16786: Karshan: Let Voters Choose by Brian Concannon, Jr. (Sun-Sentinel) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MKarshan@aol.com

Sun-Sentinel

Let Voters Choose

By Brian Concannon Jr.

September 22, 2003

The Bush administration is pressuring Haiti to halt preparations for
elections this year that are mandated by Haiti's Constitution and by an Organization
of American States resolution. The stated justification -- security conditions
-- is a smokescreen to protect opposition parties supported more by our tax
dollars than by Haitian voters. Supporting democracy means letting Haitians
choose their own leaders, even ones we do not like, and forcing politicians we do
like to win at the ballot box or not at all.

A U.S.-led multinational force, pursuant to a U.N. Security Council
Resolution, restored Haiti's first elected president in 1994. Since then two voluntary
democratic turnovers of presidential power -- the only two in the country's
troubled history -- have occurred. The hated army, a perpetual source of
instability, embezzlement and horror, was disbanded. Haitians have embraced
democracy, almost always voting in higher percentages than Americans do.

Yet we cannot seem to embrace this foreign policy success. In addition to
discouraging elections, the U.S. is leading a development assistance embargo
against the Haitian government that blocks urgently needed aid (including World
Bank loans) for health care, education and sanitation. We also prop up the
Convergence Democratique, a motley assortment of parties from across the spectrum,
united only in their opposition to the governing Lavalas party. Some of these
parties once had electoral credibility -- a plurality in the1995 Parliament.
But U.S. encouragement to adopt unpopular policies, attack the popular Lavalas
and ally with right-wing veterans of brutal dictatorships parlayed that
plurality into a 4 percent credibility rating (per U.S.-sponsored Gallup polls).

Haiti's democratic transition is far from complete. The country left behind
the human rights problems of dictatorship (army massacres, political prisons
and censorship), but struggles with human rights problems that challenge all
democracies (crime by private citizens, some of it politically motivated, and
non-systematic police abuses).

This year's elections are a critical and urgent step in building Haiti's
democracy. Critical because the political crisis must be placed in the hands of
the voters, who alone can resolve it. Urgent because most legislators' terms
expire in January. For these reasons, a resolution with unanimous OAS support
(including the U.S.) last September called for elections in 2003.

Both the U.S. and the CD claim that security conditions are not right for
elections. Haiti is a polarized society, with a young, inexperienced and
underfinanced police force and a short tradition of democratic elections. But it is
far less violent and polarized than war-torn Colombia, which had successful
elections last year, or the U.S. in 1968, when riots marred the Democratic
Convention and political assassinations claimed leading dissident Martin Luther King
and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy.

Haiti, like all democracies, needs an opposition, but it needs one prepared
to court Haitian voters, not just Washington policymakers.

Brian Concannon is an American human rights lawyer,who has worked in Haiti
since 1995, first with the U.N., then with the Bureau des Avocats
Internationaux, a law office set up by the Haitian government to help prosecute human rights
cases.

Copyright (c) 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel