Michèle Montas
Michèle Montas | |
|---|---|
| File:Michelemontas.jpg | |
| Spokesperson of the United Nations | |
| Assumed office January 1, 2007 | |
| Preceded by | Fred Eckhart |
| Head of French UN Radio | |
| Spokesperson for the President of the General Assembly | |
| In office 2003–2004 | |
| Personal details | |
| Nationality | Haitian |
Michèle Montas is an award-winning journalist from Haiti and current Spokesperson under UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon since 1 January 2007. Prior to her appointment, Ms. Montas headed the French unit of UN Radio. In 2003-04, she served as the Spokesperson for UN General Assembly President Julian Robert Hunte soon after she fled to New York from Haiti.[1]
Montas began her journalism career in Haiti in the early 1970s with her husband, Jean Dominique, a prominent anti-government journalist. Dominique's station, Radio Haiti-Inter, was attacked several times in the 1980s and 1990s, and the couple was forced to flee the country twice to briefly live in exile. Dominique was assassinated in April 2000 after broadcasting increasingly strident criticisms of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's party on his program. (Aristide was not in power at the time.) Montas took over the radio station, but shut it down in February 2003 and fled to New York after her bodyguard was gunned down in an attack on her home and she received several death threats.[2]