Michael Deibert and Elizabeth Eames Roebling Attack IPS Journalists Writing on Haiti
By: Kim Ives
About a week ago, an IPS story reported that Amnesty International called for the release of Ronald Dauphin and described his continued detention as “politically motivated”.
In response, Elizabeth Roebling accused IPS of becoming an “outlet for spin” and directed members of the corbett list to a bitter response on Michael Deibert’s blog. Deibert is the author of “Notes from the Last Testament,” an account of President Aristide’s second term, which was cut short by the February 29, 2004 coup.
Normally, I wouldn’t bother responding to a mere political difference. But Deibert makes several personal attacks on the IPS piece’s authors Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague that warrant correction.
Deibert’s allegations are irrelevant to the accuracy of the IPS article. Readers can check the facts reported (most importantly, Amnesty’s appeal on Dauphin’s behalf ). Good journalism, like good scholarship, relies to the greatest extent possible on sources that readers can check.
Deibert wrote that Sprague “…works as a teaching assistant at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sociology Department, focusing on crime and delinquency, subjects with which his past behavior [sic] no doubt gives him a close familiarity.”
This is a baseless ad hominem attack. Sprague’s PhD studies are not focused on crime and delinquency, and, if they were, would not justify Deibert’s nasty insinuation.[1] Furthermore, teaching assistant duties are not the same thing as a graduate student’s area of study, and, much less, evidence of a criminal background.
Deibert also claims that Sprague sent him an email containing “intimations of violence against my person”. I asked Sprague to forward me the email from 2005. In it, Sprague merely questions the accuracy of Deibert’s writings. Observing that thousands of people were being killed in post-coup Haiti, Sprague attached what he called a “photo of the suffering,” which showed victims of one UN-PNH raid [2]. To say that the e-mail “intimated” a threat against Deibert is absurd.
Deibert then accuses Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre of having a “stark conflict of interest” and that “when writing about the IJDH [The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti], Wadner Pierre is quoting his former employer without acknowledging it.”
Pierre has never worked for IJDH. Pierre has provided IJDH and many other organizations in Haiti and around the world with photos taken during his time living in and visiting some of the poorest and most victimized Haitian communities. He has often done so for free or for sums barely adequate to live on in Haiti. Providing freelance photographic evidence of human rights abuses to organizations does not make him an employee or former employee.
Moreover, the ideal of an “objective” reporter or source for news does not and cannot exist. Journalism is not science. It is permeated with value judgments.
Pierre and Sprague have both been open about their sympathy for the poor’s mobilization for democracy in Haiti. The IPS article cites a number of sources, such as AUMOHD, IJDH and also well-known Lavalas opponents such as RNDDH and Haiti’s Ambassador to the US, Raymond Joseph. Moreover, the article was not “about” IJDH. It highlighted Amnesty International’s appeal on behalf of Dauphin and reported facts that are mentioned in that appeal. In contrast, Deibert’s recent IPS article on the case does not cite a single source critical of his viewpoint. [3]
Revealingly, Deibert makes no mention of Amnesty’s appeal for Ronald Dauphin, one of the most balanced accounts of the alleged “massacre” in St. Marc. Does Deibert wish to bury the Amnesty report under his spurious allegations against Pierre and Sprague? Does he wish that IPS had buried it as well?
To close, I direct readers to a few critiques of Deibert’s bias in recent years.
a) Justin Podur. 2006. “Kofi Annan’s Haiti”. New Left Review.
b) ___________. 2006. “A Dishonest Case for a Coup”. Znet.
c) Patrick Elie. 2006. “A Few Notes about ‘Notes from the Last Testament’”.
d) Mark Weisbrot. 2006. “Response to Michael Deibert”. The Nation.
e) Diana Barahona. 2007. “U.S. Reporting on the Coup in Haiti: How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal”. Counterpunch.
f) Tom Luce. 2007. “The Proxy War in Martisant and Gran Ravine”. HaitiAnalysis.
g) Peter Hallward. 2008. “Response to Michael Deibert’s Review of Damming the Flood”. Monthly Review.
Readers can weigh the bias of all sources and draw their conclusions about the facts.
Notes:
[1] Jeb Sprague University Website.
[2] The photo that Sprague attached to the e-mail had been taken by grassroots photojournalist Jean Ristil who lives in Cite Soleil and has himself been harassed and jailed illegally in the past (for taking photographs) by Haiti’s UN-trained police. See Eric Feise, Jeb Sprague. 2006. “Persecuted Haitian Photojournalist Speaks Out: Jean Ristil & Cite Solely”.
[3] Michael Deibert. 2009. “Haiti: ‘We have Never had Justice’”. IPS.
For further reading:
Hallward, Peter. 2008. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. Verso.
Macdonld, Isabel. 2007. “The Freedom of the Press Barons”. The Dominion. http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/976
Sprague, Jeb. 2006. “Invisible Violence: Ignoring murder in post-coup Haiti”. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Griffin, Thomas M. 2004. “Haiti: Human Rights Investigation: November 11-21, 2004″ University of Miami School of Law.
