A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

"He was shooting at me. A soldier, his face hidden in the shadow of his helmet, raised an automatic rifle and fired. His bullets were hitting everywhere, and the fragments of glass and pavement were bouncing off my body. I have never been so aware of anything as I was at that moment."

Jean-Bernard Diederich, a photographer working on this week's World story about Haiti's tragic attempt at free elections, had arrived only a few minutes earlier at L'Ecole Nationale Argentine Bellegarde, a Port-au-Prince elementary ) school. What he saw was a polling place turned into a killing ground. Bodies lay everywhere, some riddled by bullets, others hacked to pieces by machetes. A band of 50 Tonton Macoutes, former henchmen of the Duvalier family, had slaughtered almost a score of people as they lined up to vote.

As Diederich and TIME Photographer P.F. Bentley began taking pictures, shots rang out. "The Tonton Macoutes and the army were coming back to finish the job, to kill the journalists," said Bentley. "We raced toward the back door of the school, running over bodies as we left. A British reporter in front of me was hit in the lower leg. We were totally defenseless: no guns, just cameras." Still under fire, Bentley scaled a 10-ft.-high cinder-block wall, scrambled over another wall strung with barbed wire and finally escaped down a maze of narrow passages.

Diederich, meanwhile, sprinted in a different direction. "I felt someone go down, but my eyes were fixed on a wall, topped with broken glass, near the school. The armed men were getting closer. I went over. When I reached a small courtyard, the people who lived there hid me and tended a gash in my hand." The U.S. embassy later sent an armored car to pick him up. "I was lucky I had a place to escape to," said Diederich, a Miami resident who was born in Haiti and is the son of TIME Reporter Bernard Diederich. "Those people took me into their homes when I was in danger, yet I cannot take them into mine now that theirs is in danger. In Haiti today, life has no value, especially for the ordinary folk. The future holds a lot of pain and suffering for a people who want only to live their lives in peace."