Following the incredibly biased article written by Guyler Delva - and inspired by Daniel Simidor's forceful rebuttal of this piece of yellow journalism - I have written a note of protest to Reuters.
Please feel free to send the same note, or one in your own words, to let Reuters know that we will not accept that their correspondent use the Reuters platform to spread the Gospel of Aristide to the rest of the world. Remind Reuters that one of their Reuters Trust Principles states:
that Reuters shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals and others with whom Reuters has or may have contracts;
The full text of my protest note is as follows:
I wish to draw your attention to the number of biased and erroneous "facts" that your Haiti corrrespondent, Guyler C. Delva, presented in his article entitled "As Vote Nears, Role of Top Party Is in Doubt".
The inaccuracies, some of which are significant, are as follows:
1. There is no reliable information today that Lavalas is the top party in Haiti;
2. It is completely false that the Lavalas party has been in existence for 20 years; it was createdabout 10 years ago after splitting from the OPL party.
3. The Lavalas party was in no way the driving force behind the departure of former president Duvalier, contrary to the suggestion of your correspondent.
As a Haitian, Mr. Delva should know better than to include such falsehoods in his article. And it is simply inexcusable that Reuters editors did not catch such patently false statements that could easily be verified independently.
The fact that Reuters published this biased article clearly violates one of the key Reuters Trust Principles, namely:
that Reuters shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals and others with whom Reuters has or may have contracts;
The article written by Delva smacks of revisionism and should be withdrawn or be corrected.
Yours faithfully,
posted by Jean-Claude Jasmin at 7/30/2005 11:17:00 PM 0 comments
Guyler C. Delva Unmasked
I received the following from a friend of mine. It is a precise and devastating rebuttal of Guyler C. Delva's misleading article in today's NY Times. Remember that Reuters has managed to hire Delva as its correspondent in Haiti: shameful!
The rebuttal was written by Daniel Simidor. Enjoy!
Joseph Guyler Delva's latest Reuters report on Haiti, published in Friday's NYTimes, is one hell of a promo piece for Lavalas Family - "the largest political party...of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the poor masses."
Next Delva, whose allegiance to Aristide is pretty up front, boldly refers to Lavalas as "the party that has dominated politics for 20 years" - when that party did not even exist 20 year ago! Indeed the Lavalas concept only emerged in 1987, in a defiant song of the Tèt Ansanm (Heads Together) peasant choir, "Nou se Lavalas / N ap pote y'ale" (We are the flood / we'll drag them out), following a massacre of peasant activists in July that year. Aristide, who took part in a fiery memorial for the victims of the massacre later that year, would drop the first two lines of the chorus, "Yo pare pou nou / Ann pare pou yo" (They [i.e. the class enemy] are prepared against us / Let's prepare ourselves against them), only to borrow the Lavalas mantra as his campaign slogan three years later. His run for the presidency in the 1990 elections had been under the auspices of the center-left coalition FNCD. Lavalas Family as a political party only goes back a decade ago.
Half way down in his article, Delva again tried to bamboozle his readers. "Aristide, whose movement forced Jean Claude `Baby Doc' Duvalier from power in 1986...," he wrote. Neither Aristide nor "his movement" played any such role. The epicenter of the upheaval that led to the demise of the Duvalier dynasty was in Gonaives, not in Port-au-Prince where the regime was at its strongest. Aristide played a minimal role, if any, in Baby Doc's downfall. Delva knows this too well. But that knowledge doesn't stop him and his fellow Lavalas propagandists, intent on rewriting Haiti's recent history to satisfy their leader's hegemonic and megalomaniac ambitions.
Delva quite cleverly manages to write about the hardline "Aristide or Death" wing of Lavalas, without any mention of that faction's year-long campaign of bloodletting violence and lawlessness. He successfully manipulates Amnesty International's latest report on Haiti to make it seem as if Amnesty's condemnation of "deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, rape, death threats and intimidation" were only directed at the interim government. In the process, Delva managed to publish a priceless pro-Aristide piece without any negative subtext, the same week that two devastating administrative reports issued in Haiti and on the internet were laying bare the shocking details of rampant and systematic corruption involving both Aristide's Foundation for Democracy and the highest levels of his administration, throughout the duration of his second term in office. "Nice work if you can get it." But that will not stop the Aristide propagandists from whining that their boss is getting a bad rap in the mainstream media!
The reports in question are available in plain text at
www.haitipolicy.org. And now I'm waiting for the Lavalas fellow travelers who tried to discredit earlier reports of the regime's corruption with their bad faith cries for "proofs," when such reports mattered most, to publicly make their "mea culpa" - if they are not utterly shameless hypocrites. But I will not be holding my breath...
08-03-05, 04:42 PM
Guyler c Delva Unmasked/
Note of Protest to Reuters 
Linear Mode
Similar Threads 
