Haiti's Democracy in the Balance

'Baby Doc' Duvalier's return does not change the basic issue for Haiti: only an election re-run can thwart foreign interference

by Mark Weisbrot from Commondreams.org

The return to Haiti – and now, possible arrest – of the infamous former dictator, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, after 25 years in exile in the south of France, has made the headlines this week. But behind the scenes, the US state department and the French foreign ministry have been ratcheting up the pressure on the impoverished, earthquake-wrecked and cholera-stricken country of Haiti. The pressure is not to prosecute the dictator for his atrocities, as human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have recommended. The pressure is to force the government of Haiti to accept the decision of the United States and France as to who should be allowed to compete in the second round of Haiti's presidential election.

It is worth looking at the details of this international subversion of the democratic process in Haiti – just to see just how outrageous it is. The first thing to notice is how unusual it is for any electoral authority to change the results of an election without a recount of the vote. Imagine that happening in Florida in 2000, or Mexico in 2006, or in any close, disputed election with irregularities. It just wouldn't happen. There could be a recount and a new result; the original result could stand; or the election could be redone. But the electoral authorities don't just change the result without a recount.

Now, add into the mix that the electoral body seeking to change the result of the election is the Organisation of American States (OAS). More accurately, it is Washington, which controls the bureaucracy of the OAS in these situations (unless there is a lot of pushback from South America, as happened after the Honduran coup in 2009).

In fact, six of the seven members of the OAS "expert verification mission" are from the United States, Canada and France. France! Not a member of the OAS but the former slave-holding colonial power that was still forcing Haiti to pay for its loss of property (that is, the slaves who liberated themselves) until the 1940s. Apparently, the OAS couldn't find any experts in all of Latin America (though they found one from Jamaica) to review Haiti's election.

This is not a matter of political correctness; rather, it indicates how much Washington wanted to control the result of this OAS mission. These are the three governments that led the effort to topple Haiti's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. WikiLeaks cables released this week show that the United States also pressured Brazil to help keep Aristide out of Haiti after the coup. Since Aristide was, and remains to this day, the most popular politician in the country, the WikiLeaks cables show that Washington and its allies also worked to keep him from having any influence on the country from his forced exile in South Africa.

As it turns out, the OAS "experts" did a very poor job on their election analysis. They threw out 234 tally sheets, thus changing the election result. According to the OAS, the government candidate, Jude Celestin, was pushed into third place and, therefore, out of the runoff election. This leaves two rightwing candidates – former first lady Mirlande Manigat, and popular musician Michel Martelly – to compete in the runoff. The OAS has Martelly taking second place by just 3,200 votes, or 0.3% of the vote.

The first problem with the OAS mission's report is that there were more than 1,300 ballot sheets, representing about 156,000 votes, that went missing or were quarantined. This is about six times as many ballot sheets as the ones that the mission eliminated. Since these areas were more pro-Celestin than the rest of the country, he would very likely have come in second if the missing tally sheets had been included. The mission did not address this problem in its report.

The second problem is that the mission examined only 919 of the 11,181 tally sheets to find the 234 that they threw out. This would not be so strange if they had used statistical inference, as is commonly done in polling, to say something about the other 92% of ballot sheets, which they did not examine. However, this is not included in the leaked report.

Lacking the force of logic, the US and French governments are turning to the logic of force to get the result that they want. Journalism professor and author Amy Wilentz wrote this weekend in the LA Times:

"According to many sources, including the president himself, the international community has threatened Preval with immediate exile if he does not bow to their interpretation of election results."

These are not empty threats. Preval's predecessor, Aristide, was whisked out of the country on a US plane in 2004. And now the US ambassador to Haiti is making it clear, in mafia-godfather-style, that this is an offer he cannot refuse:

"US ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten said in an interview that the US government supports the OAS report and its conclusions. 'The international community is entirely unified on this point. There is nothing to negotiate in the report,' Merten said."

