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.

Just a few comments: I don’t think it’s all that productive to curse at the cops. I tried to be an observer – I wasn’t saying anything or holding a sign, and I complied with all police orders. Some protesters did not immediately clear the intersection once the order to disperse was given. But when the police advanced in formation with pepper spray, protesters did peacefully clear the intersection.

For all their hyperbole, the guys yelling at the cops were accurate in pointing out that people were, at that point, standing on the sidewalk. When one protester seemed to puff his chest out, face-to-face with a cop, they grabbed him behind their police line and seemed to pile on top of him. As I tried to get it on camera, I was hit with a blast of pepper spray directly to the face. I saw it as it reached my eyes.

The protesters were well organized in helping me wash my eyes out (I feel they should have been better organized in communicating the objective of occupying the intersection to the public, but if anyone forgets what this is all about, see here.). I wandered in a daze over to the “triage” area, where my eyes were doused a few more times, providing fleeting relief from the pain. But I couldn’t see much of anything and my whole upper body felt like it was on fire for a good 40 minutes, with a recurrence earlier this evening. Not my best look.

I hate to imagine the suffering that this 84-year-old woman went through after being sprayed. SPD’s use of pepper spray tonight was reckless and unnecessary and it surely has the effect, whether intentionally or not, of intimidating people from joining or even being near the Occupy movement.

Seattle, I’ve missed you.

Update 11/17: A couple things to add here. The NYT Lede blog posted this video in a round-up of Occupy news with the following observation. I think they’re right.

The police spokesman’s account said: “At one point a 17-year-old female suspect swung a stick at an officer but failed to strike him. As officers moved in to arrest the female suspect the officers were hindered in their efforts. Officers deployed pepper spray to move subjects away from them so they could affect the arrest of the female suspect.”

It seems possible that the protester seized by police officers and hurled to the ground in Mr. Herz’s video might have been a young woman wearing a hooded sweatshirt, rather than a man. If that is the arrest described in the police statement, the footage does not support the written account, since there was no sign of anyone swinging a stick, and the initial volley of pepper spray was fired well before the police moved to take that person into custody.

Whatever the motivation, it is hard not to be struck by the sheer volume of pepper spray used by the Seattle police officers.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn issued a statement after the photo of the incredible 84-year-old Dorli Rainey went viral. “To those engaged in peaceful protest, I am sorry that you were pepper sprayed.”

Still smarting from the pepper spray, I engaged police officers, including a Sergeant, in conversations later Tuesday night. I told them I had essentially been assaulted while obeying police orders and exercising my rights. They had failed to do their jobs. The officers were polite – one even offered me some chocolates – but none of them apologized or admitted any fault at the time.

The KOMO radio host who interviewed me on Wednesday has egg on his face, after telling me that Seattle police have acted with the utmost professionalism and respect towards the protesters. And this KING 5 journalist’s report from that night is atrocious. He unabashedly took the police side and demonized all protesters as unruly and antagonistic. The reporter went on to say, “All demonstrations come at a price.” That sounds completely un-American to me.

Finally, here’s a quick interview a protester filmed with me right after I was sprayed in the face, in case there were any doubts about what happened. Again, not my best look.

When I find some time I will be contacting the police and my city council members to file a complaint, as well as attending future Occupy events.

Interviewing folks living under old tents shredded by wind and rain days as Hurricane Tomas approached Haiti in Nov. 2010

I’ve taken a reporting/blogging position in Seattle, my hometown, with the very cool Common Language Project. It’s a move I’ve been planning for a while.

“Ou poko ap vini?” “M poko konnen ki lè m ka vini anko non.”

That is to say, I don’t know when I can visit again or return. I am hoping it can be soon.

Upon learning of my imminent departure, another foreigner asked if I wasn’t going to have a “going away party.” The thought hadn’t occurred to me. My “party” turned out to be eating tonm tonm and diri sos pwa on a Sunday afternoon with a friend and her kids (and a “pi red blan”). Good times.

I’m going to miss Haiti.

I’ll miss folks yelling “blan,” “blanco,” “mon blan,” and “hey you,” at me in the street. I’ll miss the ability to instantly surprise and delight them by responding in their language (a beautiful one, and I don’t mean French).

