government radio, carried protests for 42 two years from citizens' groups in Creole...

...For the first time in Haitian history, JulylAugust workers, artisans, shopkeepers, peasants, the landless, tasted what it meant to articulate their own needs and desires...

...In comparison with the oppression of the past, the last decade had brought a loosening of control and progress toward freedom of expression...

...Jean Valme himself, who was perceived to carry out the repression of the democratic movement for personal political ambitions, was ordered out of his own barracks a few weeks later...

...The landless leave in droves, sailing in crowded, leaky boats to Florida, the Bahamas, French Guiana or crossing the border to the Dominican sugar cane fields...

...The arrests were led by a disciplined police force, not by the Tonton Macoutes...

...It shows the inability of the regime to mend its deep internal dissensions, to assess and use change to its political advantage...

...on those of small rice and coffee growers now left without a voice for their grievances...

...Simply by reporting as an observer, in 1979 and 80, the press became a "protector" of fragile democratic organizations: political parties, professional groups and the Human Rights League...

...Today, more than ever before, the most frequent news carried over the telediol describes how to leave Haiti illegally to reach the beaches of Florida, the Bahamas or French Guiana-a measure of the increasing sense of powerlessness and despair felt by the Haitian "man and woman in the street...

...His death led neither to a full investigation, nor to the punishment of the murderers, nor even to a staged trial, despite government promises to the contrary...

...In the neighborhoods of the capital of Port-auPrince, or Jeremie or Gonaives, noisy evening gatherings around transistor radios to hear and discuss the news of the day, broadcast in Creole, over Radio Haiti, Radio Soleil or Radio Caciques, have given way to silence...

...Some of the best investigative reporting by Radio Haiti, Radio Metropole or the weeklies, Le Petit Samedi Soir and Regards, originated from such "scoops" on corruption particularly within the government...

...This is in sharp contrast to four years earlier when another journalist, Gasner Raymond, was assassinated on a roadside while investigating the mysterious disappearances of labor activists at a cement factory for a weekly, Le Petit Samedi Soir...

...royal gift to Haitians, and by many others as a direct by-product of Jimmy Carter's human rights policies...

...The Haitian officials who had voiced their joy at the Republican victory in Washington on November 4, banked apparently on the powerlessness of a lame duck administration...

...Beaten by policemen, they seek refuge at Radio Haiti...

...The moving interview of the illiterate mother of another young broadcaster, Konpe Plim, arrested a few weeks later, creates the same emotion-and his immediate release...

...Jean Claude's new coalition of wealthy mulattoes, rightwing businessmen, technocrats, civil servants and black army officers, all groups enriched through corruption, allows little room for Haiti's disgruntled middle income groups or for the majority of poor citizens...

...Other groups like the autonomous labor unions linked to the moderate confederation, Autonomous Central of Haitian Workers (CATH), were achieving genuine grassroots organization...

...Since November, news within that nation comes only from the official government media, from the "aligned" press which relays little if any non-official information, or from the informal telediol (word of mouth), an active though not always accurate people's grapevine, immune to censorship, that has carried "news" among the illiterate masses since Haitian independence in 1804...

...Furthermore, protests over arbitrary measures by local Tonton Macoutes in certain villages, or against peasant uprisings in the Artibonite Valley, were starting to reach the "messengers," i.e...

...Rumors of his arrest are growing...

...The repression against lower income groups was once again ignored, as it had been throughout the "liberalization" phase...

...His detention results in a quiet ground swell of popular support as hundreds of factory workers and public transportation drivers stop work, ostensibly to listen to the news...

...Seen in perspective, the crackdown in Haiti seems increasingly a reaction of anger and panic on the part of the government...

...now we rule over human rights...

...on free speech...

...About 20 staff members and visitors at Radio Haiti were rounded up the night of the 28th by 60 agents of the political police brandishing machine guns...

...Other elements are also present on the political chessboard: ironically, international aid donors-the United States, Canada, France and Germany-are currently pressing for the same check on waste and corruption that the Haitian democratic movement had sought up until November 28...

...A year later, a trial of three members of the so-called gang is dismissed for lack of evidence...

...By focusing attention on a few well-known public figures, the government managed to create in the foreign news media the impression that the regime was not, after all, going back to the disappearances, arrests and torture that had marked the 60s...

...the small, grassroots organizations and the press...

...August 1980: Konpe Filo, a popular radio journalist, broadcasting in Creole, is arrested...

...The struggle for power within the Duvalierist structure between the "dinosaurs," as those surrounding Francois Duvalier's widow, Simone, are known, and the young "liberals," can best explain the constant leaks of invaluable information by one group or the other to independent journalists...

...Increasingly, the elimination of those seen as authors of the "message" was encouraged by a small fringe of powerful right-wing businessmen, and by the Duvalierist "dinosaurs...

...Several of the arrested people who were later released, told of hearing sounds of beatings and cries of pain from some prisoners at the Casernes Dessalines, but those branded for "export" were kept carefully apart...

...Creole news broadcasts, including interviews in the street by increasingly professional news people, gave a voice to the previously silent Creole-speaking citizens of Haiti...

...The government, at the time, needed an independent media sector to refurbish its image and create a climate that would attract foreign aid and foreign investors and reassure the many Haitian professionals living abroad of Haiti's progressive atmosphere...

...At times, in poor neighborhoods, unidentified gunmen in unmarked cars roam at night, shooting indiscriminately, to intimidate those who might attempt to translate the new rights into reality or protest too strongly against abuses...

...The chief of police, Colonel Jean B. Valme, who will later lead the November 28 crackdown, accuses the radio station of lying about what he claims was actually an attempted holdup by a group of "gangsters" organizing in Bolosse "to ransack the local casino...

