Letter from Haiti

It was, and still is, unpaved, unmarked, and cratered with potholes, Haiti's seemingly endless road to democracy, and its manifest of casualties has been extensive. Eventually every traveler navigating its hazardous course has crashed, turned around, or broken down, however temporarily, and in that sense, at least, it's been the same road for everybody, including the foreign and domestic press. The same challenge. The same opportunity. What one might euphemistically call a learning experience.

Which is why I could imagine the several dozen Haitian journalists asking themselves what they were doing last March as they boarded a plane in Port-au-Prince that would take them to a professional seminar in Miami. What more might they conceivably have left to learn from the American media? It would have been a fair question, considering that the two press corps had worked shoulder to shoulder for almost a decade; that Haitian journalists had played a key and historic role in the reinvention of their country's political landscape; and, finally, that you didn't need to poll many of them to start your own collection of anecdotes illustrating a pattern of transgressions, great and small, committed by their otherwise well-intentioned counterparts from the colossus to the north.

 Among those flying into Miami were representatives of Port-au-Prince's three most popular and influential commercial radio stations (radio being the medium of choice in Haiti, where almost everyone is poor and illiterate). Radio Quisqueya, Radio Tropic FM, and Radio Metropole have distinct, yet converging, identities. Left-of-center Quisqueya scrapes by, proud of its activist heritage. The liberal Tropic FM, owned and operated by a husband-wife team who spent much of their adult lives in New York, is solvent, floating on the audience it built during the years when General Raoul C?dras's junta was in power (1991-94), when Quisqueya was mostly off the air. Metropole finesses the most lucrative advertising accounts, because of its ability to span the chasms between Haiti's socio-economic classes. Radical, middle of the road, bourgeois, is how the stations tend to describe each other, although they all share the common cause of a free and democratic Haiti and a history of death threats and harassment during C?dr's regime.

 Last summer, when U.S. News & World Report published an invasion map showing one station targeted, the rest assumed their mountaintop antennae would also be demolished a la Grenada. They were all accused by the de facto minister of information of "scandalous and provocative behavior" when they went, an alarmed contingent of station owners and directors, to the United States Information Service to offer to cut their own wires, anything, to be spared destruction.

Currently Radio Quisqueya rules the audience, if not the marketplace, largely because of its resonant history and the long-standing and unrepentant militancy of its founders, Lilyanne Pierre-Paul and Sonny Marvel, who are understandably ambivalent about their celebrity (see "Local Heros," CJR, May/June 1992). "I've been hiding all my life," Pierre-Paul told me in February when I visited the station's carefully guarded offices in a decrepit building in downtown Port-au-Prince.

At the zenith of Jean-Claude Duvalier's dictatorship in the late '70s, when Pierre-Paul started her career, "we used the technology of the transistor, and the introduction of Creole [a Franco-African polyglot, the language of Haiti's masses] onto the airwaves," she recalled, "to make a cultural and political revolution in our country." Until that time, 100 percent of Haitian programming had been in French, the polarizing language of the ruling class, no matter that barely more than 10 percent of the population spoke or understood it. Then, in a stroke of proselytistic genius, Radio Lumi?re began broadcasting Baptist sermons in Creole (thousands converted); Radio Haiti-Inter, an independent station, followed suit, transmitting live coverage of soccer matches. Then Radio Soleil, a station owned by the hierarchy of the Catholic church, legitimized through newscasts, commentary, and sermons the everyday use of Creole. The linguistic wall of silence had been breached; soon Haitians were being interviewed on the seets, for the first time their opinions disseminated in a common language, and the Haitian press became the spokesman for Haiti's voiceless millions.

 The Duvalierists were not pleased. The minister of defense summoned the press corps to a meeting to complain that he had recently visited the provincial city of Jacmel, where he was astonished to hear a peasant talking about the Shah of Iran. Why should a peasant know so much, the minister demanded. In 1980, Baby Doc retaliated against the innate subversiveness of the transistor radio by unleashing his police chief on the stations. "I had two choices - die, or go into exile," said Pierre-Paul.

