Update 7/9: Before I wrote the post below, I contacted McClelland asking whether Sybille/K* had given consent for her story to be used the way it was in her GOOD magazine piece. She responded with an explanation (she asked that it stay off-record) that does not seem to have been the full story, based on what Edwidge Danticat has written here. It’s disappointing. And it means she did commit journalistic malpractice (in a different way than the letter-writers had alleged).

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.

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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. Read More…

Not long after former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide landed in Haiti yesterday, ending an exile begun in 2004 by a US-backed coup d’etat, Kristoffer Rønneberg at the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten posted online 13 new private diplomatic cables from the US government relating to Aristide and Haiti, from the Wikileaks Cablegate set.

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… Read More…

Disclaimer: I write bland headlines. But hopefully you’ll find the post itself worth your while. I’ll add links tomorrow. It’s late and I need to get home!

“President Rene Preval made reference to these rumors, telling the Ambassador that he did not want Aristide ‘anywhere in the hemisphere.’” That was in 2008, according to a secret American cable from the Wikileaks cache released today, when rumors swirled about Preval’s predecessor, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his possible passage to Venezuela.

The rumors, which began circulating again with ever-stronger intensity in the past month, finally were put to rest today.

Aristide ended a seven-year-long exile. He arrived in Haiti by private plane, gave a heartwarming speech about love and exclusion in four languages including Zulu, and headed to his mansion with his family amidst a jostling crowd of overjoyed supporters that stretched down the road surrounding his convoy.

A single smoke bomb to disperse the crowd? Nothing doing. People promptly gave each other lifts over the Aristide compounds’s newly-cleaned 13-foot-high walls. A middle-aged guy boosted me up and I clambered over.

We waited for Aristide to emerge again, some eating mangos off trees and lounging about the pool to bide their time, but he stayed inside. He’ll probably have more to say soon. When he does, many will listen, much to chagrin of his detractors, who say he tolerated corruption and violent crimes as President.

One of them is a certain Michel Martelly, a leading presidential candidate in Sunday’s runoff election, who can be seen strutting about a nightclub in a video posted on YouTube recently, saying “I would kill Aristide to stick a dick up your ass” and calling Aristide supporters “faggots.”

Martelly has been drawing huge crowds and many presume he’s handily winning the race against a less aggressive right-wing rival. But today I heard a young man remark that he’s “falling in shit.” I stifled a laugh (and a cough, as we marched through the dusty, trash-strewn streets along Aristide’s convoy).

Longtime Haitian political observer Patrick Elie, who served in the governments of Aristide and Preval, was a bit more nuanced: “These elections are going to give a president who has no legitimacy and who will be the puppet of the international community, especially now with the reconstruction.” Read More…

An October 2008 cable just released by Wikileaks called “Why We Need A Continuing MINUSTAH Presence in Haiti” recommends MINUSTAH’s presence continue until at least 2013. The US pays one fourth of its budget. Some notable passages:

A premature departure of MINUSTAH would leave the Preval government or his successor vulnerable to resurgent kidnapping and international drug trafficking, revived gangs, greater political violence, an exodus of seaborne migrants, a sharp drop in foreign and domestic investment, and resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces – reversing gains of the last two years.

The fundamental USG policy goal in Haiti is to make it a viable state that does not post a threat to the region through domestic political turmoil or an exodus of illegal migrants. To reach that point, Haiti must be able to assure its own domestic security, govern itself with stable democratic institutions, and create a business climate that will get the economy moving. Haiti has made progress but is still a long way from these goals. The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is the largest and most effective external institution pursuing them.

We must be sensitive to Latin fears that any Haitian opposition to the UN presence undermines their domestic support for deployments in Haiti. During the April riots, the Brazilian MINUSTAH Force Commander told Ambassador and others that his greatest fear was that his troops would be forced to fire on demonstrators. He understood that this could ignite opposition in Haiti, Brazil, and other contributing countries to his troops’ presence in Haiti.

Read up on the other Haiti-related disclosures in Wikileaks cables here.

Below, an edited September 2010 interview with Dr. Matthew J. Smith, historian at Jamaica’s University of the West Indies, Mona and author of Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 – the first comprehensive history of the post-occupation era, arguing that “the period (from 1934 until the rise of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier to the presidency in 1957) constituted modern Haiti’s greatest moment of political promise.”

I ordered the award-winning book just in time for it to be delivered before my plane left for Haiti in September of ’09. It goes a long way towards explaining why the Duvaliers rose and clung to power for so long; I can’t recommend it highly enough. I hope other American reporters have read the book as well so we can see start to see some desperately-needed decent journalism on Haiti in the establishment media. As Gina Athena Ulysse says, “Yes, we are poor and have a history of political strife, but it’s not innate. And hell no, it’s not because we are mostly black. We are not reducible to our conditions.”

