UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton speaks to hospital staff in Mirebalais.

From my blog entry for the Pulitzer Center in March:

In early March, Bill Clinton showed he is learning the lessons of Haiti’s man-made disasters. Far from natural byproducts of the nation itself, the widespread poverty, misery and deaths among Haitians have an awful lot to do with mistakes made by influential foreigners.

After the January 2010 earthquake, Clinton acknowledged that he was wrong to champion agricultural trade policies during his presidency that benefitted “some of my farmers in Arkansas,” but damaged the livelihoods of Haitian peasant farmers.

Those policies helped drive Haitians out of the countryside into overcrowded, shoddily-built urban slums in Port-au-Prince, where many of them perished in the quake. Earthquakes of that magnitude don’t kill tens of thousands of people in industrialized countries.

“I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else,” Clinton said in testimony before the U.S. Senate.

On March 7, Clinton candidly admitted to having learned another lesson from another man-made tragedy in Haiti—the October 2010 cholera outbreak which has killed more than 7,000 and made sick at least 500,000 Haitians.

At a press conference at a new hospital in Mirebalais, with United Nations troops standing guard outside, I asked him whether he agreed with recent comments by the American ambassador to the UN that those responsible for the cholera’s introduction to Haiti should be “held accountable.”

Cholera was alien to Haiti and the Caribbean prior to the outbreak. Multiple scientific studies have pinpointed UN peacekeeping troops as the definitive or most likely source of imported cholera bacteria from Nepal to central Haiti.

Clinton sidestepped the question, at one point calling that decision “above his pay grade.” He receives a symbolic $1 per year salary from the UN as its special envoy to Haiti.

But he also became the first UN representative to acknowledge the truth that’s long been in plain sight, ever since reporters captured shocking images of waste from the Mirebalais UN peacekeeping base flowing into Haiti’s waterways.

“I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera to Haiti, the UN peacekeeping soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus,” Clinton said. (It is a bacterium, not a virus.) “It was the proximate cause of cholera,” he continued. “That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waters of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”

The UN has long denied its decisive role in the cholera outbreak. This was an unusual level of candor from such a high-ranking official. I immediately broke the news on Twitter. Within hours the Associated Press had filed its own dispatch about Clinton’s comments, making headlines around the world. A Haitian law firm that sued the UN on behalf of cholera victims praised Clinton’s response to my question. One of the lawyers told me he thinks it’s “going to have a big impact on the case.”

Still, even after Clinton’s admission, the UN issued a statement attributing the cholera outbreak to “a confluence of factors.” In New York on March 9, a spokesperson fended off questions from reporters about Clinton’s admission.

Clinton, for his part, also emphasized that “what really caused” the cholera epidemic is Haiti’s virtually non-existent clean water and sanitation system. He pondered aloud, “And I can’t recall ever until this cholera outbreak hit, people even asking: ‘Did these people come from a place where they have a lot of cholera or malaria or you name it, and are we sending them to a place where they don’t have that, and therefore, almost by accident, we could start an epidemic?’

“And I have to tell you—at least I had never thought about it before. And insofar as I would have any influence over continuing UN operations it’s one question that I think that will always be asked from now on. I feel terrible about what happened here.”

Clinton commands enormous influence in Haiti. As special envoy, he co-chaired the reconstruction commission set up after the earthquake alongside Haiti’s prime minister, and he was recently appointed to the President’s Economic Advisory Council.

The question now is whether the policies Clinton champions today are the right ones or whether he will lament how things should have been done better in Haiti years from now. These include export-driven agricultural and trade policies, as well as boosting the textile and tourism industries as panaceas for Haiti’s pervasive unemployment.

There is already a stark dissonance between his comments about aid organizations and how his own foundation conducted itself in quake-battered Leogane. Clinton urged aid groups to work themselves “out of a job” and build the capacity of Haitian institutions. But journalists found that the Clinton Foundation ignored local officials and installed trailer classrooms laced with formaldehyde. The foundation deflected the accusations.

As a governor and president in the U. S., Clinton distinguished himself with his charisma, intelligence, and ability to get things done. But it’s hard to see Haiti’s faltering recovery since the earthquake as anything but a failure. (The reconstruction commission he co-chaired is now defunct.)

“Building back better” will require learning from errors more quickly, or better yet, not making tragic mistakes in the first place.

The case against five United Nations peacekeepers caught on tape in an alleged sexual assault on a Haitian teenager has apparently stalled and the accused soldiers have been freed, a UN official has confirmed.