...One element distinguishes the latest string of events from other bloodier waves of repression since the rise of Duvalierism in 1957...

...In spite of the prevailing silence, the Haitian spring has left an imprint on people's minds and dreams: on those of a small fringe of progressive investors who saw in the democratic opening an effective check on corruption and the only road to a healthy, modernized economy...

...Moreover, this new monolithic power, reigning over generalized silence, is completely reversing the trend set by Francois Duvalier himself...

...The most violent and extensive bout of repression since former dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier died in 1971, it reincarnated his reign of silence and fear...

...Thanksgiving weekend, were timed to receive minimal publicity in the United States...

...As early as November 5, several members of the Tonton Macoute, the feared civil militia of Francois Duvalier, had roamed some Port-au-Prince neighborhoods, firing pistols and chanting, "Cowboys are in power...

...When reports of systematic beatings reach the media, the government orders such beatings stopped...

...He subsequently speaks openly of beatings while under arrest, with no immediate reaction from the police...

...A New Duvallerism The growing role of the independent media rested mostly on radio stations that could reach a predominantly illiterate population and link traditionally isolated regions...

...Today, some unpleasant side effects of the crackdown are being felt by those in power: the accelerating flight of capital and currency, a drastic drop in tourism and the increasing suspicion of aid donors...

...Beyond the Facade The November 28 action was described afterwards, by some foreign media, as "mild" and "bloodless...

...The old mulatto elite, the Syrian merchants, the black army officers, are buying up by the dozens the choicest peasant plots in Haiti's plains...

...Among the 21 journalists and prominent personalities sent into exile, few were severely mistreated, in comparison to earlier practices in Haitian jails...

...It is still difficult to know who, beyond the most corrupt elements of the elite, are the real beneficiaries of the November offensive...

...An Ambiguous Relationship The Haitian media's relationship with the government had rested on ambiguous foundations during these three years...

...Groups of workers, students, artisans and slum dwellers openly discuss the right to work or freely associate, the possibilities of limiting the local Tonton Macoutes' abuses of power and volunteering to testify on such abuses to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, in Port-au-Prince at the time on a fact-finding mission...

...Spectacular arrests seemed designed to strike the imagination...

...August 1978: The articles of the Inter-American Declaration of Human Rights, translated into the popular language, Creole, are broadcast over the radio...

...These surprising negotiations between the power structure and journalists, three months before the crackdown, reveal a very uneasy "balance of power" between the press and the regime...

...Other well-known prisoners were released after a few weeks in jail or put under house arrest...

...The dead dictator challenged the power of the traditional mulatto elite through sheer repression, by relying on the economic power of the Syrio-Lebanese merchant class (then the mulattoes' economic competitors) and by bestowing political power on a black feudal minority and a burgeoning middle class of black bureaucrats...

...One Winner: Corruption The increasing misery and widespread corruption, the inability to obtain-through free expression and basic political participation-the right to eat, to work or to receive proper pay for a harvest, leave little hope for change...

...Alerted by one of the survivors, Radio Haiti broadcasts July/August the news with no editorial comment...

...Like dangerous terrorists, the prisoners were handcuffed and taken to the army barracks...

...The official intervention and international news coverage, as well as protests by human rights organizations worldwide, set limits on the November 28 repression and may have effectively stopped further arrests...

...A few hours after the November 28 crackdown, the U.S...

...A record was left spinning repetitiously over the station airwaves for 45 minutes...

...Journalists fully used the liberalization process announced by the government in 1977 to expand their reporting and push back the limits 41update . update . update * update The dreaded Tonton-Macoute...

...State Department reacted swiftly and bluntly with official protests, as did the Canadian government...

...The journalists or political figures arrested were told by the chief of the political police, Colonel Jean Valme, that he received his orders from the "liberal" ministers in government, Theo Achille and JeanMarie Chanoine...

...For four hours, the police beseige the radio station, and the director, a journalist, has to negotiate the return of the school children, unharmed, to their families...

...so was Jean Claude Duvalier's desire to use popular dissent and the press to control old Duvalierists challenging his own power...

...As the quiet gatherings grow larger, particularly in the poor areas of the capital, the political police release the journalist...

...However, the assumption proved to De wrong...

...For the first time in Haitian history, news was not the exclusive province of the French-speaking, educated elite who had always managed in past political struggles to present themselves as spokespersons for the majority...

...Their sense of participation in the country's affairs that had developed especially over the past three years as a by-product of the relatively open discussion of civic, economic and political issues over radio or in small periodicals, ended when the government of Jean Claude Duvalier abruptly silenced Haiti's political spring on November 28...

...Even though the regime publicly supports human rights, one such meeting in Bolosse-Martinssant, a Port-auPrince suburb, is violently suppressed by the political police (3 people are killed, one is severely wounded...

...This relationship has grown more tense since 1977, as the independent press becomes the backbone of the democratic movement, by simply reporting on issues relevant to people's lives...

...The same day, several of his followers, all from lower income groups, are arrested, beaten and released, bloody and bruised...

...By first "jailing the messengers' '-journalists and prominent public figures-the Haitian regime brought back in one night the fear it paradoxically had tried to erase in the preceding years and immediately silenced popular dissent...

...March 1980: After seven months of detention, Sylvio Claude, leader of the Christian Democratic Party, is released as a result of increasing pressure on the government by international human rights groups...

...The political necessity for the government to let off steam was growing...

...The offensive against all non-governmental sectors effectively changed the regime itself, driving it toward "monolithization" NACLA Reportupdate update update update while paradoxically shrinking its political base...

...The first arrests, on the eve of the U.S...

...The crackdown ended the era of so-called liberalization heralded by Jean Claude Duvalier himself in 1977, as his 40 Word-of-mouth is Haiti's ever-present news service...