Haiti: `Don't blame Haitians for election fiasco'

The popular Fanmi Lavalas party was excluded from the November 28 Haitian elections.

The following article appeared on the op-ed page of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper, on December 1, 2010. Kevin Edmonds is a freelance journalist and graduate student at McMaster University’s Globalization Institute. Roger Annis is a coordinator of the Canada Haiti Action Network.

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By Roger Annis and Kevin Edmonds

December 1, 2010 – Those who counselled against holding a national election in Haiti in the midst of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis will take no comfort in the debacle it became. Our thoughts rest squarely with the tens of thousands of people afflicted with cholera, and the hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims still without shelter, clean water and hope. How much suffering could have been alleviated with the tens of million of dollars spent on a wasted electoral exercise?

The image of the brave and resilient Haitian people will inevitably be stained by what the world has witnessed. Haiti, we are told by so many uninformed commentators, is hopelessly rife with “corruption”, “fraud” and “violence”. But that’s not correct and it’s not fair.

Yes, there was no shortage of electoral fraud on display on November 28. But it’s not true that this is the hallmark of elections in Haiti. The country has held four successful presidential elections in the past 20 years.

To achieve the first of those, in 1990, the people sacrificed greatly in a difficult and bloody four-year battle against the country’s wealthy elite. The latter sought to recover what was lost with the overthrow of the Duvalier tyranny in 1986 by transferring political rule to the ousted dictator’s army. Ultimately, that failed. But not without a high human toll. No one knows more the value of a free and fair election than ordinary Haitian people themselves.

The current election was imposed on Haiti, courtesy of Washington, Ottawa, Paris and the UN Security Council. The dust had barely settled from the earthquake when they began to press for it. They footed the bill, to the tune of at least $25 million. They are the ones to be held accountable, for there was no shortage of voices in Haiti and abroad crying foul and calling for a different political course.

Why were these voices not heeded? Sadly, November 28 was the latest step in a long and protracted effort by Haiti’s elite and the wealthy powers of the world to disenfranchise the Haitian people and strip them of their national sovereignty.

Following 10 years punctuated by a military coup and incessant foreign interference, the disenfranchisement effort resumed in earnest following the election in 2000 of a government of social reform, headed by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The elite opposition boycotted the election, but to little avail. The people voted overwhelmingly for Aristide. His party, Fanmi Lavalas, won 72 of 83 parliamentary seats.

Impartial observers declared the election fair. But the opposition called for a boycott of aid and assistance to the government, the opening shot in a protracted drive to overthrow it. The US, Canada and Europe obliged, pressuring international financial institutions to withhold aid funding. One of the victims of the aid embargo, as documented by Partners in Health in a comprehensive study in 2008, “The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti”, was a government plan to build water treatment facilities in the very Artibonite region where cholera broke out.

Four years later, the elected government was overthrown in a bloody paramilitary assault that received political as well as military backing from the US, Canada and France. The much-hated UN Security Council mission called MINUSTAH was created in May of that year.

In the 2006 election, a clumsy effort was made to steal the result from the presidential candidate favoured by the popular majority, René Préval. The people accepted him, reluctantly, as a stand-in for Fanmi Lavalas because the party’s leaders were either in exile (Aristide) or in prison (Jean Juste, Auguste, Neptune, many others).

But even mild-mannered Préval was too much for the elite to stomach. They tried, but failed, to block his election. Regretfully, he became the pliant president they wished for, holding down, for example, the factory minimum wage, and failing to aggressively apply the laws of eminent domain against specious landowners following the earthquake so that temporary shelter could be constructed more rapidly.

In 2009, the Préval-appointed electoral council issued its first formal ban against Fanmi Lavalas participation in elections, in the partial senate election that took place in April and June. As a result, voter turnout was less than 5 per cent. The council repeated that ban in the election that was supposed to take place in February 2010 and rolled that decision forward to apply to this latest one.

So how can Haiti recover from this foreign-sponsored electoral disaster?

First, as if it needs stating, the candidates calling for the election to be cancelled should be heeded. As well, a new Provisional Electoral Council needs to be formed. Haitians have been demanding this in countless demonstrations over the past seven months; those candidates now crying foul are doing so late in the game.

