An interesting story by Reed Lindsay of the UK Observer, republished in the Toronto Star, where I spotted it.
An interesting story by Reed Lindsay of the UK Observer, republished in the Toronto Star, where I spotted it.
Lindsay appears to have done something that is relatively rare. First of all, he went to the place he’s reporting about. Second, he covered a topic, a massacre of prisoners in a country under occupation, that doesn’t serve established power. Third, he talked to some of the people affected, and presented some of the things they said. In other words, it seems as if a reporter for a mainstream outlet acted as an actual journalist should, and in the process unearthed a horrific story that is very telling about Haiti today.
Here you have a prison, called the Titanic, in which over a thousand people are locked up. One of them says “Everyone in the Titanic is Lavalas” – Lavalas, for readers who don’t know, is the political party that is being liquidated by the paramilitary government that was installed early this year by a US-Canada-France coup. Thousands have been killed by this government since the coup and the slaughter is ongoing. Lindsay didn’t do a great job of writing the story, but a reader can put a comprehensive story together from what he gathered: police and guards went from cell to cell and massacred the prisoners, then had the bodies dumped in mass graves. Lindsay didn’t finish the job and find the graves – he says no one wanted to show him because they feared reprisals, which is quite possible, and I don’t want to impugn Lindsay by implying that he didn’t do the best he could. If there had been this kind of reporting when it was really needed, during the coup, intensely, and especially on television, things might have worked out differently (that of course speaks to why reports like this can come out now, and are framed in such a way as to make readers wring their hands and say ‘gee, haiti sure is awful’).
This is all taking place in order to destroy Lavalas, the democratic and popular movement in Haiti that was the target – Aristide wasn’t the target – of the coup in February. And Lavalas has to be destroyed for reasons of pure racist contempt for democracy, for the same reasons Haiti has never been given a chance to develop on its own in the 200 years since Haitians waged the first successful slave revolt in history. Lindsay’s story even suggests a bit of this.
If I were going to impugn Lindsay, however, I would have some basis to do so. I suppose he had to do this kind of thing to get the story published, but after some serious investigative work unearthing the story of the massacre and discussing the various sources and the different kinds of evidence and testimonies he gathered, Lindsay goes to great lengths to quote official sources discrediting the testimonies.
He quotes the warden: Penitentiary warden Sony Marcellus dismissed the prisoners’ accusations as lies and exaggerations. “The prisoners will never tell the truth,” said Marcellus. The guards “are trained to shoot in the air, not at prisoners. They would never fire on prisoners in this way.”
But that is not nearly as bad as this sentence, a blight on the whole story and, if taken seriously, ought to serve as an indictment of Lindsay himself: Still, evidence that more than seven people were killed at the penitentiary has gone no further than the testimony of prisoners and anonymous sources. (Why didn’t you get some evidence, Reed? Oh, you did? Then why do have to discredit your own story? My own feeling is Lindsay didn’t write the sentence, but some editor inserted it as a sop to ‘objectivity’.)
Lindsay’s implied solutions, which come from the United Nations, also deserve at least some contempt (though the contempt should flow from the UN to Lindsay). Again, in the midst of reporting on the conditions in the prison and the evidence of the massacre, he adds context about the lack of resources for a good prison system.
Last February, former soldiers swept across the country, setting fire to police stations and freeing 3,500 prisoners from the penitentiaries in the armed revolt that toppled Aristide. Since then, the prison population has quickly shot back up to nearly 2,000, but with a much reduced capacity as many cells were destroyed.
Dyotte said the U.N. offered $50,000 (U.S.) to repair broken cells and the Canadian government promised to chip in with materials from its own penitentiary system and furniture from the Port-au-Prince embassy. Dyotte said the U.N. also offered $15,000 to buy beds, mattresses and furniture for the women’s penitentiary in Port-au-Prince. All these offers of help were turned down by Claude Theodat, director of Haiti’s penitentiary system. Theodat refused to be interviewed.
Interesting, isn’t it? The paramilitaries freed all those who Aristide’s regime had jailed, then turned around and jailed thousands of Lavalas people. The article states that of the 1,100 people in the Titanic prison, 17 have been convicted of any crime.
So what does the United Nations propose?
A couple of thousand bucks to build more prison capacity, of course!
