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19 de agosto de 2010 —

Wyclef Jean presidente do Haiti. Espetáculo, acusações e ameaças de morte.

www.nazen.tk


Sociedade do Espetáculo ficou no chinelo com essa..

Já tem gente dizendo que Wyclef Jean desviou dinheiro da Campanha feita nos EUA pra ajudar as vitimas do terremoto no Haiti >
Vamos ver no que no que vai dar estas acusações… enquanto isso o músico prepara sua campanha para presidente do Haiti (ha!)

Sobre a situação no país, recomendo as reportagens e fotos da série “Haiti: 6 months on” do The Guardian.

Abaixo o fato na Reuters e no The Guardian

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There are people saying that the “Haitian-American musician, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years paying Mr. Jean himself, along with his business partner”. Let’s check out fact and  see what we get from this. Mr. Jean’s video response is now on YouTube.

I strongly recommend THe Guardian series “Haiti: 6 months on”

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Wyclef Jean diz que ameaças não afetam sua candidatura a presidente do Haiti

JOSEPH GUYLER DELVA

DA REUTERS, EM PORT AU PRINCE

O cantor de hip-hop Wyclef Jean (ex-membro da banda Fugees, com Lauryn Hill) disse na quarta-feira que vem recebendo ameaças de morte, mas que elas não o impedirão de candidatar-se à Presidência do Haiti, seu país natal.

“Há gente que me vê como ameaça a seu poder e suas ambições. Não vou desistir. Minha vontade é servir ao povo haitiano. As intimidações e ameaças de morte não vão me deter”, disse Jean à Reuters.

O conselho eleitoral provisório do Haiti deveria ter concluído na terça-feira a lista de candidatos que atendem aos requisitos legais para se apresentarem na eleição de 28 de novembro, que vai escolher o sucessor do presidente René Préval.

Wyclef Jean não aparece em público a dois dias depois de receber ameaças de morte no Haiti

O anúncio foi adiado para sexta-feira para dar ao conselho mais tempo para decidir sobre questões legais relativas a vários dos 34 candidatos, incluindo Jean.

O cantor e compositor de 40 anos declarou que recebeu telefonemas anônimos em que pessoas disseram que ele será morto se não deixar o Haiti. Ele está escondido e não aparece em público há dois dias, mas falou em tom de desafio.

“Há muita gente que morreu antes de mim. Se eu tiver que morrer pelo povo haitiano, pelos jovens, estou preparado para morrer”, disse Jean.

Jean é muito popular no país caribenho. O Haiti se esforça para recuperar-se do terremoto devastador de 12 de janeiro que deixou até 300 mil mortos e destruiu boa parte da capital, Porto Príncipe.

A lei eleitoral haitiana requer que os candidatos tenham cinco anos consecutivos de residência no Haiti, além de outras exigências, como situação tributária em dia.

Jean deixou seu país aos 9 anos de idade para fixar-se nos Estados Unidos, onde iniciou e desenvolveu sua carreira musical internacional. Seus advogados dizem que ele atende aos requisitos para ser candidato à Presidência e mora no Haiti há mais de cinco anos.

Objeções de caráter legal foram feitas a vários outros candidatos, entre eles Jacques Edouard Alexis, ex-primeiro-ministro em duas ocasiões, e Leslie Voltaire, urbanista formado nos EUA e ex-ministro que desde o terremoto está intensamente envolvido na reconstrução do Haiti.

Jean rejeita as críticas de que lhe faltam experiência e qualificações para ser presidente, afirmando que o Haiti precisa de uma figura internacional capaz de atrair assistência e aliados.

Ele disse que sua segurança foi revogada recentemente, sem aviso prévio.

O chefe de polícia, Mario Andresol, disse que a proteção foi dada enquanto Jean estava atuando como embaixador informal do Haiti, e também por seu status de celebridade. Mas terminou quando ele se tornou candidato porque, se tivesse continuado, a polícia teria sido obrigada a providenciar a mesma segurança a todos os outros candidatos.

“Se houver uma ameaça específica, reagiremos de acordo, mas precisamos ser neutros e dar o mesmo tratamento a todos os candidatos”, disse Andresol.