The French weighed in on Friday, AFP reports:

"France warned Haiti's government on Friday to respect a report by OAS poll monitors that is thought to call for President Rene Preval's preferred successor to drop out of the election race …"

So far, Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) hasn't caved. But the pressure and threats are very intense. Some of it appears to come from hard-right Republicans, whose influence on foreign policy in the western hemisphere has remained strong under the Obama administration and has increased with their takeover of the House of Representatives. Rightwing activists such as Roger Noriega, who was involved in the 2004 Haitian coup as President Bush's assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, are among those fighting to control the runoff election in Haiti.

It is quite possible that the hard right was responsible for the leaking of the draft OAS mission report. On Monday, OAS secretary general Jose Miguel Insulza – embarrassed and angered by the leak, and probably also by Washington and France's gross disregard for Haiti's sovereignty and democratic rights– sought to downplay the mission's report:

"The report, Insulza said, is based on "calculations" and not results. "It's not in our power to give results," he told the Miami Herald. "We are not publishing any kind of results."

Of course, the obvious solution would be to re-run the election, since nearly three-quarters of registered voters didn't vote in the first round, reflecting the fact that the country's largest political party – not coincidentally, the party of Aristide – was arbitrarily excluded. But Washington and its allies don't want to take any chances that they could end up with a free and fair election in Haiti, which hasn't led to their preferred outcome in the very few times that it has been allowed.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC.

Why Can't Haitians Get A Fair Election

by Robert Naiman from Commondreams.org

On November 2, Americans will have the opportunity to vote for their representatives in Congress, an election likely to affect whether the "normal" retirement age is raised for Social Security and how decisively President Obama moves to end the war in Afghanistan. There are many legitimate criticisms to be made of the electoral system in the United States as we know it. But it could be much worse. We could be confronted with the electoral system that Haitians are currently facing in elections scheduled for November 28.

In Haiti, as things are currently run, political parties are completely excluded from participation if the people currently in power don't like them, including Haiti's largest political party, the Fanmi Lavalas party of deposed and exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

It is a telling fact of our political-media culture that while American newspapers regularly carry articles, op-eds and editorials raising the alarm about democracy and human rights in countries where the U.S. has little influence, the major U.S. media are virtually silent about extreme violations of democratic rights in Haiti, a country where the U.S. has tremendous influence. (Two rare, praiseworthy exceptions have been the Miami Herald, which last month published this op-ed by Ira Kurzban, and the reporting of the AP's Jonathan Katz.)

In particular, the unfair elections that Haitians are expected to endure are expected to be paid for by foreign donors, including the U.S. There is no serious question whether the U.S. has influence it can use. Indeed, in Afghanistan, the U.S. and other Western donors, who pay for Afghan elections, told the Afghan government, unless you implement certain reforms, we're not paying for the election.

But, although both Republican and Democratic Members of Congress have called for the U.S. to use its influence in Haiti to ensure a fair electoral process, there has been so far no visible change in U.S. policy. Despite all the blather following the earthquake about how "this time it's going to be different, this time Haitians will have a say," it's not different this time. Not yet.

In June, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a report prepared under the direction of Republican Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Member. Senator Lugar's report called on the State Department to press the Haitian government to reform Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council so that political parties, including Fanmi Lavalas, would not be arbitrarily excluded from participating in the election. But, as far as anyone can tell, the State Department never said boo about it.

Now Representative Maxine Waters is circulating to her colleagues a letter to Secretary of State Clinton, urging Secretary Clinton to make a clear statement that elections must include "all eligible political parties" and "access to voting for all Haitians, including those displaced by the earthquake." Rep. Waters' letter urges that the US not provide funding for elections that do not meet these minimum, basic democratic requirements.

Shouldn't it be a no-brainer to say that the U.S. shouldn't pay for elections in Haiti from which the largest political party is excluded? If you agree, ask your Representative to sign the Waters letter for fair elections in Haiti.

Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy

Thousands of Haitians Face Risk of Forcible Evictions from Temporary Camps

Thousands of Haitians Face Risk of Forcible Evictions from Temporary Camps

from Demoncracynow.org

It’s been over seven months since Haiti’s devastating earthquake left up to 300,000 dead and displaced over 1.5 million. Only a small fraction of the displaced have found new homes, and those who’ve found shelter in temporary camps now face a new round of displacement. According to Haitian community groups, thousands of Haitians are at risk of forcible eviction from some of the 1,300 camps established since the quake. The evictions come at a time when reports show a rising number of rapes and sexual abuse in the aftermath of the quake, especially in the camps for the internally displaced.

Source Video: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/17/thousands_of_haitians_face_risk_of

Rush Transcript:

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: It’s been over seven months since Haiti’s devastating earthquake left up to 300,000 dead and displaced over 1.5 million. Only a small fraction of the displaced have found new homes, and those who’ve found shelter in temporary camps now face a new round of displacement. According to Haitian community groups, thousands of Haitians are at risk of forcible eviction from some of the 1,300 camps established since the quake. Last week, dozens of protesters held a sit-in at the remains of the National Palace to call for a moratorium on all forced evictions until alternative shelters are in place.
The threat of evictions comes as the international community is under increased criticism for failing to send aid money pledged at the international donors’ conference in March. According to the UN-sponsored Haiti Reconstruction Fund, only two countries—Brazil and Estonia—have paid the fully pledged amount. The United States, France, Canada and many other countries have failed to send their pledged aid. A recent review by CNN found that just two percent of total pledges have been delivered to Haiti.

AMY GOODMAN: But in addition to aid, calls are now growing for another form of payment to Haiti: reparations. This week, a group of prominent academics and activists published an open letter calling on France to repay an "independence debt" that it imposed nearly 200 years ago, after Haiti successfully won independence from France. Haiti was forced to pay France around 90 million gold francs up until World War II, which after interest and inflation is valued today at up to $40 billion.
For more on Haiti, we’re joined by three guests. Joining us by video stream from Ottawa, Canada, is Jean St.-Vil. He is a Haitian writer and activist.
Also joining us from Canada, down the highway in Montreal, is Vox Sambou. He is a Haitian hip-hop artist.
And joining us here in New York, Mark Schuller, just back from Haiti. He’s an assistant professor of African American studies and anthropology at the City University of New York, co-editor of the book Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction, also co-director and producer of the documentary film Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy. This summer he’s been studying aid delivery and living conditions in Haiti’s camps for internally displaced.
You’re just back. This crisis of the camps, the makeshift camps, bad as they are, people are being thrown out of them. Can you explain what’s happening?

MARK SCHULLER: Sure. Well, about 65 percent of the camps are owned by private landowners. And, you know, it’s been several months, and the government has no funds, as you know, to do any kind of—you know, to reimburse the landowners, and there’s no public will for such. So, about 20 percent of the camps have been closed between May and July. And I’ve been working with eight student assistants, and they discovered about another eight percent of camps that are either being shut down or under threat of being shut down.
AMY GOODMAN: You visited a hundred camps. You just came back Sunday night?

MARK SCHULLER: Yeah, I came back Sunday night. My students visited a hundred camps. I went and visited about thirty. I did a follow-up visit, so...

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And can you describe the conditions in the camps—sanitation, water, security?

MARK SCHULLER: Sure. The best—quote-unquote, "best" camps are the ones that are officially managed by NGOs. And even those, you know, the conditions are bad. You know, the tents, as you know, rip. You know, it’s a hundred degrees every day. It’s been—you know, there was this period of seven days in a row where it rained every night. So, you know, at several camps that I visited, about 50 percent of the tents had been ripped. The tents had been ripped. And these are the best-managed camps. Other camps, you know, there’s Place St. Pierre in Delmas 2, where there’s about 6,000 families, and there’s only about fifty tents. The rest are tarps.

