17313: Dailey: 17302 Holmstead- How to rig a Haitian Election

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Peter Dailey <phdailey@msn.com>

Mr. Holmstead is right!  Unlike the May, 1997 elections where massive
fraud and
intimidation took place on election day (see the Lissade Report,
commissioned
by the Preval government and then suppressed), the fraud in the May, 2000
parliamentary elections primarily took place in the counting.

This is why neither an election day swarming with poll watches and
monitors,
taken by itself, nor a truly independent CEP, capable of withstanding
pressure
from whatever quarter, alone can produce a just result. You have to have
both,
for starts.

The last two months have signaled another departure in U.S. "policy"
toward
Haiti, if you can use that word to describe something fundamentally
incoherent
and improvised, and the principal architect is not Roger Noriega or Otto
Reich
but Karl Rove. The reason for this, of course, is to keep things in Haiti
"quiet" so as not to jeopardize Bush's chances of carrying Florida in the
2004
election. Good luck! If unseating Aristide is on anyone's agenda in
Washington,
it has been pushed back to the second term. Following the withdrawal of
U.S.
objections to the disbursement of various loans, and Ambassador Todman's
reappraisal, the U.S. has quietly abandoned its prior insistence that
Aristide
meet the various security preconditions contained in Resolution 822 -
disarmament of the chimeres, prosecution of persons responsible for the
attacks
on Convergence supporters on December 17, etc.- and indicated its
willingness
to settle for Aristide's pledges of a secure election climate. The various
Convergence caciques are hollering sellout to anyone who'll listen.
The problem for the Republicans, however, is that they are discovering
that
Aristide can't or won't honor even these basic promises. Demonstrations
and
rallies are ostensibly banned because of the need to prepare for the
Bicentennial celebrations, and when they take place are met by chimere
attacks
of the sort that Aristide, who signs their checks, told poor Tracy Kidder
were
actually the work of opposition provocateurs. For the various hardheaded
Republican rightwingers, marronage is still an unknown concept.

It would be foolish to try to predict where things in Haiti are headed,
other
than it will bring a further compounding of misery for the Haitian people.
Outbreaks of unrest come in cycles, each of greater magnitude than before.
The
Convergence, whose support was never better than marginal, has been
supplanted
by other actors and Aristide's policy of repression will only accelerate
the
increasing destabilization.