The men were sent back to Uruguay last summer to face trial after cell phone video obtained by ABC News appeared to show uniformed soldiers assaulting an 18-year-old Haitian as he is held down on a mattress in a UN compound in Port Salut, Haiti. The video shows soldiers in their UN uniforms, one of them with his pants down. The victim’s mother said her son was taken inside the base by five UN soldiers who accused him of making fun of them.

“They beat and maltreated him,” Rose-Marie Jean told ABC News in an interview. “Two raped him from behind.”

The release of the accused men comes at an unsettling time for the UN in Haiti, two years after a devastating earthquake rocked the struggling island nation, and three months after the grainy video of the alleged assault triggered street protests from those who believe international peacekeepers are able to abuse Haitian citizens with impunity. Since the video surfaced, more UN peacekeepers — this time from Brazil — have been accused of beating Haitian civilians. Read the rest →

Readers, I have a request.  Does anyone remember Rose Mina Joseph?

I wrote about her back in September after breaking the news of abuses by UN soldiers caught on cell phone video in Port Salut, Haiti.  Beyond the incident captured by the video, it turned out that soldiers from the local Uruguayan UN peacekeeper battalion had had children with a number of local Haitian women.  UN regulations strongly advise against this, given the “unequal power” levels inherent in any such relationship.  Some of the women (photos) and their children had been all but abandoned by soldiers who had finished their deployments to Haiti.  But the soldiers are absolutely forbidden from having sex with minors, much less impregnating them.  The country’s legal age for sexual consent is 18.

Rose Mina became pregnant five days after turning 17 last January.  The father was Uruguayan peacekeeper Julio Posse, seen in the photo below of her birthday celebration.  Posse was sent back to Uruguay last summer for what the UN later admitted was a “very serious breach of the Code of Conduct.”  The UN mission said:

As a disciplinary measure, the soldier was repatriated and banned from serving in other UN missions. He is required by his hierarchy in Uruguay to assist the young girl and her to be born baby. We are following up on whether he was sanctioned, what was the sanction, and whether he has executed it, as well as on the continuation of assistance to the girl and the baby.

According to Rose Mina, her son’s father sent a small amount of money once since her story was covered in the press.  A flurry of journalists visited her in those days at the tiny ramshackle home she shares with her mother and uncle.  They cook under a thatched roof covering behind the house.

Apparently I’m the only one who gave her a phone number before leaving.  We’ve kept in touch since then.  Normally Rose Mina is reserved and soft-spoken. She doesn’t say a whole lot.  But on Friday she called me and was upset that I hadn’t called her sooner.  I called her back.

She immediately launched into a long, flowing tirade against “Julio.” He told her he would send money again, but has not.  Recently she called him and he claimed he couldn’t talk because he’d been in an accident.  He picked up again when she called another day, sounding perfectly normal, then abruptly hung up on her.

Rose Mina is infuriated that he hasn’t followed through on his promises and has lied to her.  She’s decided to name her son Anderson Joseph, instead of naming the boy after his father, as she had planned. For good measure, she called all the other journalists who interviewed her “thieves.”

Here are the text messages she sent me after we talked.  She’s always had a funny way of writing.  A translation:

“Hi, how are you?  Where are you?  I’m not doing well at all because the father doesn’t ever call me, he doesn’t send money for me and the child.  Merry Christmas. . .Ansel hello, it’s Rose Mina.  The foreigners in MINUSTAH never sent any small amount of money for the baby.  Try to call them for me so they can send it for me.  Merry Christmas.”

What happened that to the “continuation of assistance to the girl and the baby” pledged by the UN in the statement above?  Hasn’t one of the UN’s many humanitarian agencies partnered with its peacekeeping mission to provide Rose Mina a minimal level of support?

No.  When I first wrote the story, I pleaded with the woman who sent me that statement, the UN mission’s public information officer, to follow through on the helping Rose Mina and her child.   The baby hadn’t been born yet.  Rose Mina worried about not having enough money to pay the only hospital in the town.

A few weeks later, not long before she gave birth, I called the the PIO back.  Once again, she brushed me off, assuring me someone was following up.   Rose Mina said nothing happened.  So from Port-au-Prince, I wired Rose Mina some money myself.