I mean, so the condition of security is a big issue, as you know. MADRE released a report about rape and violence against women. And, you know, tents don’t offer any kind of security. They can be easily ripped by, you know, a nail file. But even so, these tents offer even more—just a modicum of security, that you can store your stuff—you know, your driver’s license, your identity card, your birth certificate or money. But if you have a place like in Delmas 2—very, very crowded, there’s no tents at all—you have no place to store your stuff. So there’s absolutely no security at all. Many, many places, 30 percent of camps, don’t have access to toilets. Twenty-seven don’t have access to water. So what people do is they, you know, go into a paper bag or a plastic bag, and they throw it in the ravine. The standard is twenty persons per toilet, and in many cases, you know, we’re talking about a hundred, 150 people per toilet. The conditions are very, very bad.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the conditions in Haiti’s camps for the internally displaced, we’re going to turn to a recent report that aired on the Al Jazeera English program Fault Lines. Al Jazeera’s Sebastian Walker interviewed residents of one camp near Port-au-Prince.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: While the official camp is home to just over 5,000 refugees, some 40,000 more have fled here from Port-au-Prince after the quake. These squatters have marked out their own plots of land with rocks and sticks and set up makeshift shelters. But they told us that police had come just a couple of days ago, slashed their tarpaulins, and told them to vacate the land.

SQUATTER 1: [translated] You see how they use the machetes. They slashed through from the inside.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: [translated] Can you show us?

SQUATTER 1: [translated] Yes.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: Well, it looks like the roof has also been slashed with machetes, and there’s rain now coming into the shelter.

SQUATTER 2: [translated] They don’t want us to build here. The rich people need the land. They had the land surveyed so they can take over.

SQUATTER 3: [translated] When I got here, they had beaten two people up. They were barely left alive. One was the owner of the house. They threatened us and said they had come to get me. Had I been here, they would have killed me. But they couldn’t find me.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: This is supposed to be one of the few plots of land owned by the Haitian government. But it sounds like local police are enforcing the interests of private land speculators. Land tenure is one of the major issues holding up reconstruction and resettlement.

AMY GOODMAN: And for more on what’s happening in these camps, we’re going to turn to another Al Jazeera English report from Fault Lines, which looks at the rising number of rapes and sexual abuse in the aftermath of the quake, especially in the camps for the internally displaced.
LOUINA ALABRE: [translated] At night, it is hard. I never sleep. I lie down, but I never sleep.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: Louina Alabre lost her husband in the earthquake. Just three days later, her fourteen-year-old daughter Falande was attacked by a group of men.

LOUINA ALABRE: [translated] I saw her coming towards me. She was crying, and her clothes were bloody. I asked her why she was crying and where the blood came from. She said that she couldn’t talk about it. Then she told me that three men pulled guns on her, covered her face, and raped her.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: In May, Louina herself was raped when she went to use the latrines. The attackers were hiding inside.

LOUINA ALABRE: [translated] They put a gun in my ear and told me, if I screamed, they would shoot me.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: While there have been no thorough surveys and no official statistics, those working with rape survivors say that assaults in the camps are on the rise. Here, at a legal office in downtown Port-au-Prince, at least six different Haitian women’s groups meet to work out ways to protect women in the camps and provide support for survivors, many of whom come here for emergency medical and psychological care.