After the Dechoukaj, or "uprooting," of Duvalier in 1986, she and the others from Radio Haiti-Inter returned from Venezuela and Canada to rebuild the station into a soapbox for the democratic movement. This, in turn, quickly attracted the attention of General Henri Namphy's brutal provisional government. "It was a new experience, a terrible experience," Pierre-Paul recalls. Forced into hiding for the next four years, she moved continuously from one safe house to another.

The Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide's election in 1990 brought a brief respite, and a more mundane challenge when the boss of Radio Haiti-Inter, Jean Dominque, fired the staff over what was ostensibly a salary dispute. Renting air time from another station, Pierre-Paul and Marvel launched Radio Quisqueya, a modest event that impropitiously coincided with one of overwhelming magnitude - the overthrow of Aristide. "For seven months," said Pierre-Paul, "we couldn't show ourselves." During the regime's three-year tenure, four journalists were murdered, one disappeared; scores were menaced, beaten, and arrested, among them Radio Tropic FM's Colson Desamir who, while attempting to report the arrival of U.N. special envoy Dante Caputo, was knocked to the ground by a soldier's rifle, bound, blindfolded, taken into custody and for the next six days incarcerated at the notorious Fort Dimanche. Radio Tropic FM, the only station to broadcast news updates on the half hour, began using the air time to plead for his release, pting his family, friends, and fellow journalists behind the microphone, none of whom could have imagined they were colluding in Desamir's misery. For two days, with the sound of his wife or father crying in the background, or a familiar voice demanding his freedom, the soldiers, with a radio tuned to Tropic FM, would torture him during newscasts, every thirty minutes. His arms still bear the scars of an attempt to chop them off.

 In May 1994, despite continuing persecution, even a grenade pitched against the station, Quisqueya was finally back on the air. "We said we are not going to wait for democracy to come to us," Pierre-Paul says. "We're going to go get the democracy for ourselves." Encouraged by Quisqueya's audacity, pro-Aristide crowds gathered at the station throughout the summer leading up to the American intervention, but even with 20,000 U.S. troops on the island, the threats intensified. The city's psychotic police chief, Col. Michel Fran?ois, vowed to destroy Quisqueya, and the staff shut down the station themselves on September 30 - temporarily. Within days Michel Fran?ois had fled into exile, and by the new year Pierre-Paul and Marvel had nudged aside their prime competitors, Radio Tropic FM and Radio Metropole.

"We are," Pierre-Paul says with her customary exuberance, "part of the history of this country."

 Richard Widmaier of Radio Metropole was also on the plane to Miami. Widmaier had been typecast by the foreign press as the quintessential - and, by implication, morally repugnant - elite bourgeois businessman/media tycoon. At one point during the reign of General Raoul C?dras, who had led a coup d'etat against President Aristide in September 1991, a Miami Herald reporter - one of the so-called Sunshine Boys, a cadre of correspondents supplied primarily but not exclusively by the Herald, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times who practiced what would become known derisively, for its excesses and omissions, as voodoo journalism - solicited Widmaier's opinion on the potential impact of Aristide's return. "If Aristide comes back," Widmaier declared, "it's going to be hell." He paused and then added, "If Aristide doesn't come back, it's going to be hell." The reporter quoted only the first half of Widmaier's statement; the Herald printed a retraction after Widmaier objected, but the damage to everyone's cribility was not so readily repaired.

Not bound for the Miami conference, but a victim of a more egregious and, despite its out-of-the-mainstream context, no less revealing encounter, was the Rev. Jean-Yves Urfie, editor of the popular five-year-old weekly Journal Lib?t?, Haiti's only Creole-language newspaper, who was cornered by Rolling Stone's geopolitical mugger, P.J. O'Rourke, in the summer of 1994. "I was printing clandestinely," says the voluble Father Urfie, whose Creole nickname translates as Skin Inside-Out, meaning he wears his heart on his sleeve. "So I explained to him, ïPlease, I'll give you background information but I cannot as such give you an interview and be identified.' You know what he wrote? ïA leftist French priest wearing a Chicago Bulls T-shirt.' In Port-au-Prince you have five French priests, four of them right-wing, and I'm the only one to have a Chicago Bulls T-shirt. That's dirty!" Urfie, round and balding, throws out his arms in disgust. Lib?t? lost most of its correspondents, through exile or murder, during the coud'etat, and the kids who sold it kept getting "disappeared" by the Macoutes (paramilitary militiamen; a generic term for anti-democratic terrorists). O'Rourke had betrayed him, he said, seething, but fortunately the Macoutes didn't read Rolling Stone.