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Wyclef Jean: President of Haiti in waiting or singer with stars in his eyes?

Musician will stand in election in his native country but critics ask what exactly he offers a nation in desperate need of leadership

Wyclef Jean is holed up in his recording studio in a basement in New Jersey laying down the final track of his latest album, the Haitian Experience. “One more time,” he says to his producer, and then brings the microphone up to his mouth and sings: “Wyclef, the Haitian president!”

Warming to his theme, he lets rip: “To all my DJs around the world, all hands on deck! The Haitian president: Wyclef!”

Now that the world knows the former singer with the multi-platinum group the Fugees turned solo star is running for president of Haiti, the key question is: why?

Jean answers the question in a roundabout way. He recalls a visit he made to Haiti just before Christmas with his four-year-old daughter Angelina. Ever one for the expansive gesture, Jean decided to spread a little joy for the children of Cité Soleil, the notoriously poor and at times violent slum in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

“I wanted to bring Santa Claus to the slums because these kids were poor but I didn’t feel like they shouldn’t have a Christmas, so I brought a carnival into the slum and I took a helicopter and I landed with my daughter and a Santa Claus right in the middle of Cité Soleil.”

He was staying as he always does in Haiti in the Hotel Montana. Three weeks later, on 12 January, the entire building was reduced to rubble in the massive Haitian earthquake.

“We escaped death by a few weeks. So that’s why I’m standing [for president]. Maybe I could have waited another 10 years for this, but this is urgent. Singing about policy is not enough. I’ve seen musicians sing about it all their life. I’ve taken the position to not only exercise what we are singing about, but to see if we could take five years to move this country into a better direction.”

The Jean candidacy will have an explosive impact on the presidential elections on 28 November. Unusually for Haiti, the race is wide open, with no obvious frontrunner. The current president, René Préval, cannot stand, having already served two five-year terms.

Into this mix blasts Jean, Haiti’s most famous son. He left the country when he was nine, relocating first to Brooklyn and then to northern New Jersey, later forming the Fugees with his cousin Pras Michel, and Lauryn Hill. Their second album, The Score, sold more than 18m copies worldwide and won two Grammys.

No one doubts that Jean is likely to have an electric presence when campaigning begins. But there are other doubts, like why should anyone in Haiti vote for a pop star as president at such a dire moment in its history?

“People can say, ‘Clef what do you know about politics and running the country, it sounds pretty insane Clef.’ But when you think of the connections and allies I’ve assembled around the world, I feel I can help move this country forward.”

Ramon Espinosa/AP
wycleaf jean if i waspresident

Wyclef Jean ‘in hiding’ after death threats over Haiti presidency bid

Jean adds that if he were the kind of rapper who went around saying “‘shake my booty, pop the champagne, let’s go,’ I would say we definitely don’t want a pop star like that running the country.” But he insists he is not like that at all, that he has always been political, even in his music.

He starts talking about himself in the third person: “This pop star was not necessarily trying to be famous. His first album was called Blunt on Reality. It talked about human rights, social issues.”

He says, even in naming the group they were thinking politically. “We wanted to call the group Refugees but when we went to register it we saw there was already a group with that name so we called it Fugees. So this pop star stands up, this pop star has always been an activist for the people.

“In my world and the stereotypes we usually have, us hip-hop artists are going to go to jail. Here you have an artist who says: my idea is not to go to prison, my idea is to run my country as president. He decides he’s at a point to transform music into policy.”

Jean has been actively involved in Haitian affairs since 2005, when he set up his charity Yéle Haiti that works with poor young people, helping them to read and write and awarding other educational scholarships. But as his Santa Claus story illustrates, it was the earthquake that really convinced him of the need to get directly involved in the running of his country.

He reached Port-au-Prince the day after the quake and says he was instantly sucked in. “I would say for two days I went missing. Two days underground, picking bodies up, taking them to a morgue, finding my friend [the rapper] Jimmy O dead in his car with a building toppled on him. I had his daughter in my arms.