Here finally is the request.  I’d like to wire Rose Mina some money again.  But I’m barely keeping up with my work in Seattle.  Just last week, I wired a friend in Cite Soleil $70 USD, in part because his mom died and the morgue was about to throw her body out (here’s a photo of the transfer).   For Rose Mina, I’d like to encourage you to make a donation to this PayPal link.   If y’all hit $50, I’ll throw in $50 myself and we’ll send her an even $100.  Maybe we can do even more than that. If anyone needs more documentation to feel comfortable about donating, let me know.  The dollars that you donate to my PayPal account will simply reimburse me for $50 of the wire transfer, which I’ll send using my credit card and Western Union at a local Vietnamese market. I’ll update this post with a photo of the the transfer receipt and again when I get word that Rose Mina has received it.

That’s pretty much it.  I don’t like asking for money, nobody does.  But I’m just a little too upset and not quite rich enough to not try this. Especially with all the buying stuff and gift giving going on around these parts.  Rose Mina deserves better.

As does another close friend, who was promised assistance from two large, well-known international aid organizations. They removed her (and by extension her five children) from a beneficiary list without informing her or apologizing. But that, like so much of what goes in Haiti, is another story – yet it’s really the same at its core. Haitians and their nation are treated as less than sovereign with rights.

Update: Wow!  This worked quickly. In the seven hours since I posted this, two readers have donated $75 between them.  I was expecting more of a series of smaller donations.  I’ll chip in $25, save my other $25 for someone else or a future remittance to Rose Mina, and send out the wire transfer as soon as I can (photo forthcoming). Thank you Nathan Yaffe and Kathleen O’Flynn. (If you’d still like to make a donation to Rose Mina, just label it “for Rose Mina” in the purpose line in PayPal checkout.)

*Rose Mina gave me permission to share all this with you. Additionally, you or I could both try contacting the UN mission’s PIO Sylvie van den Wildenberg at 011 509 3702 9042 or vandenwildenberg@un.org, but that’s likely to go nowhere. And please let me know if you have an idea for how to help Rose Mina in a non-financial way, such as linking her with effective legal counsel or a women’s group with a presence in Port Salut. Finally, I want to note that while I try to act in such a way that doesn’t lead someone consider me as an exploitative person or a thief, I have never given nor offered a source or interviewee money before publishing an article. On occasion, it’s something I’ve volunteered well after whatever journalistic work I’ve done involving them has been completed.

Anti-MINUSTAH protesters peacefully marching.

Here’s a round-up of some of odds and ends that I haven’t gotten around to posting until now.

First, there’s this piece for Haiti Liberte: WikiLeaks Reveal: Expecting Civilian Deaths, US Embassy Approved of Deadly Attack on Crowded Haitian Slum. The article describes how a top Embassy official agreed with private sector leaders like Reginald Boulos, who now holds influence over Haiti’s reconstruction, that MINUSTAH should attack Cite Soleil knowing full well that innocent Haitians would be killed by the “peacekeepers” during the operation.

For more on the Port Salut abuses, there are these interviews I did with Democracy Now!, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and if you speak Spanish, this Uruguayan media outlet. The five soldiers accused of abusing Johnny Jean in the video are reported to have been jailed in Uruguay pending sentencing. 17-year-old Rose Mina Joseph, who was pregnant with a Uruguayan soldier’s child when this was published, gave birth to a healthy boy a few days ago. She told me yesterday she hasn’t been able to reach the father in Uruguay to tell him yet, but that when they last talked he said he’d seen an article about her.

Amnesty International issued an action alert that you can participate in about the eviction threat to Camp Mosaic, which I reported on a few weeks ago. And this interview with Dr. Renaud Piarroux about cholera and its origins in Haiti is well worth reading.

Finally, I’d like to shout out this heartfelt and insightful reflection from Sebastian Walker, Al Jazeera’s post-quake Haiti correspondent (check out his new film), especially this part: “I would have liked to stay in Haiti forever. If you spend any significant time there, you will believe, as I did, that Haiti deserves to be on the front page of every newspaper, every single day. It is a permanent, urgent and unjustified humanitarian tragedy.”

I feel the same way.  To me, it’s not just the humanitarian tragedy that makes Haiti worthy of front page coverage every day, but the extraordinary way that tragedy is politically and internationally maintained.  There are stark political choices (some examples) that keep Haiti mired in this state which implicate a wide range of powerful groups in Haiti and across the globe.  Sebastian’s team did a great job of exposing many of them while listening to and projecting the voices of ordinary Haitians.

This contrasts with some recently sloppy reporting by the Associated Press.  An anti-MINUSTAH protest march last Wednesday was completely peaceful from the start, when it was confronted by MINUSTAH soldiers in a jeep, very nearly until it reached its destination in Chanmas. When the march arrived near the palace, Haitian police immediately began launching tear gas canisters, to which the protesters responded by throwing rocks.  This can be observed in a video I produced.