I’ll miss Haitian cuisine, which kicks American food’s ass any day of the week. I’ll especially miss lam veritab, pate, mangos, zabokas, diri sos pwa, lalou and Malta H. Haiti’s bananas are better than American bananas too.

I’ll miss the near-total lack of enforced traffic laws and zooming about on a Chinese motorcycle. I won’t miss the traffic. And I won’t miss the shiny NGO-stickered sport utility vehicles and foreign military patrols that overpopulate the streets.

I’ll miss living in a football-crazy culture where everyone recognizes my soccer jerseys and interrogates me about my team loyalties.  I’ll miss slipping, sliding, and falling during gravel-strewn street games, trying to prove (with mixed success) that a ti blan kap jwe too.

I’ll miss widespread class consciousness and impassioned political discussions over lunch and in tap-taps. I dread integrating back into a far more depoliticized, ignorant, corporate media-saturated society – though maybe I’m being overly pessimistic.

I’ll miss walking home, feeling reflective, and being momentarily awed by the sheer strength and dignity of the Haitian people as they go about their business: laborers, machanns, students, drivers, police, etc.. I won’t miss the first question I often I received: Can you get me a job with an aid group?

I’ll miss being useful. My conscience (stricken with credible proposition that I’m betraying Haiti by leaving now) is a little bit eased knowing I broke some important stories professionally, and on a person-to-person level, I materially helped out various friends, neighbors, and strangers alike.

This list falls well short of being comprehensive.

I will miss Weed, Elizabeth, Mark, Feindy, Claudy, Esraie, Billy, Junior, Yvon, Nesly, Jonas, Lovely, Rose-Marie, Marie-Michel, Rose Mina, Johnny’s father, and others.

Nap wè.  I will be back, a harder, better, faster, stronger journalist. And I expect to keep writing about Haiti, from time to time, while lòt bò.

A demonstrator on Oct. 7 supporting Batay Ouvriye's unionisation campaign holds a sign that says, "Respect the rights of working people."

Published today by Inter-Press News Service:

PORT-AU-PRINCE (IPS) – Workers in Haiti’s apparel manufacturing sector charge that factory owners are repressing attempts to organise workers in the capital, after the dismissals of six of seven leading members of a new union within just two weeks of its formation.

The new union, Sendika Ouvriye Takstil ak Abiman (SOTA), is recognised by the Haitian government and supported by the Haitian union federation Batay Ouvriye, which organised the only other textile workers’ union in the country on the border with the Dominican Republic in 2006.

Judeline Pierre, a rail-thin 44-year-old mother who works at the Sonapi Industrial Park near Port-au-Prince’s airport, said she has been secretly attending union meetings organised by Batay Ouvriye for months.

In her bag, she carries a wrinkled, folded-up flyer calling for better conditions in the factories. She said she had to hide her involvement in the union, “because as soon as you start to assert your rights, they fire you. They’ve fired many operators for that.”

Textile factories in Port-au-Prince employ about 29,000 people, in a country of nine million with an estimated unemployment rate of 80 percent, according to the U.S. Embassy. The minimum wage is about five dollars per day, though some workers earn more by exceeding production quotas.

A handful of contractors run the factories, assembling and exporting duty-free garments for U.S. companies like Hanes and The Gap under the terms of a preferential U.S.-Haiti trade deal known as the HOPE programme.

Two Haitian factory owners, Charles Baker, whose factory fired one of the union-connected workers, and George Sassine, the head of the owners’ industry association and executive director of the HOPE programme, told IPS they were not opposed to unions in principle and that recent worker firings are justified.

“These incidents, they have nothing to do with people trying to form a union,” Sassine told IPS. “Now suddenly, the whole international community is on my back telling me I’m against people organising.”

Sassine said he believes Batay Ouvriye aims to completely shut down factories, rather than merely organise workers.

Haitian textile workers start sewing at early hours in Charles Baker's One World Apparel factory.

Stepping out of his air-conditioned office onto a buzzing, 1,640- worker-strong factory floor, Baker gestured around, “If they want to unionise, they can unionise. But they need to do it in the right way.” He said he fired a man handing out flyers during work hours and interrupting production.

Between the workers and the factory owners is Better Work Haiti, a nine-person team funded by the U.S. Department of Labour charged with monitoring labour conditions in Haiti’s textile factories. The group will issue a fact-finding report on the alleged firings of SOTA members next month.