What caused you to write Red & Black in Haiti? What kind of response did it generate – both within and outside in Haiti?

Growing up in Jamaica, I had seen how intense political rivalries create dangerous problems and in many instances lead to violent solutions. I wanted to find out to what extent this history was matched in Haiti, a country which I have always considered to be incredibly similar to Jamaica. An earlier generation of scholars, such as David Nicholls, Michel Hector, and J. Michael Dash had indicated in their work that the tension between Marxists and Black Nationalists in Haiti was a defining feature of the 1930s-1950s. This intrigued me and encouraged me to go further and explore this tension.

The two decades before Duvalier were very transformative for Haiti in terms of politics, but in a much larger sense in terms of culture and history. So much happened in the postoccupation period that deserved careful attention. It was really the beginning of a modern political era in Haiti, one that was defined by an increase in popular politicization.

Yet it had not been given the attention it deserved. The possibility of great positive change seemed very real in this period and Haiti could very well have evolved differently as a result. I also wanted to write a political history of Haiti that did not reduce Haitian politics to a series of failures but to give it rigorous and fair-minded assessment and to show that the radical generation of that era had invested a great deal in improving the welfare of their country. Read More…

Dominican President Leonel Fernandez told State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Patrick Duddy in January of 2006, according to a cable released by Norway’s largest newspaper, that he suspects Brazilian MINUSTAH military commander Urano Bacellar was assassinated by a paramilitary-type group, possibly led by Guy Phillippe. Fernandez said he believes Bacellar did not commit suicide and there had been a cover-up.

Fernandez inquired about the circumstances surrounding the death of Brazilian Army General Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar. DAS Duddy confirmed that all indications pointed to suicide. Fernandez expressed skepticism. He had met General Bacellar; to him, suicide seemed unlikely for a professional of Bacellar´s caliber. Fernandez said he believes that there is a small group in Haiti dedicated to disrupting the elections and creating chaos; that this group had killed MINUSTAH members in the past (a Canadian and a Jordanian, and now the Brazilian General); and that there would be more violence against MINUSTAH forces as the election date approaches. The President said he knew of a case in which a Brazilian MINUSTAH member had killed a sniper. Although he allowed that Bacellar´s death might be due to an accidentally self-inflicted wound, he believes that the Brazilian government is calling the death a suicide in order to protect the mission from domestic criticism. A confirmed assassination would result in calls from the Brazilian populace for withdrawal from Haiti. Success in this mission is vital for President Lula of Brazil, because it is part of his master plan to obtain a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

(SBU) DAS Duddy restated his understanding that the evidence pointed to suicide and that the specific circumstances of the other assassinations in all likelihood ruled out a conspiracy. (S) Fernandez elaborated further on his hypothesis: there was a cover-up of an assassination and that more attacks would occur. He was firm in this view and repeated the warning. (S) The Ambassador asked who might be behind such an attack. Fernandez said he did not know. He commented that in the case of the demonstrations against his visit to Port au Prince in December 2005, Haitian activist Guy Philippe had organized the effort. Fernandez said that Philippe had people working for him inside the National Palace.

Fernandez´s Visit to Haiti
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(U) DAS Duddy praised Fernandez on his handling of the aftermath of the Port au Prince demonstrations. (SBU) Fernandez retrieved from his desk a book of photos from the visit. He described his visit to the National Palace in Port au Prince: the growing crowd, his uneasiness, the lack of security, the “ambush” of his motorcade as they were leaving, machine gun fire, and the role of Dominican helicopters and MINUSTAH troops in rescuing the motorcade. (S) He said that entities within Haiti had killed MINUSTAH troops via sniper attack on previous occasions, and he believed they would do so again. Their goal was chaos. “Imagine,” he said, “the chaos that would have resulted if they had killed me in Haiti. There would have been wholesale persecution of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.” For this reason he had downplayed the incident to the press, but the truth was that it had been very serious.

Read up on the other Haiti-related disclosures in Wikileaks cables here.

There are a fair number of narrative reflections by journalists on Haiti’s past year, probably the most moving by the Associated Press’ Jonathan Katz. Of course none of them can be totally comprehensive in covering the past year’s events, tracking promises and pledges, and showing what has changed. Neither is the Flash timeline below, to which I’m still adding posts. But I do think it’s useful as a visual overview of the past year’s ups and downs (mostly downs) and a way to zoom in and out (click on the plus icons along the bottom) on specific months to recall what claims and progress were made at various moments.

For me, something that stands out is the number of times the UN indicates an understanding of humanitarian failures but seemingly ignores suggestions from others on how to do better – for example, that it do a better job of including Haitians and civil society in decision-making.

 
Let me know in the comments if there are any big events or statistics you think are missing.