The Associated Press team was not present at that time, to my knowledge.  I saw them walking down towards the protests hours later, after many of the demonstrators had left and only a small band of rock-throwers remained.  But the AP wrote that protesters had “fled into” the camps in Chanmas (they may have since improved the language from the original article), which I did not observe (one resident of the tent camp told me he did not blame the protesters for the tear gas).  The AP did not even mention the peaceful march.  And today, another AP article reduces all recent anti-UN protests in Haiti to “rock-throwing.”  I already pointed out some serious flaws in their initial reporting on the Port Salut abuses.

They should do better. Update: One of the AP’s photographers may have been present as the march itself reached Chanmas.

Or is living with swarms of mosquitoes and an overpowering stench in the area an acceptable level of suffering for Haitians? They’re resilient people, after all.

Interviewed in the video is Dantes Eseck, whose house is directly across from the UN peacekeeping base (there are two different bases) in Port Salut. His house is visible on the left at the 16 second mark. He’s a painter and his wife is a teacher. I wasn’t able to show in the video, but the manhole seen at the beginning is one of several spaced out evenly with connecting pipes along a dirt road leading to the base, and not further.

Check out this photo gallery to get a better view.

I had to look up anophele and filariasis. And please forgive my rough translation of Dantes, though it’s essentially accurate.

Below is a MINUSTAH spokeswoman’s official response. Here is the UN’s response in New York.

II. WASTE MANAGMENT SYSTEM

Whenever there is a technical problem related to sanitation and waste management issues, being in Port Salut or in other areas of Haiti, MINUSTAH discusses them with the local authorities, with whom it coordinates all necessary efforts in order to solve it and keep improving the sanitation and waste management system. Important surveillance measures also exist and inspection teams are regularly dispatched to the field to monitor/test the waste and sanitation systems.

MINUSTAH is not the only player in this chain of waste management. There are several other actors, including the companies in charge of garbage, waste collection, the local authorities, the state of infrastructures in the country as well as the riverine population.

MINUSTAH is currently in the process of installing water treatment plants in its bases, in order to be fully independent in the whole chain of waste management and be able to control the process for A to Z.

More interesting is how the video was initially obtained, through what local activist Ernso Valentin called, “the strategy of the population.” Yesterday evening I found the two young men who, by all accounts, swiped the video from a soldier’s phone. They explained to me what happened – about a week after July 18, they said, the date of the assault. It all started with an upbeat, pulsating Spanish song (which I stupidly mistook for Konpas at first).

21-year-old Viaud Fegens on the right, with his 18-year-old friend Leveille Jean-Michel, whose phone swiped the video.

Viaud Fegens: “Me and Jean-Michel were passing by the base. A soldier named Leo called out to us. I went and sat down and he to put the music on his telephone.”

Leveille Jean-Michel: “We were listening to some music and he liked it.”

VF: “We’ve passed by the base before playing Spanish music. This time, he liked it. He asked me to put it on his phone and he gave me his phone. So I went into his phone to see if it had cool things or nice videos on it. I took his phone, and I’m looking inside to see what it has on it. Then, I came upon the video! When I saw the video, I said [to Jean Michel], ‘Hey look at this!’ The soldier went to sit down. So we’re looking at the phone, and we see the video. I said, ‘Look, that’s my cousin. My cousin, Johnny.’ I’m looking at it and I see what they did. I said, ‘Oh mezami [roughly translates to holy crap]!’ I transmitted the video via Bluetooth onto this phone. I said, ‘Go give him his phone.’ So then I have the video, I’m watching it again, and it’s dominating me. It’s giving me problems [in my head]. So then later, we had a meeting across from the Commiseriat. MINUSTAH was there. We talked about everything bad that MINUSTAH does in Port Salut. They’re dumping their trash in aviation… Now when we come to the subject of what they did to Johnny, they said they don’t believe it happened. Then we showed them the proof. The MINUSTAH chief saw the video, and he’s shocked! He sweats!”

LJM: “He’s afraid. He’s afraid.”

VF: “There were three of them. The deputy was there too. He asked us to transmit it by Bluetooth for him. We did it. He looks again, he watches again, and he’s shocked, sweating.”

LJM: “It was weighing on me since I saw that. I was shocked when I was seeing it, it made me feel terrible. They committed the act but they didn’t want people outside to know about it. Yes, I thought it was rape. Because he’s yelling, ‘Help!’”"