 Making the rounds over the past six months in Port-au-Prince, I often wondered if the litany of mistrust and disappointment I heard about American media distortion was itself a distortion - many Haitians on the streets had a rather mythic notion of journalists as heroic liberators. But the awkward and at times adversarial relationship in Haiti between the foreign and domestic press became painfully obvious after President Aristide's return, its strange physics poignantly captured by Lib?t?'s widely respected cartoonist, J.V. Keush. Aristide stands on the steps of the National Palace, welcoming - in English - a quartet of U.S. network cameramen, emissaries of the vast audience of taxpayers bankrolling, however reluctantly, Operation Uphold Democracy. Off to the side on the palace lawn, American soldiers hold the Haitian press at bay. "Gee," one of the hapless reporters thinks to himself in Creole, "if I were American I could speak to Titid." The use of the president's nickname is affectionate; the sentiment inot.

 On one level, the cartoon alludes to Aristide's first press conference, four days after his reinstallation by U.S. troops on October 15, 1994. Ten minutes into the clamor, Aristide shocked the packed hall by declining to entertain questions from his generally loyalist and often idolizing countrymen, justifying this insensitivity with the rationalization that the foreigners would soon bail out of Haiti altogether, and the Haitian media would have their president all to themselves. Aggrieved but compliant, the journalists retreated to the palace's interior portico, where they stoically devoured numerous trays of complimentary hors d'oeuvres, a small but rare perquisite for a press corps that is underfed, underpaid, undertrained, underappreciated, and overworked.

But there was a second, parallel conflict, similarly disturbing, explicit in the Lib?t? cartoon: an indictment of the blanc, or foreign - read that, American - media. Beneath the caricatures, a legend deciphered the network acronyms: ABC - Ann Back C?dras (Let's Support C?dras); CBS - C?dras Bull Shit; CNN (much loathed in Haiti) - C?dras News Network; and NBC - Nou Bezwen C?dras (We Need C?dras). Ever since the Dechoukaj, when Father Aristide, the liberation theologist from the slums of Port-au-Prince, began to redirect the country's center of gravity, Haitians from across the political spectrum have perceived the mainstream American press, epitomized by the Sunshine Boys, as being little more than a mouthpiece for the State Department, and thus persistently anti-Aristide. "The mainstream press never understood him or even tried to understand him," Bernard Diederich once told me, explaining what he saw as the media's role in Aristide's unpopularity among the American public. Diederich, Time magazine's formeCaribbean bureau chief, a drinking buddy of Graham Greene, and the dean of Haiti's foreign correspondents, has been covering Haiti since 1950. "These guys would come [to Port-au-Prince] and head straight for the embassy." As for talking to Haitians, American reporters gravitated toward English speakers, who tended to be upper class and unapologetically authoritarian. Then, in an attempt to balance the story, says Diederich, "they'd bring nuts out of the woodwork, always the same clowns, they'd use weird sources, and that's why Haiti suffered a lot."

For the foreign press, "It's always the same story - the slums versus the elites," laments Widmaier, even though Aristide would never have been elected or subsequently reinstated without the baroque coalition-building that evolved between his traditional base among the peasants and urban poor and more progressive supporters within Haiti's middle and upper classes, the million-strong diaspora, and the army's handful of socially-conscious officers.

 "For reasons I don't understand," Edwidge Balutansky, the director of the U.N.-funded Haiti Info-Services, a training and resource center for journalists, told me in her modernized Victorian-era offices in Port-au-Prince, "the U.S. press responds to Washington's interests. You get the same point of view from all the papers. To me one of the best examples of this is how they treated Aristide and the military throughout the crisis [1986-94] - Aristide was a leftist radical; the military was pro-democratic." As the crisis went on, stereotypes would change as policy changed. So would buzzwords like "intransigent" and "cunning" (frequently applied to Aristide during negotiations for his peaceable return to the island). "Then, all of a sudden," she continues, "the regime were criminals."