Better Work Haiti’s third biannual report on compliance with International Labour Organisation standards was released two weeks ago. It found violations of some occupational health and safety and minimum wage regulations in over 80 percent of the factories, but in the four “core” labour standards, compliance rates are near perfect.

Richard Lavallée, Better Work Haiti’s director, said the factory owners “are fully engaged in the programme” and praised the steady improvements in compliance with core standards over the last two years.

The fourth core standard is the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. The latest report identifies just two instances of non-compliance, including a 12-day-long strike in May which resulted in the firings of 140 workers.

But the low non-compliance rate is potentially misleading. “Although no non-compliance findings are cited in the current report under Union Operations,” the report notes, there are “very significant challenges related to the rights of workers to freely form, join and participate in independent trade unions”.

“If you look at the reports, in Haiti there is only one unionised factory (in Ouanaminthe) out of 23 operating factories. In the factories in Port-au-Prince, there are no unions. We don’t have any evidence,” Lavallée said.

He explained that if a factory owner fires a person for trying to organise workers, it won’t be noted in the employee records reviewed by his team.

Asked if Better Work Haiti isn’t really measuring anything when it comes to conditions for labour organising, because there are almost no unions, Lavallée responded, “Exactly.”

Haitian union activists have continually complained of attempts to stifle union activity by factory owners, Lavallée said, but he hadn’t seen evidence and the activists had not provided names of dismissed workers until last month’s round of firings.

The expansion of the textile industry in Haiti has long been enshrined as a key plank of the country’s reconstruction and development plan. A U.S. Embassy spokesperson told IPS the industry has the potential to more than double in the next four years.

Officials say 20,000 jobs will be created by Korean garment manufacturing giant Sae-A, which inked a deal with the Haitian government last year to build an industrial park in northern Haiti.

The project’s funding by international donors, including 50 million dollars from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and 120 million dollars from the United States, was “not conditional on allowing unions to organise that space”, according to Canadian political scientist Yasmine Shamsie, who has studied Haiti’s textile industry.

“I’m very disappointed in the industry’s reaction to the new union,” Shamsie told IPS by email, referring to SOTA.

Her 2010 report for the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum called for a “high-road approach” to the Haitian apparel industry’s expansion, including unionising workers and providing welfare programmes to raise their living standards.

She said she didn’t understand the “lack of interest” in that strategy from international donors. “To be frank, it’s a no-brainer,” Shamsie said. “You say you want to create employment and reduce poverty – then give workers the tools to advocate for better than poverty wages.”

A study published last March by the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center found wages needed to be nine times higher for apparel industry workers to pay for basic living expenses. Senator Steven Benoit, who spearhead the last minimum wage increase in Haiti’s parliament, said wages need to raised again.

Sassine, the industry association president, told IPS a higher minimum wage would force factories to lay off workers and close down. Secret diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks show that Sassine and the U.S. Embassy worked together to oppose Benoit’s last attempt to raise the wages.

“President Martelly is talking about having a bunch of new textile factories coming to Haiti that will pay four dollars per day for 12 hours. This is slavery!” Benoit said, raising his voice during an interview in his Port-au-Prince office. “Nobody can live on five dollars per day on Earth in any country in the world. So this should be addressed, and I will address it again, before the year is over.”

Having worked there for two years, Judeline Pierre plans to quit her factory job and return to selling goods in street markets next year. Her family is worried about her health and she said she hasn’t earned enough to pay for her two children to attend school this year.

The long hours and intense, repetitive labour on sewing machines leaves her fatigued, she said, and her doctor recommended she find other work. Asked whether she can make more as a street merchant, she gave a wry smile and said, “It depends. But I’ll manage.”

In the late 1980s, Claudy Fevois, like Pierre, worked for three years at an apparel manufacturing factory near the Port-au-Prince airport. At the time, the industry employed about150,000 people, before the sector was devastated by political instability.

Now she sells breads from her neighbourhood’s local bakery. “(That work) can’t do anything for you,” she said, as she washed her children’s clothes by hand. “If I had been advancing in that job, I wouldn’t have quit after three years.”

---

Sidebar: Change, Or More of the Same? Last year, at a signing ceremony for the agreement to build the industrial park in northern Haiti, U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti and former U.S. president Bill Clinton spoke to IPS.