VF: “He’s saying, “Problem, problem, that he’s in a problem.” And they pulled down his pants. The video is proof. Because when they saw it, they could see what the soldiers did. Everyone who sees this video can see what happens. I heard about the protest tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll attend. But MINUSTAH represents a force in the country. It’s MINUSTAH that helped created a situation where we don’t have war or gunfire. They gave us some calm. But they violated a young man, they’re dumping trash, [AH: didn't understand this part]… this isn’t good. We didn’t have these things in our country. It’s them who gave us cholera. We never had these things before.”

Viaud’s mother is worried. “Are they going to be ok? I’m scared. Will something happen to them?” she kept asking me. I left my number and tried to assure her that nothing bad would happen.

Update 9/16/11: After removing the photo and the boys names on the advice of some commenters, I’ve just restored them. I’m in touch with the boys and they want recognition for what they did. Viaud specifically asked that his photo and name be included. His mother never objected.

Klein spells out the definition of shock doctrine: using shocking situations to push through legislation that would not be passed under normal circumstances. The shock doctrine is, as she states, a “democracy-avoidance strategy.”

- Naomi Klein lecture at Berkeley, 2009

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: ECON EFIN EIND ECPS ENRG ETRD PGOV HA
SUBJECT: HAITI: PRIVATIZATION UPDATE

…

Despite assurances that privatization is a still a priority for the government, as elections draw nearer we are increasingly skeptical that privatization, in whatever form, will happen under the watch of the IGOH. Time is running out and we are not convinced that the IGOH has the technical capacity nor political will to carry out even one privatization prior to turning over power to an elected government. We will continue to advocate strongly on behalf of privatization and/or private management. Post repeats its recommendation in reftels that privatization be a requirement under future agreements with the IFIs, including an IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) to be negotiated with the new government. Indeed we believe that the only reason that the audits will eventually be completed is because it is a requirement of the World Bank program.

- US Ambassador to Haiti James Foley, Aug. 25, 2005

IGOH refers to Interim Government of Haiti, the unelected government installed after a US-backed coup ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.

Update: Thanks to WikiLeaks for tweeting this! I should add that this “shock doctrine in action” cable pairs nicely with this “disaster capitalism in full effect” one that we flagged earlier this summer, in which the US Ambassador described a post-earthquake “gold rush” for reconstruction contracts.

If you’re a new visitor, check out more WikiLeaks Haiti content here and here, and consider donating to the venerable shoe-string budget Haitian newspaper Haiti Liberte, without which the effort to comb through and analyze these cables would have not been possible.

I spoke to some Haitians in displacement camps – living there since about the time of January 12, 2010 earthquake – about President Michel Martelly’s first 100 days in office. They voice their perspectives in this story for Free Speech Radio News broadcast on Friday:

Download the MP3. You can also hear an archived interview with me about Haiti and WikiLeaks from KOOP Radio’s People United program here – my part starts at the 37 minute mark.

Camp kids playing Mortal Kombat

Also, the last time I spoke to K*’s mom, she didn’t appear to hold any ill will towards McClelland. She asked me to say hi to her for me. But maybe that was just on the surface and she was being polite. She did mention to me that she and her daughter were bothered by how McClelland didn’t talk to them much and was constantly typing into her phone (presumably, live-tweeting). That, on top of the revelation that McClelland ignored K*’s handwritten letter, makes me retract my statement that I believe McClelland treated K* with respect during their time together in Haiti. I don’t know.

I still don’t think it’s productive to make McClelland into “something of a scapegoat,” as Gina Athena Ulysse puts it in this thoughtful post for Ms. Magazine, without calling attention to the larger problems around foreign media coverage of Haiti and potential ways to address them.

–

I hesitate to write this post. There are more important things going on. Haiti is in crisis yet again, with resurgent cholera claiming more victims every day. Read Dr. John Carroll’s blog to get a sense of the terrible situation on the ground. A new study adds yet more evidence that UN peacekeepers are the source of the outbreak. “STUDY SAYS UN GAVE HAITI CHOLERA” should be a banner headline all over the place, but it isn’t.

Instead, there’s been a lot of discussion, a furor even, about Mac McClelland’s essay in GOOD magazine, called “How Violent Sex Eased My PTSD.” It prompted multiple days of furious tweeting by American journalists who have worked in Haiti. Some of them, all women, even got together with other Haiti activists and writers to pen an open letter condemning the piece. Several wrote passionate comments arguing with an Atlantic Wire post that defended McClelland.

