I've been looking for a balanced, rational account of the Aristide regime and of the causes of its failure. This article by Tom Reeves, though written last September and thus before the recent coup-that's-somehow-not-a-coup, is the best thing I've come across so far.

By the way, one keeps reading of "militant supporters" of Aristide, "street gangs," usually also described with the Haitian word "chimères," as the chief cause of violence in Haiti. Witness, for example, a piece I missed last Friday by Lydia Polgreen ("Day of the Vigilante Stretches On Outside of Haitian Capital"), which takes a kind of grim satisfaction in reporting the torture and death of one such pro-Aristide goon:

After what the thugs did to his son, no punishment seemed harsh enough to Roland Lysias.

Two months ago, loyalists of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide kidnapped his 21-year-old son, Junior, and tortured him, chopping off his hands and feet and poking out his eyes before burning his body, because he had supported a militant opposition group, Mr. Lysias said.

So on Wednesday, when an armed band of vigilantes found the man he said was responsible for his son's death, a pro-Aristide militant known as Tiroro, he watched with satisfaction, he said, as they beat him unconscious, threw gasoline-doused tires around his neck and set him on fire. He described how the chanting and cheering crowd threw rocks at the man's burning body, indifferent to his screams for mercy.

"I asked for justice for my son," Mr. Lysias said, recalling the incident on Thursday. "I feel that now I am starting to see that justice."

The American press is not just universal in its condemnation of the chimères, it's pretty much universal in reducing all support for Aristide to such elements, and in implying that nothing except corruption and thuggery sustained the former regime. I myself find that at least a bit of a stretch, but no matter. The point is: instead of just disapproving of and celebrating the death of thugs, how about some enterprising reporter actually makes an effort to learn directly about the sources of Aristide's support? Is there really nobody in all of Haiti except for violent criminals who regrets, or even has mixed feelings, about Aristide's departure? Why are none of our reporters showing the slightest interest in that side of the story?

posted by michael  5:54:26 PM  
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Spoiling the party. The article Dexter Filkins wanted to write about yesterday's signing of the interim Iraqi constitution ("Iraq Council, With Reluctant Shiites, Signs Charter") doesn't begin until page 2 of the online version:

For 90 minutes on Monday, the mood was high, betraying nothing of the quarrels to come. The 25 Iraqi leaders, many of them scarred by wars and traumas past, gave their names to an expansive document that enshrines human rights and democratic rule as firmly as any constitution in the region.

"This is a great and historic day for Iraq," Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Governing Council, told the crowd that had gathered deep inside the protected confines of the American compound. "This is an Iraqi constitution, made by Iraqis. We have produced a document of which we can all be proud."

With that, the 25 leaders moved to an antique table once used by King Feisal, Iraqi's first monarch, signed the charter and stepped onto a raised platform. As the stage filled, the council stood as the embodiment of the extraordinarily diverse nation, patched together 83 years ago from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, that the interim constitution is meant to hold together.

"An expansive document," the council as "embodiment of the extraordinarily diverse nation," the historical reminiscence of the ruined empire as context for a new democracy—well, God bless America Iraq, land that I love! When Filkins turns in his next couple of grafs to the moment in which Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, switches in his address from Arabic to Kurdish, now one of Iraq's national languages—it's almost enough to make you forget, while you brush away a patriotic tear, that this charade, staged by an American-appointed body deep within concentric layers of American security in the so-called Green Zone, is being played over a document that appears essentially dead on arrival.

But, just as he manages to dictate political terms to Jerry Bremer's discomfort, Ayatollah Sistani's determined to make Dexter Filkins acknowledge reality. Here's the article's actual lead:

Iraq's leaders signed an interim constitution on Monday and agreed to embark on a common path toward democratic rule, but the celebratory mood was dampened by calls from the country's most powerful Shiite leaders to amend the new charter before it goes into force.

The signing ceremony for the interim constitution, delayed once because of terrorist attacks and again because of a political deadlock, unfolded without a hitch inside the fortified confines of the American compound

Filkins does manage to offer a high-flown "common path toward democratic rule," but I hear some pique in that next clause. Can't Sistani even let us throw a nice, phoney-baloney democracy party for ourselves? Just to feel good for a day? Filkins goes on to report that Sistani "released a religious decree later in the afternoon in which he declared that the charter would obstruct an agreement on a permanent constitution" and insisting, once again, on a popularly elected national assembly to approve the interim law. Not in view, still, is any attempt at an examination of the game Sistani is playing, first blocking the signing of the document, then unblocking, now condemning.

As is now typical, the article concludes by noting, in passing, a couple of the most recent and most notable instances of guerilla attacks. I guess it's a measure of the insurgency's success that the bar keeps getting set higher: it takes a good few score of dead now for Iraqi violence to get a story to itself.

posted by michael  3:20:10 PM  
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