A mainstream correspondent in Haiti works on a tightrope. Even for those with the best of intentions, the story in Haiti has never been easy to get, to understand, or elucidate. Every journalist who parachutes into Port-au-Prince for the first time is bound to be daunted by the crowds and poverty, overwhelmed by contradictory images, grasping for contemporary references. Some correspondents feel trapped; before long they sour on the beggars, the pestilence and filth, the heat; the interminable hassle of logistics - cars, rooms, phones, electricity; the devastated infrastructures, physical and administrative; the obscenity of the elite; the intrigues, circumlocutions, and cultural mysteries. Sooner or later, these correspondents begin to file stories that reflect their weariness and distaste for the assignment. A tone of petulance creeps into their prose, a subtextual implication that Haiti is ultimately insignificant.

At the Miami conference, as we waited for another session to begin, Bernard Diederich confided to me that he thought "No one would get a prize for Haitian coverage." His assessment - with a few notable exceptions - seemed amply justified.

The wonk from Planet Silicon is telling Haitian journalists, many of whom have never touched the enter key on a computer, about digital technology and its impact on the future of broadcasting. Ultra-slick visuals are projected on a sheet, draped across an upturned table. In English delivered far too rapidly for the interpreter in the glass booth at the back of the Topiary Room at the Eden Roc Hotel to translate accurately into French, the speaker describes something called individual subscriber service for satellite technology. Smart cards. Electronic coupons for radio advertising. The Intelligent Vehicle Highway System. Then comes a short video from Japan - ghost images sliding across the snowy topography of the sheet - promoting the marvels of interactive radio. A very few of the journalists look on enthralled, dreaming the impossible, but most in the audience are stunned by this presentation, their faces frozen by the absurdity of it, and one of them folds his arms on the table in front of him and cradlesis head, apparently exhausted.

 This tour of somebody else's future made him "cry my eyes out," Sylvain Bernier, a reporter from Radio Galaxie, told the speaker afterwards. "We have no technicians. People learned their trade twenty years ago. We have to steal a piece of cable, pay people under the table, call thirty times until you get a line."

Despite the disconnect, the conference - "The Haitian Media: Defining Our Role" - sponsored by the Inter American Press Association and the McCormick Tribune Foundation, had managed to bring together the battle-scarred veterans of the Haitian press for the first time in years, no small feat considering the almost endemic disunity among Haiti's journalists. Separately and collectively, they reflect the tensions and the factionalization within Haitian society, to the extent that they mirror the diversity of approach and opinion inherent in Haiti's democratic movement, the sprawling ideological neighborhood which they all inhabit.

 The second and final morning of the conference began with a seemingly innocuous review of the evolution of the Haitian media by historian Jean Desquiron, but when it became clear that Desquiron had little to say about events beyond 1957, the year Fran?ois Duvalier hijacked the island, body and soul, the session became contentious. "I'm not an analyst, I'm a storyteller, a raconteur," Desquiron protested after someone accused him of shying away from controversy. "So you tell stories on the press?" Lilyanne Pierre-Paul asked wryly, the double-entendre meant to badger the historian into a fight. "The question is impertinent," fumed Desquiron, but the audience dragged him onward into an animated debate about the political ramifications of Creole and the limits of objectivity - "The press is never neutral in Haiti," Desquiron replied.

Folks grumbled about a generation gap; those who had stayed in Haiti during the regime felt a lingering bitterness toward the returned exiles. But Clarens Renois, Radio Metropole's tall, tennis-playing news director, harbors a quixotic passion - he wants everyone in the room to form a Haitian press association, like the one they had in 1987-88, when the journalists were unified in opposition against the junta. Unfortunately, that same association degenerated into the Palace Band, a Haitian version of the Sunshine Boys. (The Sunshine Boys got the nickname because they could usually be found poolside at the Holiday Inn; the Band because it took requests.) It seemed paradoxical to Renois that democracy could sow divisiveness among the profession, but few in attendance were especially keen on his idea.

 In the hour before lunch, the Haitian-American chairman of Wesleyan University's sociology department, Alex Dupuy, offered the assembly a geopolitical overview, tracking the events and philosophies that had culminated in the pounding of Haiti's square peg into the round hole of the New World Order.

