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Saturday, May 25, 2013

By Jack Shea
Published: July 23, 2009

American journalists may yearn for the "good old days" when daily newspapers were strong, but in The Republic of Haiti, these are the good old days.

For working Haitian journalists, the old days were very bad and very recent.

"This is like springtime for Haitian journalism," newspaper reporter Claude Bernard Serant said in an interview with The Times last week.

Mr. Serant is well acquainted with the hard realities of Haitian journalism. Five years ago, he was hospitalized for four days from a beating he received while covering an event for Le Nouvelliste, Haiti's largest (30,000 circulation) daily newspaper. "I was in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time," he said simply. The crowd that delivered the beating believed his newspaper was on the wrong side of an issue they espoused.

Mr. Serant and Alix Laroche, an editor and reporter for Le Matin, a 5,000 circulation daily newspaper, both said that social unrest, not the Haitian government, poses more risk for journalists. But, they said, that could change.

With a wry smile, Mr. Serant said, "There probably has never been a better time for free journalism in Haiti." But quoting Frank Etienne, Haiti's best-known writer and commentator, he added, "Etienne says, 'Haiti is like a tinderbox. It awaits a match.'"

The two reporters are in the U.S. covering a series of appearances by Haiti's minister of women's affairs and rights, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, who spoke frankly about the issues facing her country in a lecture at the Oak Bluffs library last Thursday.

Ms. Lassegue's Island visit was sponsored by the Martha's Vineyard Fish Farm for Haiti Project to raise money for education and awareness for women's rights in Haiti.

For now, the two men see opportunity to affect change in a country born of a successful slave revolution in 1804 and marked by oppression and strife since. The world watched the horror of decades under dictators Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, when bands of secret police, called Ton Ton Macoutes, routinely murdered and savaged the Haitian people from 1957 until 1986. Haiti adopted constitutional rule in 1987 but has been intermittently battered by political unrest and violence since.

Located less than 2,000 miles from the U.S., Haiti's nearly seven million citizens rank among the poorest of Caribbean countries with a daily wage of less than $2 per day, according to independent economic reports.

More recently, the country has been torn by the presidencies of now-deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a priest turned politician, whose several brief administrations created expectation for positive social change. Fanmi Lavalas, the party that supports Mr. Aristide, recently boycotted senatorial elections that produced a turnout of about 10 per, according to human rights and press watch organizations and U.S. government reports.

While Haitian journalists were routinely beaten and murdered as recently as a few years ago, Mssrs. Serant and Laroche say that today the government is less intrusive, an assessment shared by Reporters Without Borders (RWB), an international press organization that ranks press freedom by country.

RWB says press freedom in Haiti "continues its slow rise," ranking 73rd of 179 countries measured in 2008. Six years earlier, the country was ranked 105th. In comparison, RWB ranked the U.S. as 36th in press freedom in 2008, an improvement from 48th place in 2007.

Neither man said he feels pressure from the government, which operates a state-run newspaper, L'Union, for which Mr. Serant worked briefly. "The government is not the danger area today," Mr. Serant said. "Opposing political factions pose a greater threat to journalists."

Both men are in their thirties and became reporters early in this decade. Mr. Serant, in his mid-thirties, joining Le Nouvelliste in 2002 after free-lancing for the paper. Mr. Laroche, 38, a former librarian, joined Le Matin after completing studies in humanities at the state university in Port au Prince.

Mr. Serant comes from a family of journalists. His brother is a writer in Haiti and a cousin, Claire Serant, holds a master's in journalism from Columbia University and was an award-winning reporter at the New York Daily News for 14 years before recently joining the faculty of St. John's University in New York.

Mr. Laroche is unmarried and supports his parents and several siblings from his reporting and editing. Both men live and work in Port au Prince, the Haitian capital.

Newspapering in Haiti has some similarities to the U.S. version. "No one enters journalism to get rich," Mr. Laroche laughed.

But news reporting in Haiti is different from the U.S. in several ways, the reporters agreed. For example, literacy rates are less than 45 percent in a country of nearly seven million people. "We work to get the attention of the leaders and the people in power," Mr. Alix said, adding that they rely on a host of radio and TV stations to report their reporting to an avid audience of listeners and viewers.

"Haitians are auditive people," Mr. Serant said. "We learn best in sensory ways. There are 28 television stations in Port au Prince alone. Twenty-eight! It's amazing. I don't know how they all make ends meet." He added that there are more than 70 radio stations in the country.

Mr. Serant said the physical danger he's faced has helped him. "It (the beating) was traumatic," he said. "I avoid large crowds now but another result is that I am even more focused on social issues, such as health care, I think."

The reporters seem to be cautiously enjoying their journalistic "springtime,." but as Mr. Serant put it, "Freedom can be a relative term."

Tania Magloire and Joseph Kira, Canadian government human rights workers, aided in translating French to English at various points in the interview.