On October 25, 2022, the 47-year-old journalist was the victim of a shooting while driving to work.
He is one of the great feathers of everyday life Le Nouvelliste and host of a popular radio show on the channel Magic9. It is precisely there that was going to Roberson Alphonse, like every day by car, when everything stopped. It was October 25, 2022, the 47-year-old journalist saw the automatic weapons pointed in the direction of his windshield then suddenly took the detonations, the car riddled with bullets and a violent pain throughout his body. Immediately, a passerby came to his aid, she made him a makeshift tourniquet and called the emergency services who took him to the hospital.
Four months later, he still has to undergo several operations to extract the projectile fragments he has in his arm, “But it is okayhe told franceinfo, I survived and now I have to move on to show the assassins that, no, they did not silence me, that I will continue to do my job, that is to say to carry the voice of the victims of violence, that’s why I decided to take up the pen and the microphone‘.
Roberson Alphonse in the running to win the World Press Freedom Prize
For Roberson Alphonse, we must continue to tell what is happening at the moment in Haiti, a republic adrift whose population is subjected to the law of armed gangs, blockades on the roads to racketeer, kidnappings, demands for astronomical ransoms, looting, gang rapes or even deaths. According to the latest UN report on the state of human rights in Haiti, in the past six months alone, and in the working-class neighborhood of Cité Soleil in Port au Prince alone, more than 260 people have been killed, shot for not cooperating with this or that gang.
UN special envoys have repeatedly called for the deployment of an international emergency force to help the overwhelmed police, but in the meantime, Haitians are on their own. And what remains in such a situation are the journalists, all those who continue to tell what is happening, because otherwise, as Roberson Alphonse says, “the blood drinks from the silence“. The journalist is in the running to win the Guillermo Cano Prize for Freedom of the Press which will be awarded on May 2, 2023 by UNESCO, a prize that would represent a strong symbol, not just for him, but for all those whose he carries the voice, the poor, the humble, the bereaved families, “and more particularly the children, for their dreams which oblige us”.