Cap-Haitien Times

Posted 9:24 PM by John Adams |
Strikes All Around

Australia's ABC Online and the Boston Globe are the first to pick up this story:

One of Haiti's most popular radio stations has stopped broadcasting news to protest an attack last week against one of its correspondents.

The home of Goudou Jean Numa, one of Radio Metropole's leading political reporters, was surrounded by armed men on Friday local time, and later that night a car in his garage was set ablaze.

He has since gone into hiding.

Privately owned Metropole have aired a statement saying it would halt news reports for 24 hours in protest.

"Here at Radio Metropole, we have always avoided protesting publicly against the intimidation, threats and physical and verbal attacks leveled against the members of the newsroom," the statement said.

"However, the attack against our colleague Goudou Jean Numa was too much."

Radio Metropole, along with other private radio stations such as Radio Kiskeya and Radio Haiti Inter, have frequently been the target of threats and harassment from political militants claiming loyalty to Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

President Aristide, a former Catholic priest who began his second term as Haiti's president in February 2001, has been under fire in recent months from opposition groups that accuse his government of repressing journalists and human rights groups.

The Metropole statement said four of its journalists had gone into exile in the United States in the last 14 months and its correspondent in the northern city of Gonaives had been forced to flee the city as a result of threats and attacks by escaped convict and Aristide supporter Amiot Metayer.

There's more. The nation's judges have also gone on strike in protest of what they call an unfair deposition of Judge Josiard Agnant. The judge in question had recently dismissed a drug trafficking case against defendant Jean Salim Batrony, citing a lack of evidence. This quote from Sen. Pierre Prince Soncon, of Aristide's Lavalas party, is classic:

"We want to fight against drugs, against impunity. It's a question of morality."

Gee, if the Lavalas Party is this zealous about fighting drugs in Haiti, maybe they should pay closer attention to their own Evans Brillant, who cordoned off a Port-au-Prince highway to land between 1,760 and 2,200 pounds of cocaine. Brillant's stash makes Batrony's charge of possession of 128 pounds of the stuff look like a mere pittance by comparison.

Posted 7:33 PM by John Adams |
Representing the Voiceless

I'll be a guest blogger over at Joshua Claybourn's site on Friday. He's busy this week, so he's allowing other bloggers to fill in the gaps for him. I plan to write an article about the plight of the Haitian people and the state of U.S. immigration. Your thoughts and suggestions would be very much appreciated, as I hope to present Haitians in a good light and represent them well.

Even though I'm a missionary child, I was born and raised in Haiti, and I feel that is my special duty to be "salt and light" from now on in America, trying to open foreign eyes to the plight of a people that I feel I can safely and unabashedly call "my people."