Paper hails end to ‘Duvalierism’

Press, 10 February 1986, Page 6

Paper hails end to ‘Duvalierism’

NZPA-AFP Port-au-Prince Haitians read their first uncensored local daily newspaper in 25 years at the week-end.

"A big farewell to DuvalierisnL and may it be forever,” said “Le Matin,” which was first on the streets of the capital. “Flight of President Duvalier and his wife. Shouts of Down with Duvalier, Down with the tontons macoutes,” said the banner headlines of the 79-year-old paper, which was the least timid of the normally supine daily press in the few months before the Duvalier regime fell. The President had been overthrown “because he had refused to follow the advice of and understand the logic or sensibleness of the ideas of the opposition and part of the press,” it said. He had also been forced to resign because he had gone back on promises to foreign Governments to liberalise his regime and because he had insisted that it was all right to keep the Life

Presidency under a democratisation process. The paper said he had preferred to answer “the cries and demands of the people with violence ... turning on faucets (taps) of blood” across the country.

As he "cleared off” he had left behind “corpses and rivers of tears” in “almost every family,” it said.

The capital’s two other dailies, “Le Nouvelliste” and the Government’s “Le Nouveau Monde,” have not yet appeared under the new regime. The weekly press, led by the magazines, “Le Petit Samedi Soir," “L’lnformation” and "Le Courrier,” had been more critical of the Duvaliers in the last few years than the dailies but were careful to print occasional articles praising the President and his family, sometimes extravagantly. Their editors had often been threatened or beaten by Government agents, but the publications were never formally closed. None has yet published a

post-Duvalier issue. But most important for Haitians, 75 per cent of whom cannot read, has been the return to the air of the Catholic Church’s Radio Soleil, whose extensive reporting of the demonstrations against the Duvaliers since November was a main factor in their fall. In recent years the written and spoken media has hidden behind the privileged dispatches of the local correspondent of Agence France-Presse, who is a French citizen, to report local politics. Relayed back to Haiti from the agency’s Paris headquarters, the dispatches are the only news agency service received in Haiti in French, the official national language. • The Haitian junta has announced the liberation of all political prisoners and the creation of a new Government comprising 13 Ministers and six secretaries of State. The junta took over after Mr Duvalier left on Friday.