September 9th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
A response to Kim Ives
http://deiberthaiti.blogspot.com/2009/08/response-to-kim-ives.html
It is good that Haiti Liberté editor Kim Ives has not forgotten me since our spirited debate at Sander Hicks’ excellent Vox Pop bookstore in Brooklyn a few years back.
Ives, who used to edit the Brooklyn-based Haiti Progrès before departing amid charges of financial irregularities and nepotism, appears not to have liked the criticism that I recently leveled at Jeb Sprague and Wadner Pierre [1]. When the latter two wrote a recent article for the Inter Press Service seeking to deny the slaughter that the people of St. Marc had been subjected to at the hands of forces loyal to the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004, they apparently did so without having ever bothered to interview a single survivor or relative of a victim of the violence, a practice that struck me as rather curious. Incidentally, some good reporting from St. Marc at the time was written by Marika Lynch for the Miami Herald and can be read here: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/haiti/reprisal.htm.
When the story also consisted of points and passages regurgitated nearly wholly from the writings and positions of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a body linked at the hip with grotesquely (given Haiti’s poverty) overpaid advocates for the Aristide government, and an organization that one of the authors is identified in various places as having worked for, it only seemed natural to point that out, as it would were a journalist working for USAID, for example, simultaneously spit out State Department talking points in print. Though I know Kim Ives has never allowed the facts to get in the way of his own attempts at journalism, for me, at least, individuals advocating their full-throated support for any political current then attempting to pass themselves off as objective journalists, investigating and allowing the facts to fall where they may, is problematic.
Likewise, the unsolicited email photo of blood-spattered corpses sent to me by Jeb Sprague, an individual with a long history of harassing people and making up wild, outlandish claims that are then proven false (such as his attacks against the UK-based Haiti Support Group) did strike me as an attempt to intimidate me into silence, one which didn’t work. The full text of Sprague’s email to me can be read as part of a broader discussion of press coverage of Haiti on my blog [2].
The attacks that Kim Ives repeats against me from academics like Peter Hallward [3, 4 ]and Justin Podur [5], men ignorant of Haiti and its people and with only the most glancing knowledge of even the recent political history that they seek to fit into their unsophisticated binary worldview, were responded to at the time. Likewise were the statements of Patrick Elie, a convicted perjurer with a long history of violent, erratic behaviour who somehow recently begged his way onto a presidential security commission [6].
As to Amnesty International’s recent declaration regarding Ronald Dauphin, in my experience reporting from conflict areas around the globe, local groups such as RNDDH are almost always more reliable in their estimations and characterizations of violence than Amnesty International, which, unlike Human Rights Watch, does precious little on-the-ground research from conflict zones these days and instead is essentially run by bureaucrats filtering through press accounts and the emails they are flooded with by various advocacy groups.
Amnesty International has done almost no original research in Haiti since 2004. RNDDH, on the other hand, with its extensive research network in Haiti and defense of those regardless of political affiliation, seems to me to fit well into the proud tradition of such groups as the Centro para Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos in Guatemala, the Mouvement Ivoirien des Droits Humains in Cote d’Ivoire and the Ligue des Droits de la personne dans la région des Grands Lacs in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Whenever one goes and actually interviews the victims of human rights violations, as I did in St. Marc this summer [7], in Port-au-Prince in 2006 [8], in the Democratic Republic of Congo [9] or in Indian-controlled Kashmir [10], there will always be those who, speaking for one political current or another with their hands soaked in blood, will seek to cast doubt on the validity or the worth of that suffering. But if verbal and written attacks are the price one must pay to draw attention to the suffering of people like Amazil Jean-Baptiste and the other survivors of political violence worldwide, it is a tax so relatively minor as to hardly merit mention.
1.
Friday, August 21, 2009
A note on the reporting of the Ronald Dauphin case in Haiti
(http://michaeldeibert.blogspot.com/2009/08/note-of-reporting-of-ronald-dauphin.html
2.
Friday, January 19, 2007
A shabby little affair
http://michaeldeibert.blogspot.com/2007/01/shabby-little-affair.html
3.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
A Review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
http://michaeldeibert.blogspot.com/2008/03/review-of-peter-hallwards-damming-flood.html
4.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Michael Deibert responds to Peter Hallward
http://deiberthaiti.blogspot.com/2008/04/michael-deibert-responds-to-peter.html
5.
25 Apr 2006
Time to support Haiti
AlterPresse
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/KHII-6P88EE?OpenDocument
6.
United States of America, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Patrick Elie A/K/a Patrick Gerald Elie, A/K/a Marie Patrick Elie, Defendant-Appellee., 111 F.3d 1135 (4th Cir. 1997)
http://vlex.com/vid/patrick-elie-marie-18190664
7.
July 21, 2009
HAITI: “We Have Never Had Justice”
Inter Press Service
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47745
8.
August 2, 2006
HAITI: Storm of Killing in Neighbourhood Has Wide Implications for Nation
Inter Press Service
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34213
9.
June 26th, 2008
A Glittering Demon: Mining, Poverty and Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Special to CorpWatch
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15118
10.
The Dead and the Missing in Kashmir
World Policy Journal, Spring 2007
http://deibertkashmir.blogspot.com/2007/11/dead-and-missing-in-kashmir.html