#5005: There's no point comparing Arisitide with Papadoc (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: ROODY BARTHELEMY <kreyolco@hotmail.com>

To compare Aristide's present-day popularity with François Duvalier's 
then-political acumen is a hasty and fallacious exercise seeking to excuse 
some sort of political partisanry or personal intolerance against another 
individual.  Either way, such judgement denotes one's deliberate attempt to 
falsify two considerably important trunks of Haitian history with one more 
amusing fill-in-the blanks comment in the coq-à-l'âne style for feel-good 
purposes with a "whateveric" attitude. In Haitian history, particularly on 
the electoral aspect, 1957 and 1990 are far more than being different; these 
two periods are unrelated, in time and in facts.

1) Aristide popularity won him the 1990 elections (67% of the votes)away 
from the support of the Army, despite the blessing of the U.S. that was 
supporting Bazin, and in front of a strong presence of U.S.-led 
international observers. Ironically also, despite his popularity, Aristide 
only last seven months in power.  Aristide's presidential victory came up as 
a surprise [to the traditional Haitian political class, the Army, and the 
CIA] because nothing predicted his predensidentiability despite the 
charismatic social militancy that initiated his political popularity.

2)Contrarily to Aristide, F.Duvalier surprisingly won the 1957 
Army-controlled elections" with 679,884 votes from the reported 950.000 
voters who went to the polls on that 22 September 1957.  F.Duvalier had the 
official support of the Army [the same that was to organized those 
elections], the unofficial blessing of the U.S., and the total absence of 
international delegates as observers. The irony of that case again  was 
that, as the least popular among the candidates in that electoral race, 
F.Duvalier won the presidency and stayed in for life. Duvalier's 
presidential victory came up as a surprise [to the traditional Haitian 
socio-economic elites and the Haitian popular majority at large; the the 
then-opposition was systematically wiped off.

NOTES
What had happened with the most popular candidates? Fignole, the most 
popular among them all with his dreaded "rouleau compresseur", was exiled 19 
days after he was elected (like Aristide, 7 months). Jumelle, the noisiest 
and most emotional one, had withdrawn from the race two days before the 
elections [hum, very OPL-like]. As for L.Dejoie Sr., he was Duvalier's most 
direct target for hatred.  Dejoie's narrow-minded aristocratic political 
campaigning approaches provided much of the racial fuel Duvalier used to 
somehow sound convincing to his partisans and listeners.  Dejoie's political 
intransigeance had inadvertently contributed in changing for the worst the 
perception of "bourgeois" and "mulatre" in Haiti. The impact is felt to this 
day among Haitians, in and outside of our borders.

MORE NOTES
In his book "Written in Blood", M. Heinl reports in page 548: <<On Sunday, 
22 September [1957],some 950,000 Haitians went to the polls for a vote that 
had been thoroughly organized by the Army.  In what Jean-Pierre Gingras 
called "the perfect peacefulness of fixed bayonets," the elections came off 
smoothly enough.  Duvalier received 679,884 votes.  Dejoie trailed with 
266,992.>>

UNFAIR OR SQUARE ELECTIONS
1. Who'd gotten the other 3,124 votes? Abstention? Even if abstention, that 
shows an impressive 71% win for Duvalier. So why has history, historians, or 
even teledyòl, ever mentioned that he [F.Duvalier] swept the polls like the 
same is everywhere said about Aristide's 67% in 1990?
Beside the 16 December 1990 elections resulting in Aristide's presidential 
victory, there hasn't been any other electoral process through Haiti's 
history that has been judged fair, honest, and democratic? So it is not 
difficult, based on this observation, to conclude why the U.S. had to topple 
the only one fair Haitian electoral experience with a coup d'etat in less 
than six months.
The Haitian People has never been given before the opportunity to elect the 
leader(s) of its choices.  It ironically seems that this People is denied 
its right to elect its own leaders.

We should not be already talking about tyranny based on what has been done 
and what is yet to be done?

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