As a Graham Greene fan, I tried in vain to contain my excitement as I sat for the first time on the veranda of the Hotel Oloffson with Richard A. Morse, the young “voodoo rock” musician from Connecticut who runs the place.
Down below us, through the century-old balcony’s ornate wooden fretwork and ocean of palm greenery, is the hotel pool in which Greene’s Dr. Philipot was found dead. The Oloffson was the Trianon in “The Comedians,” Greene’s take on the nightmare regime of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
Morse dodges the inevitable comparisons to Mr. Brown, the Trianon’s proprietor. “I came to study voodoo rhythms,” he says. “The hotel is my day job.”
Yet, Haiti is Haiti, “the best nightmare on Earth,” American writer Herbert Gold, another Oloffson visitor, called it.
“It had the air of a Charles Addams house in a number [issue] of The New Yorker,” Greene wrote of the Trianon’s Gothic atmosphere. Outside the Oloffson’s walls and gate, I detect that Gothic gloom and doom in the rest of Haiti, too. The atmosphere seems less dictatorial, yet still fouled with the aroma of dead bodies here and there during the watch of Haiti’s first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
I have come with a pair of colleagues on a “mission” from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member. Morse approves. “After all,” he observes, “after they come for the journalists, the musicians are next.” The noisy, narrow and dusty streets of Haiti’s capital are decorated with the name and charismatic face of one dead journalist already.
“Justice for Jean Dominique,” says a banner stretched across busy streets.
“The assassins are in the city,” say large posters bearing Dominique’s rather gentle and fatherly looking face.
He was gunned down April 3, 2000, ambushed in the parking lot of Radio Haiti, the popular radio station he owned and used as a platform for hard-hitting reports and commentary.
Another journalist, Brignolle Lindor, was hacked to death in December by a mob, apparently connected to an “Organization Popular,” grass-roots community service groups that have become, in some instances, politically charged militias with their own warlords.
Two Haitian journalists were jailed in late May without charges or medical attention for 13 days, along with a dozen suspects following a political protest that turned into a gang fight. They were released after the Association for Haitian Journalists lodged protests and court action.
“Those in power are not accustomed to being challenged, not used to a free press,” said Guyler Delva, the association’s director, who was assaulted by Aristide opponents when Aristide was in exile. Such are the hazards of attempting objectivity in Haiti.
In this country, where very few can read and where a television set costs about as much as a worker’s average yearly per capita income, radio prospers. Port-au-Prince has more than 40 radio stations and another 200 or so radio stations cover the rest of the country.
You hear a greater diversity of news and views now, than under the Duvaliers, with their notorious “Tontons Macoute” thugs, but that’s not saying much. Repeatedly we were told by reporters and radio station owners that “when you were attacked or threatened under the Duvaliers, you knew it was the Tontons Macoute. Now when you are attacked or threatened, it could be from anyone.”
Such are the complications of the Dominique case. He was, in the words of his widow, Michele Montas-Dominique, now the radio station’s general manager, “an equal-opportunity offender.”
A member of Haiti’s mulatto elite, Jean Dominique nevertheless championed the poor. After working as a Radio Haiti reporter, he bought the station in 1971 and turned it into a voice in Creole, the language of Haiti’s masses, and a voice against the indifferent elites and the thugocracy. His funeral drew more than 16,000 people to the capital’s soccer stadium.
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Who did it? The suspects are numerous. Three suspected gunmen were put in custody. but efforts to prosecute the suspected masterminds behind the assassination appear to have stalled.
Meanwhile, the nation’s independent journalists pursue their jobs, trying to shrug off the chilling effect brought on by a new reign of terror and uncertainty.
“Journalism in Haiti always has been a risky business,” says Dominique’s widow.
When Aristide talks to journalists he pledges, as he did in a January meeting, to “do everything in my power so that journalists can do their jobs without interference.” Yet his information minister has notified media owners of a new press law under consideration that would enable the government to determine who is a journalist.
Sounds like journalism in Haiti will continue to be a risky business.
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