I often cite the Indian journalist-extraordinaire P. Sainath’s quote that the corporate media reports on events and spectacles rather than processes, "and the belief that only events make news, not processes, distorts understanding."
If there is a better example of this than the media reporting around Haiti, I’d be hard pressed to find it. Seeing the few events we have been presented with over the last couple of decades, we can see one picture: of AIDS-ridden refugees in rickety boats scrambling for US borders, of wretchedly poor,
hopeless people suffering the effects of hurricanes, or some generic and omnipresent 'street violence'. The events of a cursed, black country that would be doomed but for the enlightened actions and interventions of the ‘international community’.
When we really look at the processes, however, we see quite another picture: the first independent black republic in the world, doomed from its revolutionary birth in 1804 by fear and imperial arrogance, continuously used and denied a chance to live through the centuries by the orchestrated violence
of the world’s political and economic elites.
As Dr. Paul Farmer from Partners in Health says:
"…[L]et me say that I admire the Haitian people more than any other. When I think about their struggle, all alone, in the late 18th century, and then I reflect on the bitter 'welcome' that greeted their announcement of their Haitian Republic, I am humbled.
Two hundred years later, the Haitian people are still seeking the same things they were in casting off their chains in1804 - justice, fairness, respect, freedom from tyranny. That the Haitian people still refuse
to lose hope is a constant source of inspiration to me. I see this in my clinic on a daily basis.
It is my view that the mainstream US media have consistently misrepresented Haiti and Haitians. When I say "consistently" I mean for centuries! The old forms of misrepresentation are now easy to dismiss vulgar racism. But the new forms are no better.”
Kevin Pina is a journalist who has spent a lot of time in Haiti, before, during, and after the latest coup earlier this year. He describes what has been going on there since the latest coup, and what continues to happen there daily, as nothing short of a US- and UN-supported “campaign of extermination against the majority political party”, an empowerment of elite classes, former military rulers and death squad members which has left many, many bodies in its wake.
"The level of repression, the number of killings, the number of incarcerations has strained the system to the breaking point... " Pina said in an October 2004 interview. "...I have never seen a Haiti so bereft of freedom of expression; I have never seen a Haiti so bereft of civil liberties, as I see today. I never saw during those years that they claimed Aristide was a dictatorship a campaign of repression anything like what I am seeing being mounted today against Lavalas. And I think people who have followed this can hear it in my voice, it's indescribable to talk about this reality in terms of sanity. It's reality turned on its head..."
Large, funded ‘human rights professionals’ such as Amnesty International have so far been mostly blind to the painful stories of state-sponsored torture and executions that journalists such as Pina have managed to present to the world through their interviews with people in the country.
In October 2004, China sent a “peace-keeping” force of 125 People’s Armed Police troops under these same UN auspices.
The right-wing press in the US cited cautious administration officials as being “not happy” because "Beijing's communist rulers" might not have the correct, "benign intentions" of the other nations involved.
Such fears are ridiculous, of course, a point which has been emphatically proven by Pina’s most recent report for the Flashpoints program on KPFA radio in the US.
Earlier today, Pina reported that Chinese troops were giving sniper training to members of the Haitian armed forces. Of course, just how endowing criminals and former death squad members with sniping skills is part of the delegation’s professed “peacekeeping” and “crowd control” activities, we can only imagine in our nightmares.
But at least Bush administration officials can rest assured. It seems Chinese troops, like all UN troops involved, will not get in the way, but rather contribute to the mass slaughter in Haiti. They have, no doubt, sufficiently displayed whatever “benign intentions” are appropriate to the “extermination of a mass political party.”
Pina’s articles and broadcasts don’t make it out to the presses in Hong Kong or China.
Indeed, there is not a lot of reporting on Haiti at all over here. Perhaps it’s time to change this, and let people know what we are contributing to, and what we’re therefore also responsible for.
he People's Armed Police standing around in the streets of a city there... clearly holding sniper rifles! A while ago there was a report that the troops were giving sniper training to Haiti's US-backed coup government, but this is the first picture I've seen where they are holding such weapons...