They charge that McClelland callously and recklessly used Haiti as scene-setter for her own story. She referred to Haiti’s “ugly chaos,” its “gang-raping monsters,” and described the country as if there are guns everywhere. McClelland was only in Haiti for a few weeks, parachuting in and out, and doesn’t know or care enough to represent the full humanity of the Haitian people. It’s sensationalist, inaccurate, irresponsible, and perpetuating of stereotypes or racist tropes, they say. This is about harmful journalistic malpractice.

I disagree. The essay was about her own experience of trauma and recovery. It was published on National PTSD Day. That’s what the headline, the vast bulk of the text, and I suspect most readers were all focused on. She related those elements of Haiti that contributed to her trauma. It’s also hard to dispute that 1) the perpetrators of gang rapes in camps, of which there have been many, are monstrous individuals, 2) there was chaos, whether it was in aid distributions or extrajudicial killings, after the quake, and 3) there are a lot more guns visible on Port-au-Prince’s streets than on your average street in the US. Obviously, that’s only one side of Haiti. I would have been careful to write it differently. But in her actual reporting on Haiti, including a long feature article and several blog posts for Mother Jones, there is a more balanced and in-depth portrayal of the country.

I’m self-aware enough to admit that my point of view on this may be influenced by the fact that I did freelance work with/for McClelland while she was in Haiti. I also met “Sybille,” the Haitian rape survivor mentioned in the piece, and I believe McClelland treated her with respect.

I also believe much of the criticism towards McClelland comes from a genuine, heartfelt place.

What I find contemptible, however, is a pack of buddy-buddies who whip themselves into a fervor of highly selective outrage. Who then go about slamming an individual who isn’t part of their club, which itself behaves irresponsibly and harms Haiti with regularity. Journalistic malpractice is a feature of foreign reporting on Haiti. It has been doing tremendous harm to the country for some time. But for some peculiar reason, this is the first instance in which the current crop of Haiti journalists have seen fit to collectively draw any attention to that damning reality, and they act as if McClelland’s piece is an especially egregious example. Let me assure you, it isn’t.

I posed the question on Twitter yesterday: Where were @amywilentz @damiencave @katzonearth et al when a Newsweek reporter published this utter crap? Last year, a senior staff Newsweek reporter parachuted into Haiti and wrote a bona-fide “Haiti as scary land of savages” first-person account billed as a serious report about Haiti. I wrote a call to action about it and someone created a petition to Newsweek’s editors that attracted 167 signatures. That writer indisputably did everything McClelland’s critics say she did, to a worse degree. There should have been serious consequences for that guy and his career, which would have sent a message to others. There weren’t.

Journalists, with a few small exceptions, were silent. Amy Wilentz, the grande dame of foreign journalists writing on Haiti, replied to my tweet yesterday and said she hadn’t seen the piece at the time (she agreed that it was horrendous).

What about CNN, CBS and others hyping up fears of violence after the quake, at a time when the world’s attention was on Haiti? Did that escape notice too?

What about the gaggles of photojournalists and TV crews parachuted into Haiti once more when cholera broke out, then intruded on patient wards to take images of desperately sick patients without permission from them or doctors? Doctors Without Borders, medics, and a thoughtful student photojournalist spoke out against it. Established peer journalists did not add their voice.

What about when Anderson Cooper flew in to accept an award, professed his love for Haiti and said “it was recognition by the country for all journalists,” in a revolting self-congratulatory ceremony across from a tent camp put on by the Haitian leadership and its international partners, on the quake’s six-month anniversary? He should have been roundly condemned for participating. To my knowledge, Cooper hasn’t been back to Haiti since.

Or what about when the New York Times profiled Sean Penn and his work in Haiti while completely erasing Haitians from the story?

There’s also the constant harm done to Haiti by newspaper and wire reporting that generally hews to an establishment political line. Allyn Gaestel, who signed the open letter criticizing McClelland, conflated an ousted dictator with a former elected president for the L.A. Times. Alice Speri, another signer, wrote a poor piece for AFP which said Aristide “fled” Haiti in 2004 into exile in South Africa. The AP and Reuters regularly write that Aristide was ousted by a “rebellion,” not a coup, effectively choosing their own version of history. When I told a wire reporter he should report on insider OAS diplomat Ricardo Seitenfus’ harsh remarks last fall criticizing the international community, not completely ignore them, he told me not to tell him how to do his job. And on and on and on.