Asked how the development of Haiti’s textile industry today would be different from the 1980s, when the industry was at its height, he said the plan has changed.

“I think that what happened with Haiti in the 1980s is the same thing that happened, in a way, when the Marines were here from 1915 to 1933,” Clinton said. “Haiti was rocking along, nobody ever did anything to change the underlying reality of Haiti, to increase their capacity to govern themselves.

“And the same thing happened when they had a manufacturing boom in the 80s – it couldn’t be sustained because nothing ever happened inside Haiti. So this time what we’re trying to do is build the capacity of Haitians to govern themselves and also get back their natural resource space, their ability to grow their own food, their ability to grow trees again, to restore the land and their whole self-governance.

“It’s a very different thing now. This is a piece of a much broader strategy,” he said, before leaving the room.

“The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely to impose NECESSARY ILLUSIONS to manipulate and deceive [whom THEY believe are] the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena.” -Noam Chomsky

I once argued with an Associated Press reporter about whether his bureau does more to aid and comfort foreign power-brokers in Haiti, like those who work out of the massive US Embassy in Port-au-Prince, than to investigate and hold them accountable.  (I did not contend that every single AP report is slavish propaganda. They do some very good reporting at times.)

I said that the AP makes political choices to pay attention to certain stories and people, but not others (at the time, it was the remarks of Ricardo Seitenfus). On a few important issues, especially those surrounding former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his political party Fanmi Lavalas, its reporting often toes the line of the US government.

Distortions of the truth, regardless of their political slant, don’t serve the public well. Here’s an unfortunate example of exact convergence between propaganda from the AP and the US Embassy itself.

On Friday, at least a thousand people took to the streets in Cite Soleil to commemorate the bloody 1991 coup d’etat against Aristide. I’m being conservative when I say at least a thousand.

2011 Fanmi Lavalas demonstration. Far more than 200 people.

Trenton Daniel, the AP correspondent, appeared to arrive way late to the Cite Soleil march, after most of the marchers had gone home.  He reported: “Thousands of supporters greeted Aristide upon his return earlier this year, but a crowd of only about 200 people showed up for the rally.”

This is simply factually inaccurate.  The AP needs to make a correction. I’ve tweeted and emailed since Friday – no response.

But it also betrays poor editorial judgment.  As a friend pointed out:

What on earth compelled Trenton Daniel to compare the turnout at Aristide’s arrival after YEARS of exile in another continent with the possibility of seeing Aristide in person to a neighborhood-organized rally based around the commemoration of the 1991 coup?! That’s the real point here–even if there WERE only 200, how can that give anyone a meaningful indicator as to the dynamics of the movement, whether support is waning, etc.?! That’s an editorial decision to link those two events to each other, and is specious.

This is to say nothing of how the AP regularly describes Aristide as being ousted by a “rebellion,” rather than using language that at least acknowledges the well-documented allegations that the US forced him from power in a second coup d’etat.

Almost two years ago, in December 2009, I covered a demonstration by Aristide supporters calling for his return to Haiti and decrying exclusionary elections.  The video I shot of the protest is on a hard drive in the States at the moment, but photos can be viewed here.  Reuters reported, “Several thousand protesters joined in the protest march, which marked Aristide’s rise to power as Haiti’s first democratically elected president in December 1990.”

2009 Fanmi Lavalas demonstration. Far more than 150 people.

The next day, Kenneth Merten, the current US Ambassador to Haiti, described how a “small” “crowd of approximately 150 persons marched around downtown before heading to the electoral authority’s offices” in a cable to State Department headquarters entitled “Fanmi Lavalas Fails to Mobilize Its Base.”

Maybe it’s willful self-delusion.  Maybe he just showed up late.  But like Trenton Daniel of the AP, Merten seized on the artificial crowd estimate to make to make political claims about Fanmi Lavalas’ lack of popularity.

“This demonstration was markedly different from the late 1990s when Lavalas could easily fill the streets with thousands of protestors, and indicates the extent to which the party has lost its power. Even two years ago, party organizers could count on two thousand supporters to take to the streets.”

At least triple of “two thousand supporters” took to the streets that day.

Videoblog sidebar: UN Troops Go After An Alleged Thief (And Their Own Interpreter)

Above, one of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s lawyers, Reynold Georges, attempts to shout over Gerardo Ducos, a researcher for Amnesty International, as he speaks to reporters today about his organization’s call for prosecuting the former dictator.

