Haiti  

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PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Around 200 protesters demanding that Haiti’s outgoing President Rene Preval leave office immediately set up burning barricades on Monday and threw stones at police and U.N. peacekeepers in the capital, witnesses said. 

Haitian riot police fired some shots in the air to try to disperse the demonstrators, who shouted “Preval must go” and set tires and piles of garbage ablaze in a central square in Port-au-Prince.

A deciding second round of Haiti’s presidential election is scheduled to be held on March 20 to choose a successor to Preval, whose five-year mandate formally ends today February 7 in the poor, earthquake-battered Caribbean nation.

Preval, who could not stand for another consecutive term, has parliament approval to stay on if necessary until May 14 so he can hand over to an elected successor, but some opponents want him to step down in favor of a provisional government.

“Today at noon, Preval’s mandate expires. He will no longer be the constitutional president. We are going to block the whole country to make him go,” said Michel Frederick, 40, one of the protesters.

Under heavy international pressure, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council announced on Thursday that former first lady Mirlande Manigat and popular musician Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly were the two top finishers in chaotic elections held on November 28, and that they would contest the March run-off.

The Haitian electoral authority’s announcement was in line with a recommendation by Organization of American States (OAS) experts revising preliminary results from the vote, which had originally put government technocrat and Preval protege Jude Celestin in the run-off with Manigat. The OAS electoral experts cited significant irregularities in first round vote tallies.

The latest political protest in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest state, which is struggling to recover from a devastating 2010 earthquake, came amid reports that ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was 

Haiti Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive (centre) and Jose Miguel Insulza (left), Secretary General of the Organisation of American States, look on during a press conference on the election crisis in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The OAS’s attempt to rubberstamp the flawed December presidential election has run into trouble. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

It didn’t get much attention in the media, but US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did something quite surprising on Sunday. After taping interviews on five big Sunday talkshows about Egypt, she then boarded a plane to Haiti. Yes, Haiti. The most impoverished country in the hemisphere, not exactly a “strategic ally” or a global player on the world’s political stage.

Inquiring minds might want to know why the United States’ top foreign policy official would have to go to Haiti in the midst of the worst diplomatic crisis she has faced. The answer is that there is also a crisis in Haiti. And it is a crisis that – unlike the humanitarian crisis that Haiti has suffered since the earthquake last year – Washington really cares about.

Like the Egyptians, Haitians are calling for free and fair elections. But in this case, Washington will not support free and fair elections, even nominally. Quite the opposite, in fact. For weeks now, the US government has been threatening the government of Haiti with various punishments if it refuses to reverse the results of the first round of its presidential elections. Washington wants Haiti to eliminate the government’s candidate and leave only two, rightwing candidates to compete in the second round.

Just three weeks ago, this looked like a done deal. The Organisation of American States (OAS) expert verification mission compiled a report on Haiti’s 28 November presidential elections, and on 10 January it was leaked to the press. The report recommended moving the government’s candidate, Jude Celestin, into third place by just 0.3% of the vote; leaving rightwing candidates Mirlande Manigat, a former first lady, and Michel Martelly, a popular musician, in first and second place, respectively. This was followed with various statements and threats from US and French officials that Haiti must accept this change of result. US officials strongly implied that aid to Haiti would be cut if the government didn’t do as told. It looked as if desperately poor Haiti would have to give in.

But then, there was pushback. President Préval noted that six of the seven “experts” from the OAS mission were from the US, Canada and France – the three countries that led the effort to overthrow Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004.

Then, the OAS report was found to be so deeply flawed as to be worthless in determining which candidates should proceed to a second round. The report, for instance, ignored the problem of more than 150,000 missing votes that – given the voting patterns in the areas affected – would have shifted the result to Celestin. It also examined only a sample of the tally sheets, and did not use any statistical inference to estimate how the 92% of the tally sheets that it did not examine might have affected the result.

The call for new elections began to grow. It was joined from the start by 12 presidential candidates who had competed in the deeply-flawed first round, in which only about a quarter of Haitians voted. This was down from 59.3% in the previous presidential election, partly because the country’s most popular political party – Fanmi Lavalas, which supports Aristide – was excluded from participating in the election.

Préval himself has been reported in the press to support new elections.

Then, on Tuesday 1 February, the congressional black caucus leaders, in their first break with the foreign policy of the Obama administration, issued a statement that they called a “response to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s support of the OAS report”:

“The CBC urges the United States and the international community to uphold the ideals of fairness and support a new Haiti election process that is free and fair, respecting the rights of the Haitian people.”

But it is the rights of the Haitian people that Washington does not want to respect. Another reason that very likely contributed to Hillary Clinton’s sudden trip to Haiti on Sunday was that the Haitian government decided it is willing to issue a diplomatic passport to former President Aristide, who has been kept in exile in South Africa since the US-organised coup ousted him. Recent WikiLeaks cables show that the United States has pressed hard to keep him out of Haiti, and to prevent him from exerting any influence from abroad. And his party, Famni Lavalas, was banned from participating in the November elections, as in other elections since he was removed from the country on a US plane in 2004. Aristide issued a statement on 19 January that he was ready to come home.

It may seem strange that US officials care so much about controlling a government as poor and without influence as Haiti, but they clearly do. They not only helped organise the 2004 coup, but had also contributed to the death squads who terrorised the populace after Aristide was overthrown the first time in 1991.

The amazing thing about the last two months is that US officials are meeting such resistance from within Haiti, and from the Congressional Black Caucus – which forced then President Bill Clinton to restore Aristide to the presidency in 1994. Signs of further international support for democracy in Haiti were shown on 26 January, when the OAS resolution on Haiti failed to endorse the recommendations of its own mission’s report – due to resistance from left governments in Latin America. And the Rio Group, which includes 23 nations encompassing almost all of Latin America and the Caribbean, was also blocked by left governments from passing a resolution on Haiti.

