Jean Dominique Eulogy

by Jonathan Demme
April 7, 2000

The coward with the pistol, apparently an expert at snuffing out the life of a great human being, must have studied my dear friend Jean Léopold Dominique’s routine very closely in the days preceding his assassination at 6:15am on Monday, April 3.  Armed only with his notes for the day’s 7:00am broadcast, Jean was shot four times in the head moments after his car passed through the gates of his station, Radio Haiti.

Jean Dominique was born in 1931, one of twelve children.  Jean’s father was an employee in a private business and a member of the petit-bourgeois portion of the elite.  He instilled a strong sense of Haitian pride in his children, and made Jean see himself not as a light-skinned member of the elite, but rather as a direct descendant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Toussaint L’Ouverture, the liberated African slaves who defeated Napoleon’s army in creating the world’s first free Black republic in 1804.

As a teenager, Jean became involved with outreach projects organized by the Catholic church to improve living conditions in rural communities.  He attended the Haitian Agricultural School in Damien for four years, then went on to the University of Paris from 1952 through 1957, where he studied agronomy, specializing in plant genetics.

It was at the University that Jean first fell under the spell of cinema, the idea of the movies that "get unleashed in our heads by the movies on the screen." Later, after his return to Haiti, Jean formed a cine-club, showing European films provided by the foreign embassies. The Tontons Macoutes shuttered the club after a showing of Alain Resnais’ NIGHT AND FOG, a devastating documentary meditation on Auschwitz, because the film brought into sharp relief Haiti’s own ongoing Auschwitz, Fort Dimanche, the military prison/torture chamber where two of Jean’s brothers-in-law would die at the hands of the Macoutes.

Jean grew up in a land of oppression, a land ruled by tyrants and despots throughout his nation’s history.  He came of age under one of the most dreaded dictators of all, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier.  Meanwhile, this product of the privileged "elite" fell madly, hopelessly in love with his country and its vast peasant population.  Returning to Haiti in the late 50s after completing his studies in Paris, Jean began a career in applied agronomy, working with rural peasants and urban slumdwellers alike in an effort to help his countrymen better cultivate their soil, enrich their crops and by extension, empower their lives.

When Jean’s brother, Lieutenant Philippe Dominique, a renegade Haitian army officer, was killed in a valiant attempt to topple Papa Doc Duvalier from power, Jean was jailed for six months, during which time he was tortured as a perceived possible enemy of the state.

Released from the penitentiary, Jean found work as a freelancer at Radio Haiti, and two years later bought the station himself.  Jean’s mission now was to harness the power of the airwaves as an instrument of social change.  This grand notion was, in Jean’s words, a very, very risky business, flying in the face of a medium hitherto used solely as entertainment for the upper classes, or as a mouthpiece for the government.

Jean introduced two extraordinary new ingredients to his country’s broadcast stew.  First, he brought Creole to the radio, the language of the uneducated population, where only French, the language of the elite, had previously been heard.  For the first time, the overwhelming majority of the population could now understand what was being broadcast.  And with this, came News.  Real news.  News of other oppressed populations around the world, struggling against tyrants not unlike the Haitians’ hated dictators, the Duvaliers.  News from Nicaragua and Iran, of the dethroning of Somosa and the Shah by popular movements in those countries.  Inspiring news.  Consciousness-raising news.  In Jean’s words, "people decipher the foreign news, and digest it in their own culture and they start responding.  We send them newsmen, journalists, to pick up information.  They come to the station to give us information.  People start living the daily news.  For them, information this became their life."

Fledging people’s movements started to arise all over Haiti.  Things started heating up around Duvalier’s palace.  So much so that on November 28, 1980, the Tontons Macoutes invaded Radio Haiti, destroying the station’s equipment, arresting Jean’s wife Michele Montas and his daughters, and forcing Jean into the sanctum of the Venezuelan Embassy and finally into exile in New York with Michele for the next six years.

But the grassroots movement that Jean helped create continued to grow and erode Baby Doc’s power.  Days after Duvalier finally fled Haiti for asylum in France, on February 7^th 1986, Jean and Michele returned to Haiti.  Tortured under Papa Doc, exiled under Baby Doc, 70,000 people were at the airport to welcome Jean Dominique home from exile.  The crowd escorted Jean and Michele to the radio station for a jubilant and spontaneous celebration that spread throughout the surrounding streets for miles.  With an avalanche of donations more of them measured in cents than in dollars the equipment was repaired and bigger transmitters installed.  With the promise of Haiti’s first presidential election scheduled for one year hence a lifelong dream Jean Dominique was back on the air.  With no lurking secret service in evidence to "play cat and mouse" with, Jean ratcheted up the ante, spewing Creole, people power, unbridled criticism of the still deeply-entrenched dynasty Duvalier left behind, and scathing indictments of the United States’ efforts to "discreetly" continue the American control of Haiti even in the face of a new democracy that our country had enjoyed throughout the century.

Jean’s dream of free elections finally came true when more than two million Haitians voted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into office on December 16, 1990.  Twice offered the Cabinet position of Minister of Information by President Aristide, Jean Dominique demurred both times, responding that he could do his best for Haiti outside the government, at his microphone, where he would be free to help the President in the best way he knew how by criticizing, rather than publicizing, the powers-that-be.

When the Haitian Military in cahoots with the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency and a consortium of international business interests overthrew President Aristide’s government in 1991, Radio Haiti was once again attacked in a barrage of bullets, and Jean and Michele again found themselves exiles in New York.

They returned to Haiti for the last time in 1994, after the ruling junta was routed by U.S. armed forces and Aristide was restored to the National Palace.  Once again, Jean rebuilt his station and resumed his mission of broadcasting the truth as he saw it. As the political and social situation deteriorated over the remainder of the past decade, Jean remained at the microphone, perhaps quixotically, speaking with the voice of the people, for the people, to the people until the morning he was gunned down in the shadows of his studio.

I remember with love and admiration and heartbreak the words that Jean said to some friends in New York in ’94, as he prepared to return for his last bout with the demons that haunt Haiti, that "the moment may have come to go back to Haiti, trying to reopen the station, and trying to participate again at this democratic process that was one of the reasons of my life, and of my work in Haiti.  So now I am just at the eve of another season of my life.  Trying to reopen the station, that I build for 24 years now, a radio station."