Below, audio of a small portion of the yelling by Georges and one of his associates, along with comments from James Burke, an Amnesty International campaigner for the Caribbean, and later Georges again. (MP3)

Update: Here’s Amnesty Int’l's official response to what happened: “Jean-Claude Duvalier’s lawyers and a dozen of his supporters tried to gag Amnesty International and Haitian journalists during the presentation of the organization’s report ‘You cannot kill the truth’: The case against Jean-Claude Duvalier, on 22 September in Port-au-Prince.”

Screengrab from video taken by Gerard Jean-Gilles' uncle of autopsy. Posted with his permission.

Finally, this story is being published – the version below in Haiti Liberte today (French), another coming in The Nation magazine next week.

Faced with growing outrage over an alleged sexual assault by UN occupation soldiers on 18-year-old Johnny Jean in the southern town of Port Salut, the UN is pledging to investigate the incident and bring the perpetrators to justice.

But this promise is belied by the UN mission’s refusal to cooperate with the Haitian justice system’s attempt to investigate the hanging death of a 16-year-old boy inside another UN base one year ago.

Gérard Jean-Gilles ran errands for Nepalese soldiers at their base in Cap Haïtien, Haiti’s second largest city. A Haitian interpreter for the troops, Joëlle Rozéfort, accused Jean-Gilles of stealing $200 from her car. The next day, on Aug. 18, 2010, Jean-Gilles was found hanging from a tree inside the base, a wire around his neck.

The UN Stabilization Mission to Haiti (MINUSTAH) said its internal inquiry found that Jean-Gilles committed suicide. But Jean-Gilles’ family and friends suspect he was murdered, and when a Haitian judge tried to investigate, the UN stone-walled.

The former delegate (or central government representative) of Haiti’s northern region calls the UN “the primary obstacle” to learning how Jean-Gilles died.

In impassioned demonstrations against MINUSTAH this week, Haitians are calling for justice for Gérard Jean-Gilles, too.

“He died searching for a way to live,” said his adoptive father, Rémy Raphaël, whose street merchant wife took in Jean-Gilles as a baby, after his mother died and father went missing.

“He was in school, but my wife couldn’t keep paying for it,” said Raphaël, in the family’s sparse two-room home in a narrow, grimy alleyway. “He never tried to make trouble with people because he understood his situation, he preferred to search for jobs… That’s why he became friends with the soldiers.”

Evens Bele, 17, worked alongside Jean-Gilles on the MINUSTAH base for three years. They earned the equivalent of $10 a month, running errands, cleaning base facilities, and translating for the UN troops during patrols.

“He entered, said hello to me, and told me he had trouble with a lady who lost around $200,” said Bele of the fateful morning. Not long after, “I saw him hung up.”

UN personnel immediately met with the family and local officials. The body was flown to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city, the same day. But it sat for three days until Haitian doctors carried out an autopsy at the General Hospital, according to Calixte James, Jean-Gilles’ uncle, who accompanied the body.

“They could have done the autopsy the same day because we arrived in Port-au-Prince at 3:45 p.m.,” said James, a heavyset Blackberry-toting lawyer. “In our country, we don’t have the equipment that can detect things in [an autopsy on] a body after 72 hours. So to me what they were doing was already meaningless.”

An autopsy report obtained by Haiti Liberte said no traces of violence were found on the corpse, which the UN uses to buttress its claim of suicide.

But Raphaël, who worked as a dishwasher in the base, believes the UN soldiers “asphyxiated [his son] with gas and then hung him from the tree,” which was “in a restricted spot of the yard behind a lot of containers.”

“He could have fought them because he was strong enough,” Raphaël said, his voice rising. “He wouldn’t let them do that to him. . .To me the autopsy is not clear enough.”

The suspicions of Jean-Gilles’ family and friends swirl around interpreter Joëlle Rozéfort, who had accused Jean-Gilles of stealing money from her car the previous day.

The morning of the boy’s death, “Joëlle came to me while I was washing dishes, saying Gérard shouldn’t have stolen money from her,” Raphaël said. “While she was talking, a soldier came in and told me Gérard had hung himself! Her face stayed quiet… Even when Rozéfort found the money in her trunk, she kept on saying that Gérard was a thief.”

