Jean Dominique

Throughout the 1970s, Jean Dominique used Radio Haiti to highlights aspects of Haitian culture rooted in its Creole-speaking majority and repressed for almost two centuries by its French-speaking elite. Dominique and Radio Haiti also reported increasingly on events that would challenge the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier, often strategically and indirectly to circumvent the regime's censorship laws. For example, Radio Haiti reported in 1972 for weeks, on the fall of the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio "Tachito" Somoza Debayle, as a proxy for talking about Duvalier. In 1973 and 1976, Dominique reported from the annual Vodou pilgrimage at Saut-d’Eau on worshippers’ lamentations and entreaties to the spirits: an implicit way of talking about peasant resistance : “We were under Jean-Claude Duvalier, we were under [high-ranking Macoutes like] Luc Désir, Jean Valmé, Luckner Cambronne, and company We were under the tigers!” Dominique later explained. “The people opened their arms in front of the pilgrimage site, they looked toward the church, and they described their misery. They described their oppression, how the life was squeezed out of them [peze-souse]. They described how everything was being destroyed [kraze-brize]. They spelled it all out. They described it in a litany, for hours. For days.”[5]

As the Haitian government relied on assistance from the United States, Duvalier had little choice but to comply with certain human rights rules and principles while Jimmy Carter was president. However, as Carter's term came to an end, Duvalier's opposition to the free press became more pronounced. In October 1980, he announced that le bal est fini (the party is over) for the independent press. Dominique, reading the writing on the wall, responded with one of his most famous editorials, entitled “Bon appétit, messieurs,” addressed to the journalists of the state press. “For you, the banquet shall resume. And you will not hear any discordant sounds, any noise that might disturb your appetites. You will not be distracted from your plentiful feast by the cries of the poor, the screams of the boat people devoured by sharks, the gunshots killing our cane-cutter brothers in Santo Domingo or in Nassau or La Romana... No, you will not hear those discordant, disagreeable noises that might trouble your meal, that might prevent you from celebrating -- it will be only silence... So you may celebrate at ease, gentlemen! At ease! And in that profound silence: Bon appétit, messieurs!”[6]

On 28 November 1980, shortly after Ronald Reagan won the US presidential election, Duvalier cracked down on the independent press, human rights activists, and union leaders in Haiti. Duvalier's militia, the Tontons Macoutes, ransacked and destroyed Radio Haiti's studios. Nearly all of Radio Haiti's journalists were arrested; some, including station manager Richard Brisson, were tortured. Most were released within days and then exiled. An order was issued for Jean Dominique to be killed on sight. He spent two months in asylum at the Venezuelan embassy, before he joined Montas in New York, where they married in 1983.

On 5 March 1986, less than a month after Duvalier's ouster, Dominique and Montas returned to Haiti, and were greeted at the airport by nearly 60,000 people. That October, Radio Haiti reopened with funds raised by ordinary Haitian people.

Through the late 1980s, as Haiti endured successive military coups d’état, Dominique continued to advocate for democratic participation, human rights, peasant rights, and for the removal of Duvalierist and Macoute elements from the government and the army. He devoted a great deal of airtime and analysis, for example, to the July 1987 massacre of peasant farmers by landowners and Macoutes in Jean Rabel. Haiti's first democratic elections were scheduled for 29 November 1987, but were violently suppressed by the army, which slaughtered voters at Ruelle Vaillant and destroyed electoral bureaus throughout the country. Radio Haiti came under armed attack that day, as ordered by Williams Régala; Dominique and the other journalists stood on the roof throwing rocks and bottles as the army fired machine guns and grenades.

Dominique was an early supporter of the Lavalas movement and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the parish priest and outspoken proponent of liberation theology. Radio Haiti covered the 11 September 1988 massacre in which attachés under the orders of Port-au-Prince mayor Franck Romain massacred parishioners at Aristide's St. Jean Bosco church, and interviewed Aristide several times as a priest and as a presidential candidate, and, finally, after his victory in Haiti's first democratic elections in December 1990.

When the military under Raoul Cédras overthrew the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, Radio Haiti once more had to close and Dominique and Montas again went into exile in New York. During these years, Dominique published op eds and appeared on the Charlie Rose show to encourage a return to constitutional order in Haiti. He also collaborated with the American filmmaker Jonathan Demme on the interviews that would eventually become the documentary The Agronomist, and on an unfinished project on the History of Haitian Cinema. In June 1993, Dominique was part of Aristide's entourage at the Governors Island meeting between the democratically elected government in exile and the leaders of the military junta. Dominique returned to Haiti in 1994, after Aristide's return to power, and reopened Radio Haiti the following year.

In the final years of his life, Dominique concentrated on issues of state corruption and criminal negligence by the private sector. He investigated Pharval Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company, for selling cough syrup contaminated with diethylene glycol that was responsible for the poisoning of two hundred children, of whom sixty died. He also denounced the importation of medical-grade ethanol that was being sold as counterfeit clairin (high-proof undistilled sugar cane spirits), sickening and killing people who consumed it while undercutting the livelihood of Haiti's sugar planters and distillers.

As a journalist who emphasized his own political objectivity and that of his staff, Dominique took pains to remain nonpartisan in his professional activities. He did, however, strongly support grassroots peasants’ rights groups, especially KOZEPEP whose leader, Charles Suffrard, was a close friend and collaborator of Dominique. Though as a private citizen Dominique was an early supporter of the Lavalas movement, he later investigated Aristide and other members of Fanmi Lavalas for corruption and misappropriation of government funds, and for betraying the promise of the twa wòch dife, the three cornerstones of the Lavalas movement: participation, justice, and transparency.

In a tense 16 December 1996 Face à l’Opinion interview, Dominique questioned Aristide about state corruption, particularly in his petits projets de la présidence.[7] Dominique also took on former police chief, Dany Toussaint, for attempting to take control of the country's security apparatus after the assassination of his rival for the position of Secretary of State for Public Security, Jean Lamy. As a result of this, Toussaint's supporters surrounded and attacked the radio station building. In February 2000, Toussaint's lawyers Gérard Georges and Jean-Claude Nord openly made death threats against Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas on the airwaves of Serge Beaulieu's New York-based Duvalierist radio station Radio Liberté. This led Dominique to declare in an October 1999 editorial, “I know that [Toussaint] has the money to pay and arm his followers. Here, I have no other weapon than my journalist's pen! And my microphone and my unquenchable faith as a militant for true change!... If Dany Toussaint tries anything else against me or the station, and if I am still alive, I will close the place down after I have denounced these maneuvers one more time and I will go in exile once more with my wife and children.”[8]