On the morning of October 25 last year, respected Haitian journalist Roberson Alphonse was on his way to radio station, Magik9, to take up duties as a talk show host in the troubled city of Le Cayes.
Less than eight days later, he was painfully and frantically leaving a hospital bed still emotionally traumatised and with bullet fragments in his arms—scrambling to exit the country out of fear of a follow-up attack that would complete the work of would-be assassins.
At 47, Alphonse had developed a reputation for fearlessness both through his work as a radio broadcaster and as a senior reporter with Le Nouvelliste newspaper – the country’s oldest, most widely circulated and authoritative newspaper founded in 1898.
In many areas of Haiti small entrepreneurs, like the one pictured here, are out of business.
Wesley Gibbings
The day before the attack, Le Nouvelliste carried a story by the journalist headlined: Silencing the Blood, with accounts from relatives of those who had been killed in the escalating violence.
What he recorded was a sense of despair and “a loss of faith … in the justice system.”
Alphonse had always thought he could someday become the subject of the media’s prolific reporting on criminal violence, but not so soon and not at a time when journalists were needed to tell the story of a crumbling nation.
“As journalists, we are never comfortable when we are the story,” he says.
Just over a year before the attempt on Alphonse’s life, President Jovenel Moise had been assassinated. It was an act that sparked some of the worst violence in recent years.
Alphonse as he spoke with T&T Guardian via Zoom
In the process and in one year alone, last year, eight journalists were killed and an uncounted number of them kidnapped or disappeared without trace. This represents a small fraction of civilian casualties.
Even as Alphonse was being interviewed last Friday, March 17, the managing director of Radio RCH 2000, Lebrun Saint-Hubert, became yet another kidnap victim. He was taken by unknown attackers in Delmas, the very area in which Alphonse was shot and which is now a hot spot for gang violence and control.
A February report of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) noted that “at the beginning of 2020, a new configuration of gang alliances emerged” in neighbouring Cité Soleil – a commune that borders Delmas in the metropolitan Port-au-Prince area.