Bele also doesn’t believe Jean-Gilles committed suicide. “He’s dead because of the money,” he said. Shortly after the hanging, Bele and Raphaël both lost their jobs at the base.

The northern region’s former Government Delegate, Georgemain Prophète, represented the Haitian state in its initial dealings with the UN on how to probe Jean-Gilles’ death. They agreed the Haitian judiciary would open an investigation, he said.

The case was given to Heidi Fortuné, a Cap Haïtien investigating judge (juge d’instruction) since 2006.

“The autopsy can only show whether or not he was strangled, but it can’t determine if it was a suicide or if someone else hung him,” said Fortuné. “They sent me the case to investigate if it was a suicide or not – that’s my job.”

The front gate of the Cap Haitien UN base where Jean-Gilles died.

Witnesses said that Rozéfort “had a little trouble with her car and Gérard gave her some help,” Fortuné said. “After she started the car and left she realized the money in her bag was missing. She accused and made threatening remarks to Gérard, but Gérard said that he did not take the money. Rozefort promised him she’d report her allegation to the chief of the base,” he said.Both Bele and Raphaël claimed in separate interviews that Rozéfort had a sexual relationship with the Nepalese chief of the base.

One witness who had seen Jean-Gilles enter the base that morning told Fortuné the boy had displayed no facial expressions or signs suggesting he would kill himself. Suicide is not considered part of Haitian culture and is practically unheard of in the island nation.

“So the next person I need to hear from is Rozéfort herself,” the judge explained.

Fortuné said he issued three separate subpoenas for Rozéfort to testify before him, the last of which mandated the police to arrest her and bring her to him. But MINUSTAH moved her to Port-au-Prince, saying she’d received death threats in Cap Haïtien.

Rozéfort never testified.

After issuing his warrants, Fortuné received a letter dated Sep. 16, 2010 and signed by Edmond Mulet, the former Guatemalan diplomat who headed MINUSTAH at the time. The letter was addressed to Haiti’s Foreign Minister, who sent it to Judge Fortuné.

“It is mentioned in the subpoena that Madame Rozéfort is suspected of complicity in voluntary homicide,” Mulet wrote. “Mme Rozéfort will not be able to comply with the subpoena. . . barring a decision by the UN Secretary lifting her immunity.”

The Status of Forces of Agreement (SOFA) between the Haitian government and the UN provides MINUSTAH members with immunity from prosecution in Haiti under certain circumstances.

Haiti’s then-Justice Minister, Paul Denis, responded to Mulet in a sharply-worded letter arguing that Rozéfort enjoys no immunity whatsoever.

“I believe it timely to ask you, Mr. Special Representative, to accord one minute of reflection on the definition of the expressions members of the MINUSTAH and contracting parties,” Denis wrote, bolding and underlining portions of the text for emphasis. The SOFA does not provide immunity for the UN’s Haitian contractors. “It seems to me that Madame Joëlle Rozéfort, of Haitian nationality, recruited here, translator by profession, is certainly a contracting party and not a member of MINUSTAH.”

Denis emphasized that the SOFA provides immunity for acts carried out by MINUSTAH personnel in the “exercise of their official functions”. Therefore, “The official and contractual function of Madame Rozéfort consists of translating statements, conversations and documents from one language to another. . . In acting as a translator, Madame Rozéfort cannot in any way be led to kill.”

In an Oct. 8, 2010 letter to Denis, Mulet shot back: “Madame Rozéfort was recruited by means of a letter of nomination issued by the United Nations Secretariat. . . [H]er employment will be governed by the terms of her nominating letter and the Regulations of United Nations personnel. She is consequently an official of the United Nations.”

Mulet did not respond to Denis’ second point, that immunity is only applicable in the exercise of “official functions.” He concluded, “the Secretary General [Ban Ki-Moon] and the Special Representative of the Secretary General [Mulet] are for the moment… not in a position to come to a decision on the request for a court appearance based on a suspicion of complicity in voluntary homicide.”

“Immunities should not be used as a shield to prohibit investigations into potential criminal acts that, if proven, would be clearly outside of the ‘official capacity’ of UN staff members,” wrote Scott Sheeran, an expert on peacekeeping law at the University of Essex who has worked in the United Nations, in an email to Haïti Liberté after viewing the exchange of letters.