“Then on the other side of town, my man gets shot. He’d been working for Yéle Haiti. At that point I lost it. Two days, just like being in the apocalypse.”

He says the experience made him question his faith, even as the son of a Nazarene preacher. “The streets filled with bodies of children and women that are pregnant, at that moment you think if there is a God why did he let that happen? But then you see a man with a nail in his hand, and he says we are building a new Haiti, and that’s how I came out of it.”

Almost seven months on from the earthquake, Haiti remains in an apocalyptic state. Hundreds of thousands of people are still living under plastic sheets despite the onset of the hurricane season, scrabbling for scarce food or work. Were Jean actually to win the election, where on Earth would he begin?

“There’s nowhere to go but up in Haiti right now, because everywhere you look there’s disaster. So the first thing you do is engage education and job creation.”

Secondly, he says, he would encourage people to move out of the ravaged capital by building new agrarian villages in the countryside. “Each village would be associated with a different food – mango village, sugar cane village. If you can provide a job opportunity and a home for people you can start to decentralise Port-au-Prince.”

Education would be the key, he says, because “until you learn to read and write, it’s called modern slavery”.

But first, before he can go to work on these policies, there’s an election he has to win, and if it is like previous Haitian elections it’s going to get dirty. He says he’s ready for anything that is thrown at him.

“Well you know politics is a combat sport and I respect that. And I’m good at judo.”

One of the brickbats that is certain to be hurled at him is the controversy that has raged over the financial handling of his charity following critical reports from the Washington Post and the website Smoking Gun. Yéle Haiti, which has raised about $9m (£5.7m) in disaster relief since January, has been accused of a range of financial irregularities, from making late tax filings to directing charitable funds towards Jean’s own private commercial interests.

In 2009, the foundation filed tax returns for the three previous years. Why so tardy? “If you make a mistake you have to admit that it’s a mistake. The taxes weren’t filed on time, so what do I do? I said, find me the best accountant because this foundation is going to the next level. So we brought in RSM McGladrey, and now everything is being filed on time.”

To the charge that an excessive amount of the donations of the charity goes into its administrative costs, Jean said he was unashamed about employing good staff. “We’re not going to stop administration because we need it and these people have to be paid well.”

The stickiest accusations have concerned payments from Yéle Haiti to Jean’s own businesses. They include $250,000 paid for television air time to the TV station Telemax, which Jean co-purchased in 2006, and more than $100,000 spent on a concert in Monte Carlo that Jean took part in, of which $75,000 went for backing singers and $25,000 to Jean himself through his recording company.

What does he say to the charge that some donations ended up in his personal coffers? “Wyclef took money for his own personal need? No, that didn’t happen. If anyone is going to suggest Clef is going to take personal money for himself, it’s ludicrous. No, we would never do that. My governance at the time, you can question that, but my honesty you can never question. I would never steal from my country.”

There is likely to be plenty more salvos and sniping when Jean launches his campaign in Haiti on Thursday. So does he really think he can win?

“Even if I lose, I do win,” he says. “The world will have known that in history there was a young man from Haiti who felt he wanted to do more than music, to engage in Haitian politics and help move the country forward. So in that sense I feel that even if I am to lose, I am to win.”

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Sobre

Blog @ nazen.tk

“Comentários islamofóbicos, anti-semitas e anti-árabes ou que coloquem um povo ou uma religião como superiores não serão publicados. Tampouco ataques entre leitores ou contra o blogueiro. Pessoas que insistirem em ataques pessoais não terão mais seus comentários publicados. Não é permitido postar vídeo. Todos os posts devem ter relação com algum dos temas acima. O blog está aberto a discussões educadas e com pontos de vista diferentes” (*)

O comunicador e ativista político, Nazen Carneiro, formado em Relações Públicas pela Universidade Federal do Paraná, foi correspondente internacional temporário de “Gazeta do Povo” em Teerã, no Irã. Já fez reportagens do Irã, Romênia, Turquia e Grécia, escrevendo sobre a relação do Oriente Médio com o mundo.

Tendo passado pelo Rádio, atua também como ativista cultural e produtor independente do evento mundial pela paz, Earthdance.

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