Jean Dominique - The Aristide Years

The Aristide Years

However, when the military overthrew the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, Dominique feared for his safety, and fled into exile again. He returned in 1994, after Aristide's return to power.

In the final years of his life, Dominique concentrated on issues of corruption and negligence. He criticised a pharmaceutical firm, Pharval Laboratories, for selling contaminated cough syrup that was responsible for the deaths of 60 children. Dominique also took on a former police chief Dany Toussaint (a former Haïtian Senator), whom he accused of having his rival for the position of Secretary of State for Public Security, Jean Lamy, assassinated. As a result of this, Toussaint's supporters surrounded and attacked the radio station building. The New York Haïtian radio station Radio Liberté had also reported that Dominique had received death threats via Toussaint's lawyers. This led Dominique to state "I know he has enough money to pay and arm henchmen," he said. "If he tries to move against me or the radio station and if I'm still alive, I'll close the station down and go into exile once again with my wife and children."

As a political adviser to Haiti’s President René Préval, he advocated holding elections but was criticized for his call to postpone them to ensure fairness.

Read more about this topic:  Jean Dominique

Famous quotes containing the words aristide and/or years:

    We shall prepare the coffee of reconciliation through the filter of justice. Through reconciliation, streams of tears will come to our eyes.
    —Jean-Bertrand Aristide (b. 1953)

    Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.
    Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)