“This is particularly so where the UN has not assisted the host government and local law enforcement to reach a view on what occurred,” Sheeran wrote. “It is not a good faith interpretation of the law, and, more broadly, it is not consistent with the rule of law and human rights which the UN is meant to uphold.” Mulet appeared to be claiming an “overly broad interpretation” of a key aspect of the SOFA, he added.

That same month, Mulet argued in a speech to international partners that Haiti’s principal problem is “the absence of the rule of law.” He said Haitians have ceased to expect or demand justice from the Haitian state and that the country suffers from a dearth of competent legal professionals. His role, along with that of the international community, Mulet added, is “not to undermine Haitian sovereignty, but strengthen it. I am very conscious of this.”

Edmond Mulet is now Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations at UN headquarters in New York. A year later, he “doesn’t feel that there was a denial of justice” in the Jean-Gilles case, according to Michel Bonnardeaux, a public affairs officer from the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations.

Former Justice Minister Denis could not be reached for comment.

“I received the copy of a letter signed by Edmond Mulet saying the madam has immunity,” Judge Fortuné said. “But I know she’s a Haitian contractor and only the UN soldiers have immunity. How can Rozéfort be enjoying this privilege as a local employee?”

Fortuné asked: “Did she complain to the chief or say something that could give a occasion to Jean-Gilles’ death?. . . I can’t say with conviction whether or not he was killed by the soldiers, but they don’t cooperate enough to help with the investigation – that’s what is bizarre.”

Judge Fortuné concluded, his voice hushed with disappointment: “The UN is blocking the Haitian justice system.”

Gilles’ family is indignant and angry. “MINUSTAH doesn’t respect the Haitian justice system,” Raphaël said. “They think they are the only force on the planet and they can do whatever they want. . .They’ve only brought us corruption. They are doing nothing good for the country.”

“We don’t have any justice because our leaders have sold out the country to foreigners,” said Calixte James, the uncle. “How can a judge call the woman to testify, and the UN refuses, saying she has immunity. She’s Haitian!. . . Gérard’s family is asking the whole world judge these things that MINUSTAH is doing in Haiti.”

Jimmy Jean, 18, lived with Gérard. “I want them to give him justice,” he said. “At night with some friends he used to sit with me joking until we went inside to go to bed. I cried. I cried a lot – he was my only brother so what’s wrong with it!”

Last October, protestors in Cap Haïtien fought pitched street battles – using rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails – with MINUSTAH troops, turning the town into a veritable warzone. Judge Fortuné said he was forced to round up his kids and dash out of his home when it was flooded with tear gas. The protesters blamed the Nepali UN troops (correctly, as scientific studies would later prove) for introducing cholera into Haiti. The resulting epidemic has now killed over 6,100 Haitians.

“MINUSTAH’s refusal to deliver the justice [in Jean-Gilles’ case] that the people demand, and the fact that a MINUSTAH battalion is pointed to as the source of the [cholera] epidemic,” said former delegate Prophète, “when you put all that together, it’s a very toxic compound and that can make anything happen.”

James and Judge Fortuné confirmed by phone this week that nothing has changed in the Jean-Gilles case since last year. They said the investigation could not progress without Rozéfort’s participation.

“I am absolutely not aware of the existence of such a letter which was sent to the judge,” said UN spokeswoman Sylvie van de Wildenberg to this journalist last fall when pressed for information about the case. “You know this is crazy, I don’t know why you are digging into it. Why are you in Haiti – are you here to help?”

Incensed by the news from Port Salut, demonstrators again descended on the area around the capital’s National Palace this week to call for MINUSTAH’s departure. Some held signs saying, “Justice for Gerard Jean-Gilles.” Police responded with tear gas which sent demonstrators and quake survivors running for cover around the makeshift tent camps that crowd the plaza.

The UN Security Council looks set to renew MINUSTAH’s mandate for at least another year before it expires on Oct. 15. While talk of a drawdown in troops is growing, UN officials say the force is likely to stay in Haiti until 2015.

“Let’s be serious,” James said. “The UN says that the judges are not efficient and the justice system should be reformed, while they block us from doing our job! I hope MINUSTAH doesn’t consider all Haitian to be idiots. To keep their positions, some Haitians are selling out the country and signing treaties in the name of Haitian people, but not all the Haitians are the same.”

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.