One of McClelland’s critics, Marjorie Valbrun, headlined her missive, “Why Are People Most Interested in a Story About Haiti When It Has a White Protagonist?” I agree this is a problem. In fact, it’s exactly how the entire US media has treated former President Bill Clinton’s involvement in Haiti from day one. Not as something to be thoroughly interrogated, or balanced or countered with the voices of Haitian leaders. Whenever he deigns to show up in Haiti, the American mainstream press dutifully follows him and practically regurgitates his latest talking points. Clinton is the focal point of the story. Esquire Magazine did the worst in this regard, calling him “Haiti’s CEO” in a piece last summer and running a “Haiti is so scary” piece alongside it from a journalist who was afraid to leave his Port-au-Prince hotel. Again, collectively, there was silence from the folks who are oh-so-disappointed now in McClelland.

I can only speculate as to why McClelland’s GOOD magazine piece, of all things, prompted the latest outcry. But if I had to guess, I’d say it has to do with a few things: She doesn’t conform to mainstream reporters’ pretense that they are omniscient, objective observers. She unabashedly includes herself in strong, forcefully written stories. She writes for a left-wing magazine, not a prestigious mainstream outlet. This piece details her own non-conformance to sexual mores, and that probably raised some folks’ discomfort level before they even got to the Haiti part. All of this sets her far enough apart from them that they’ll publicly criticize her.

Do they want McClelland to apologize? Do they want the GOOD editors to retract the article? There are no concrete requests, only repetitive denunciations. The open letter says, “While we are glad that Ms. McClelland has achieved a sort of peace within, we would encourage her, next time, not to make Haiti a casualty of the process.”

Haiti became a casualty of the foreign corporate press’ irresponsibility and racism a long time ago (see here), as the letter-writers should well know. I challenge all of McClelland’s critics, the letter-writers and journalists, many of whom I consider friends, to acknowledge that and stop making McClelland into the fall person for it. If they want to be taken seriously, they should join in building a system of accountability around media coverage of Haiti, individually and institutionally, until Haiti is revived.

Taken together, they portray the United States as intractably, almost obsessively occupied with marginalizing Aristide and Lavalas, and making sure other nations fall in line. The French government conspired with the US to make his return near-impossible, discussing how to make the logistics of a return flight more difficult and making plain to S. Africa that he must be kept there. There’s also the news that in 2008 current President Rene Preval was trying “co-opt” the Fanmi Lavalas party into his ruling coalition and was flatly opposed to Aristide even being in the hemisphere. Below, a round-up of key passages from the cables…

Four days before Aristide was flown out of the country, the Dominican Ambassador to Haiti said he was “worried” about chaos in the North and but that Aristide was “very clever” and did not ask the Dominicans for any help or the use of a helicopter.

In October 2004, a confidante of the Bahamas Prime Minister said the United States owed the leader “a call from senior USG officials, or the White House, advising him ‘when the United States decided to change direction on Aristide’ and ‘remove him from power.’”

In November 2004, nine months after the coup, Dominican President Lionel Fernandez gave a speech in front of other regional leaders in which he said Aristide commanded “great popular support” within Haiti and called for his inclusion in the country’s democratic future. The US was shocked and outraged, commenting, “The Aristide comment appeared to come out of nowhere. Fernandez had not previously discussed Aristide by name in conversations with us, or with our French and Canadian counterparts…Perhaps the greatest surprise for us was the palace’s presumption that there would be no downside.

On November 6, during a pull-aside at a social event, the Ambassador admonished Fernandez that his reference to Aristide was a serious mistake, one that had the potential of further inflaming a situation already dangerous for the Haitian people and for the international peacekeeping force. Fernandez replied that given popular support for Lavalas, it would have to be part of the situation. The Ambassador was direct: Aristide had led a violent gang involved in narcotics trafficking and had squandered any credibility he formerly may have had. “Nobody has given me any information about that,” Fernandez replied. The Ambassador insisted that no supporter of human rights and democracy could in good conscience allow Aristide and his close supporters back into the situation in Haiti. Fernandez listened and eventually agreed to distinguish between Aristide and Lavalas. He asked for any information on Aristide that the United States might be able to share with him.

Two months later, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela told the US Ambassador there “he believes the USG is wrong on Haiti: “There is no long term solution that does not involve Aristide in some way.” Yesterday during his airport arrival, the Venezuelan Ambassador was the only foreign ambassador present with Aristide.