Second, the foreign powers in Haiti should respect the sovereign will of the country and its institutions in the reconstruction effort. Haitians need social cohesion and a rights-based plan for national recovery. Foreign assistance could help such a process by cooperating with Haitian authorities and bending over backwards to assist the creation of public services and other social institutions that strengthen Haitian capacity.

Third, MINUSTAH needs to prepare an orderly departure from the country. It was already reviled by many Haitians as symbolising the loss of sovereignty in 2004; now it stands accused of being the likely source of the cholera outbreak, via its Nepalese contingent, and of backing a fraudulent and undemocratic election.

Finally, and above all, the humanitarian crisis requires urgent attention and much more resources. Notwithstanding the sacrifices and heroism of so many Haitians and their allies, the international aid effort has proven flawed and insufficient. A renewed influx of resources and commitment is required.

In Haiti, ‘international community doesn't know which way to turn'

By Roger Annis

November 30, 2010 – Canada Haiti Action Network --The big powers that pressured for the November 28 election and then paid for it are today left not knowing, "which foot to dance on", according to Montreal La Presse columnist Agnes Gruda.

She writes in the November 30 edition that she witnessed Sunday's election and the two weeks leading up to it, and after listening on Sunday to CARICOM's Colin Granderson urging Haitians to get out and vote, she concluded, "Colin Granderson does not live on the same planet as I". She said that many Haitians wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so by an unbelievable combination of a poorly organised election and a regime determined to have its preferred candidate prevail.

She concludes her article by saying that a delicate showdown is underway in Haiti. "On the one side, there is a threatened regime that wields some power. On the other, some candidates who can rely on the people's anger. And between them, an international community that no longer knows which way to turn. And which is wondering to what degree it can support a hated regime without risking a social explosion – the first signs of which are already being felt in some parts of the country."

Truth be told, the big powers lording it over the Haitian people can hardly be considered to be "between" the governing regime and the people; they are a constituent part of the regime. Like the Préval government, they are now engaged in a delicate dance to extricate themselves from a political disaster of their own making.

Where does the government of Canada stand? Canada's largest circulation daily newspaper publishes a short, sharp editorial today, "Haitian election: Don't let fraud prevail". Canada's government is caught in an impossible squeeze. It wanted an election that would deliver a pliant government to it and its allies. It paid C$6 million to get it. But all of Canada watched the predictable unfolding of the electoral spectacle and is aghast. The Toronto Star editorial expresses the view of most people who would have seen or heard the news: Don't let fraud prevail! So what to do?

Perhaps the backing off of two of the leading candidates – Martelly and Manigat – from their call on election day to cancel the whole thing offers an out. Each candidate changed its stance on condition, of course, that he or she be declared one of the two candidates to pass onto a second round of voting. They want a vote count that would deliver this result. But how would that look to the world?

UN officials have gone out on a limb to defend the election. Yesterday, in a panel discussion on CBC Radio One's The Current, UN Deputy Special Envoy on Haiti Nigel Fisher gave a strong defence. The OAS/CARICOM observation mission (including the aforementioned Colin Granderson) issued a statement also backing the election. But the statement contains reservations that bizarrely contradict their argument in favour.

Fisher acknowledged on the CBC panel that there was, "No real grassroots political organising represented in the election." That was assured by the banning from the election of the largest grassroots party in Haiti, Fanmi Lavalas, by the country's appointed and unconstitutional electoral council, with the backing or acquiescence of Fisher and his MINUSTAH police/military occupation force.

The Globe and Mail's trusteeship

Canada's largest circulation daily had editorialised in favour of the election. On November 29, it published a news article very damning of the exercise. Today, it is thinking...what? The only hint is a letter it publishes today. It is the only letter on Haiti that the newspaper has published throughout the run-up to the election, and it projects a bizarre future for Haiti – complete foreign takeover. Written by a David Lieber of Montreal, it says, "Canadian Ambassador to the UN, John McNee, should table a motion in the General Assembly for Haiti to be put under United Nations trusteeship for four years."

In Lieber's fantasy world, former governor general Michaelle Jean would head the country's reconstruction committee, Stephen Lewis would serve under her and Paul Martin would direct Haiti's finances. One can only imagine what Her Excellency and messrs Lewis and Martin think of the Globe's, er, Mr. Lieber's, ravings.

Sane people like me can't get letters or commentaries published in the Globe and Mail for love or money. But you can read some that were sent to the editor anyway, here on the Media Watch page of the CHAN website.