The government of Haiti is scheduled to announce its decision on the elections on Wednesday, and it may well fold under the enormous pressure from Washington. But with Aristide’s return imminent, the battle is far from over.

It is not only Egyptians who want free and fair elections, and not only the Arab world that is resisting US-backed tyranny.

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Haiti presidential candidate ‘may pull out’

(AFP) – 36 minutes ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Haitian President Rene Preval’s ruling party candidate Jude Celestin is considering withdrawing from the presidential race, Senator Joseph Lambert, a senior party official, said Tuesday.

Celestin could “withdraw his candidature in the next hours,” said Lambert, a senior official with the INITE (Unity in Creole) party, speaking on Radio Metropole.

In preliminary results of the November 28 presidential election made public by Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), Celestin would face off against former first lady Mirlande Manigat in a second round of voting.

However a monitoring team from the Organization of American States (OAS) regional bloc advised the CEP to revise its initial results because of widespread fraud.

If the CEP follows the advice of the OAS team, popular singer Michel Martelly would face Manigat in the second round run-off instead of Celestin.

Opposition candidates accuse Preval and the CEP of orchestrating massive fraud in favor of Celestin to ensure he made it through to the second round, which has now been delayed.

The United Nations has said it hopes the run-off will be held in mid-February.

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A year after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, an estimated 1 million people are still living in accommodation intended as temporary shelter, while millions of dollars were spent on an election that was effectively boycotted by the majority of Haitians. Photograph: Thony Belizaire/AFP/Getty Images What is it about Haiti that makes the “international community” think they have the right to decide the country’s fate without the consent of the governed? Yes, Haiti is a poor country, but Haitians have fought very hard, and lost many lives, for the right to vote and elect a government.

Yet, on 28 November, nearly three quarters of Haitians did not vote in the presidential and parliamentary elections. That is what we at the CEPR found when we went through 11,181 tally sheets from the election. This is a ridiculously low turnout for a presidential election.

Now, according to an AP report, the Organisation of American States has decided that the election should go to a runoff, finding that the top two finishers were former first lady Mirlande Manigat and the popular singer Michel Martelly. The OAS is proposing a runoff between presidential candidates who received about 6% and 4%, respectively, of the electorate’s votes in the first round.

One reason that most Haitians did not vote is that the most popular political party in the country, Fanmi Lavalas, was arbitrarily excluded from the ballot. This was also done in April 2009, in parliamentary elections, and more than 90% of voters did not vote. By contrast, in the 2006 presidential elections, participation was 59.3%. And it has been higher in the past, even for the parliamentary (non-presidential) election in 2000.

Haitians have taken great risks to vote when there was political violence, and have been pragmatic about voting even when their first choice was not on the ballot (as in 1996 and 2006). But the majority won’t vote when they are denied their right to choose. This is the big story of the election that most of the major media have missed entirely.

Our recount of the vote also showed that even among the votes cast, there was a sizable proportion of votes – about 12.7% – that were never received by the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) or were quarantined by it. This quantity is much higher than was previously reported by either the CEP or the OAS.

A statistical analysis of the vote totals found that some 8.4% of tally sheets had vote totals that were irregular (that is, with irregularities that could be expected to occur by chance less that one in a hundred times). Another 5.4% of tally sheets had obvious clerical errors – for example, total votes cast exceeding the number of registered voters at a voting booth. We did not include these errors among the irregular vote totals, because they did not necessarily affect the outcome. But the high percentage of clerical errors on the tally sheets further undermines confidence in the overall results.

Our analysis confirmed what many observers saw on the ground, including ballot box stuffing, fraud and people unable to vote because they did not appear in the registry. People in the areas hardest hit by the earthquake had much lower participation rates.

This election was the first round of an election that was supposed to proceed to a runoff election, which has now been postponed until February. The top three finishers were Manigat, Martelly and the government’s candidate, Jude Celestin. But since second and third place were separated by just 0.6 percentage points, there is no way – given the massive irregularities – to tell which two candidates would proceed to the second round.

Clearly, an election that was so severely flawed and plagued by irregularities cannot be considered legitimate. But even less excusable is the exclusion of the country’s most popular political party – the equivalent of banning the Democrats or Republicans in the United States. This “exclusion will undermine both Haitians’ right to vote and the resulting government’s ability to govern,” wrote 45 Democratic members of Congress to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on 7 October 2010. They asked her not to provide “funding for elections that do not meet these minimum, basic democratic requirements”. These pleas were ignored.

Haiti’s first and last democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown (for the second time) in a coup that Washington helped to bring about in 2004. According to his account, he was kidnapped and put on a US plane to Africa, where he remains in exile, in violation of the Haitian constitution and international law.

Three weeks ago, Ricardo Seitenfus, the OAS’s special representative to Haiti, was removed from his post for publicly criticising the role of the UN mission and the international community in Haiti. Last week, he revealed something even more damning:

“At the meeting of Core Group (donor countries, UN and OAS), something that seemed just creepy [was discussed]. Some representatives suggested that President Rene Preval should leave the country and we should think of an airplane for that. I heard it and was appalled.”

Washington and its allies, including the people who are currently making decisions about Haiti at the OAS, are pushing these illegitimate elections for the same reason that they overthrew Aristide, and will not let him back into his own country – in violation of the Haitian constitution and international law. These people want to determine who rules Haiti, without allowing the majority of Haitians themselves to decide. There will be resistance to this, as to the dictatorships and foreign occupations of the past. We can only hope that it does not result in similar levels of violence.