As debate rambled on, its focus gravitated to one of the core dilemmas confronting Haiti's media: Were they to be watchdogs or advocates of Aristide's government? How best to balance vigilance with self-censorship? Many of the journalists fretted that objectivity absent self-restraint would play into the hands of anti-democratic forces. "It's one little candle with a light with a lot of wind trying to blow it out, this democracy," said Pierre-Paul. "Even though you are not satisfied with the way the government's functioning," she had told me earlier in Port-au-Prince, "you cannot attack a democratic government the same way you attack a dictatorship."

But how do you report on a political culture that has no habit of accountability? "It's not easy to investigate the public administration," said Renois. "It's not in their routine." Back in Port-au-Prince I had listened to Max Chauvet, publisher of the conservative Le Nouvelliste, Haiti's oldest newspaper, critique the government's own lack of solidarity: "You have a faction for privatization and a faction against privatization. So you really don't know what the government thinks about privatization. It's like a doubletalk government. Everybody says we'll have a more open press now that Aristide's back but it's not true - everything's still secret." I had also spoken with several younger, more disillusioned journalists, one of whom felt so frustrated by the government's impenetrability and mistreated by security personnel that he planned to "boycott President Aristide's activities, and not report on them." Aristide's press liaisons, he told me - and every foreign correspondent working in Haiti would agree - on't know their jobs." Or do, but live in fear of being shown the door. As we know from Eastern Europe, new democracies, often blinded by arrogance and self-righteousness, don't relate very well to the press. It's a conceptual prejudice - the new folks think they're the good guys.

Nowhere has the ethic of impartiality been more hotly contested than in the state-owned media, an issue that surfaced in January when the government's clumsy attempt to define itself and micromanage the spin on its increasingly inert image wreaked havoc at the national television station, TNH. Frantz Marcelin, the station's general director since October 15, learned of his dismissal while listening to one of the local radio stations. His newsroom staff, whom Marcelin had recruited with assurances they would not be molded into a propaganda tool, walked out in protest and were subsequently replaced by the new director, Dominique Constant, a former Ministry of Information official and radio journalist, a friend of President Aristide.

Constant was sanguine about the dispute when I spoke with him at TNH several weeks later. The problems foremost on his mind were pragmatic: building an advertising base to supplement an anemic budget, purchasing fuel for the station's generator, upgrading TNH's technological resources and improving production quality, decreasing the reliance (currently 50 percent) on imported programming. "People would rather see Haitian programming than something ridiculous from the United States," said Constant, perhaps naively.

 TNH, as he envisioned it, would become "a big school for the country. For example, we can teach someone how to lodge a complaint against someone. We can teach people about hygiene." Listening to Constant, I asked myself, Who other than the well-washed elite has electricity? In a country with an annual per capita income of $255, who has a television set? "I feel comfortable criticizing problems," he insisted. "Our duty is to present both sides and avoid explosions. I don't wait for the government to tell me what to do." The government, said Constant, could "create their own propaganda" by simply getting the job done - fixing the infrastructure, reducing the cost of living.

In what looks to be a very long interim, most Haitians expect the state-controlled radio and TV stations to become, in the words of Lilyanne Pierre-Paul, "constipated by the propaganda food."

The Miami conference seemed to end in disarray - Lilyanne Pierre-Paul and Clarens Renois sparring over the need for a press association; Edwidge Balutansky and Marie Jean from Radio Tropic FM unwilling to role-play in a silly exercise conducted by a chirpy management specialist from the University of Miami; George Krimsky, president of the Center for Foreign Journalists, mightily offended by the anti-capitalist rhetoric of Alex Dupuy; the sponsors grousing about the entire aimless affair.

The sponsors in Miami didn't understand, Bernard Diederich said several days after the conference had ended. "There was a lot of hope in that meeting. The big important part of the whole conference was the realization that these people had matured a hell of a lot."

Now they are all back home, back at work, as Haiti resurrects itself from the dead. I keep thinking of something Marie Jean said: "The Haitian press just gets better when there's trouble." Frankly, however, they could use a breather, though it's probably not in the cards. Presidential elections are scheduled for December. Who's running? No one really knows. Opportunities for improvement abound.

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