That same month, Jan. 2005, France and the United States discussed how to keep Aristide from returning home, planning to warn off Caribbean countries and tell S. Africa he must not be allowed to return “under the pretext” that it would hurt their chance for a UN Security Counci seatl:

Bienvenu later offered to express our shared concerns in Pretoria, perhaps under the pretext that as a country desiring to secure a seat on the UN Security Council, South Africa could not afford to be involved in any way with the destabilization of another country.. . .2. (S) Bienvenu speculated on exactly how Aristide might return, seeing a possible opportunity to hinder him in the logistics of reaching Haiti. If Aristide traveled commercially, Bienvenu reasoned, he would likely need to transit certain countries in order to reach Haiti. Bienvenu suggested a demarche to CARICOM countries by the U.S. and EU to warn them against facilitating any travel or other plans Aristide might have. . .Both Bienvenu and Barbier confided that South African mercenaries could be heading towards Haiti, with Bienvenu revealing the GOF had documented evidence that 10 South African citizens had come to Paris and requested Dominican visas between February and the present.

And seven months later, a South African official told the French that its government “would not support any effort by Aristide to return…Ntshinga told the French that he would share the French concern about Aristide´s activities with the National Intelligence Agency and ensure that President Mbeki was also informed.”

In August 2005, the Jamaican Labor Minister was chastised for describing Aristide “as a friend in need” after the coup. He said Washington was overreacting. Jamaica allowed him to pass through the country on his way into exile, and had offered the Aristides the option to stay there for a few weeks “for family reasons,” but on the condition that Aristide “keep a low profile” and refrain from making public statements. He stressed Jamaica wasn’t taking an adversarial position to the United States, but was “reminded that the [Jamaican government] acted unhelpfully” during the coup and its aftermath by the Imperial Squire Ambassador.

In the fall of 2008, as rumors swirled that Aristide might leave S. Africa for Venezuela, Haitian President Rene Preval met with the US Ambassador:

President Rene Preval made reference to these rumors, telling the Ambassador that he did not want Aristide “anywhere in the hemisphere.” Subsequent to that, he remarked that he is concerned that Aristide will accept the Chavez offer but deflected any discussion of whether Preval himself was prepared to raise the matter with Chavez.

There is also further in-depth commentary on Fanmi Lavalas, Aristide’s party, with various members (including Yves Cristalin, a presidential candidate in this election who claimed to represent Lavalas) informing the Embassy on what’s happening behind the scenes. Meanwhile Preval, the cable says, was trying to co-opt the party into his political coalition. I quote at length for close observers of Haitian politics:

Despite his disagreements with Aristide, Cristalin said he feels compelled to keep his opposition to Aristide´s return private due to the considerable support for the former President among many segments of the population. [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] echoed these sentiments in his October 1 meeting with Poloff, noting that he shared Cristalin´s belief that the Executive Committee appointed by Aristide was illegitimate. Like Cristalin, he made an impassioned plea for U.S. assistance so that factions of the party willing to renounce violent demonstrations and forego illicit financing would prevail against other factions of the party.

Embassy sources tell us that President Preval is also actively working to co-opt popular groups affiliated with Lavalas to shore up his support..[TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] told Poloff on September 19 that Preval met “at least weekly” with the leaders of the “Reflection Cell,” including Jean-Marie Samdy, at the National Palace and that Preval had promised the group HTG 58 million (approximately USD 1.5 million) in funds from the PetroCaribe account to distribute to parents in poor neighborhoods for the beginning of the school year in early October. [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] provided a more plausible account of the agreement, saying that the Education Ministry had agreed to task Lavalas-affiliated “popular organizations” to identify needy families in poor neighborhoods, and that the Ministry would then pay their school fees directly to the school concerned.

Although Aristide is nominally the “National Representative” of Fanmi Lavalas, the party has essentially been leaderless since Aristide left Haiti in 2004, and any attempt to reassert control over Lavalas would be fiercely opposed (albeit privately) by one or another group within the party. From South Africa, Aristide has been either unable or unwilling to resolve disputes within his party or mobilize popular support for Lavalas.

Factions in the party have their reasons for opposing or supporting a greater political role for Aristide in Haiti and in the party. On one side of the divide are elected officials and former government officials who want to unify feuding groups into a disciplined party organization and have the leadership elected by and accountable to the party in Haiti rather than to Aristide. These individuals resent Aristide´s interventions in party matters from afar, and are critical of Aristide´s conduct during his two terms in office. On the other side lie leaders linked to popular organizations who hope that Aristide´s greater proximity will help them revive grassroots militancy, which would then propel them to positions of prominence.

The others cables: The Vatican agreed with the Embassy that Aristide shouldn’t return after the earthquake and said it would communicate that to him. The Dominican Republic was concerned about mass migration of Haitians and Bahamas not optimistic about a peaceful resolution without outside intervention during the last days of the 2004 crisis.