CAMP RESIDENT: [translated] I don’t see any of the NGOs helping to stop violence against women or finding a way to avoid it, or working with the government to reduce it. Every day, the violence multiplies.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: The leaders of at least one of the organizations, FAVILEK, told us they have not received any assistance from international NGOs. The FAVILEK organizers took us to the Savanne Pistache camp, where there have been numerous cases of rape and violent assaults on women in the past six months. Here, they introduced us to fourteen-year-old girl Maudeline Derival. Two months ago, she was sleeping with her mother in their shelter. About 4:00 in the morning, a man broke in with a gun and a machete. He told Maudeline’s mother that if she called for help, he’d kill her daughter. He then took Maudeline to a nearby ruined house, put a gun to her head, and raped her. When her father went to the police, they told him it wasn’t their problem.
A few shelters down, and we heard another story.
They came with machetes?
This woman told us her home had recently been broken into.
The only security this woman had was this tarpaulin stretched over the entrance to her tent.
The man who came in slashed it with a razor. He told her that if she didn’t have sex with him, he’d kill her. She was relatively lucky. She managed to call for help, and the man fled. They’re hoping that these testimonies will eventually make criminal investigations possible, in spite of the apparent indifference of the Haitian police. And while we saw no Haitian police here, we did find the symbols of international protection: the United Nations flag and blue helmets.
Can we speak to the commander?
This base houses some of the UN’s 10,000-strong force.
I’m going to tell them that there are cases of rape that are going on every night in this camp and just ask them what they’re trying to do about it.
We tried putting the women’s concerns to the base’s Sri Lankan commander.
How do they contact you? How—I mean, if there are cases of rape going on at night, and you guys are right here, can you not help?

UN BASE COMMANDER: Gentlemen, don’t take the video here. Understood?

SEBASTIAN WALKER: The commander has told me that neither he nor his soldiers are actually allowed to even speak to the civilian population of this camp without permission from his commanding officer. He’s given me the name of somebody at a UN base some distance from here, but he wouldn’t give out the telephone number, and there’s no way for these residents to even communicate with the soldiers who are living in this base.
It’s the disconnect between the international community in Haiti and the people that are here to help. And we saw it again on a night patrol with UN police.
This is one of the biggest camps in Port-au-Prince. There’s a plentiful supply of flood lights and electricity. That’s not always the case in all of the other camps around the city.
In addition to the lights, the UN is hoping that these officers, members of a newly arrived contingent of 600 female Bangladeshi police, will make it safer here and easier for women to report violence. But like most of the UN police force in Haiti, the Bangladeshis don’t speak the local language, Creole, or even French, making meaningful communication with the camp residents impossible.
A couple of days ago, we were in a camp where women were complaining of rapes going on every single night.

JEAN-FRANCOIS VEZINA, UN Police Spokesperson: Mm-hmm. Rapes? No, that’s not true.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: It was a very big camp. I mean, we spoke to people that are saying there were incidents on a very regular basis.

JEAN-FRANCOIS VEZINA: But actually, we don’t have any information about rapes every night, for sure.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: OK.
But when girls and women are being assaulted under the noses of international peacekeepers and so many thousands languish under the elements in ill-lit IDP camps, it’s no surprise that across the city you meet people who feel angry and abandoned by international NGOs and the United Nations.
There is a lot of hostility on the street towards the presence of NGOs. I mean, it must make things more difficult for you to kind of have—

EDMOND MULET, UN Mission Chief in Haiti: I don’t agree with that term of hostility on the streets against NGOs or international community.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: Well, everywhere you go, you see graffiti saying "Down with the NGOs! NGOs are thieves! And down with the UN!"

EDMOND MULET: Everywhere?

SEBASTIAN WALKER: Pretty much every neighborhood in Port-au-Prince has graffiti which—

EDMOND MULET: Yeah, no, I don’t agree with that assessment. I don’t see that. It’s some groups, maybe some minority groups.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: Have you seen any—

EDMOND MULET: Politically motivated, maybe, at this point, but I don’t think it really reflects the sentiment of the people of Haiti.

SEBASTIAN WALKER: Do you think there’s been a lack of focus on this transitional period? And do you think you may be taking your eye off the ball?

EDMOND MULET: As I said a while ago, I think that we did lose the sense of urgency that was there in the very beginning. And as I said, I think we have to reenergize that, and we’re doing that right now.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s from Al Jazeera English’s Fault Lines, produced by Jeremy Dupin and Andréa Schmidt, hosted by Al Jazeera English reporter Sebastian Walker. The special, "Haiti: Six Months On," is available on full at their website english.aljazeera.net.
When we come back, we’re going to go to Canada. We’ll stay here in New York, and we’ll talk about what’s happening in Haiti seven months later. Stay with us.