25566: Wharram - news - Outsiders plan Haitian elections: No voters? No problem (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

> From Bruce Wharram <bruce.wharram@sev.org>


San Francisco Bay View

6/29/05


Outsiders plan Haitian elections: No voters? No problem

by Sue Ashdown

Women?s International League for Peace and Freedom
Haitian police patrol Bel Air in Port au Prince Monday. No voter
registration centers have been provided in Bel Air or other poor
neighborhoods.
Photo: Thony Belizaire, AFP

The elections planned by the U.S. and its allies for Haiti in the fall are a
fiasco that is becoming impossible to conceal. Faced with the hopeless
prospect of registering 4.5 million Haitians by Aug. 13 ? 60 days before the
first election on Oct. 13 ? Haiti?s Provisional Electoral Council (known by
its French acronym CEP) and the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti have taken
to issuing surreal and unsubstantiated statements about the voter
registration process.

By the end of May, out of 436 planned registration offices, the Organization
of American States admitted that only 14 had been set up. The 436 offices,
were they to exist, would still stand in sharp contrast to the Haitian
elections of 2000, when more than 12,000 registration centers and polls
served the Haitian people.

Observing this logistical nightmare, the National Council of Electoral
Observers expressed grave doubts about the feasibility of registering
Haitian voters: ?It would take six months to register 4 million voters in
the 436 registration offices projected across the country. That is assuming
that the offices were functional today, open seven days a week, 10 hours a
day and staffed by competent technicians.?

In early June, with the lack of registration centers becoming a public
relations disaster and with less than 2 percent of eligible Haitians
registered to vote, the CEP and the UN appeared to agree on a joint
communications strategy. Every few days, one or the other would announce the
opening of new voter registration centers and the registration of additional
Haitian voters. After all, the numbers would be almost impossible for anyone
to verify, especially in the face of the skyrocketing violence in the
country.

So, during a tidal wave of kidnappings which encouraged the U.S. to withdraw
its entire Peace Corps contingent as well as non-essential embassy personnel
and issue a travel warning, the CEP and UN reported that within the space of
one solitary week in June, voter registration centers in Haiti doubled ? and
then quadrupled again ? with a concomitant increase in voter registration
that brought the claimed total registrants to 3.5 percent of the potential
total.

One might argue that the average Haitian, having nothing to lose, and
therefore nothing to fear from kidnappers, might choose to spend his or her
practically nonexistent free time hunting down a registration center in
order to be fingerprinted and photographed in return for the right to vote.
But it seems unlikely.

The average Haitian would have to get out of her neighborhood first. There
are no registration centers in the poor neighborhoods and no plans to open
any either.

Poor Haitians have been terrorized in their own homes by police and
ex-militaries backed up by UN forces. They have been fired upon by those
same forces when they gather in peaceful demonstrations demanding the return
of the president they elected last time, with 92 percent of the vote, Jean
Bertrand Aristide.

Neither Aristide nor his party, Fanmi Lavalas, is on the ballot this fall,
thanks to the U.S.-French-Canadian-supported coup which removed him to
Africa last year, and Lavalas has sensibly refused to join the elections
unless the attacks against it stop.

Of course this is not to be discussed. With Aristide out of the way, the
whys and wherefores are of little interest to the international community,
who treat the democratic Haitian elections of 2000 and the coup that
overturned them as though it were all a bad dream, better forgotten. Time to
move on!

An election result more favorable to foreign business interests has been in
the works since long before Aristide won in 1990 and again in 2000. As in
Venezuela, the U.S. has funneled millions of dollars to Haitian opposition
parties through the pleasingly named National Endowment for Democracy.

The fall elections planned for Haiti are the fruit of that investment,
designed to give those opposition parties the platform they have always
desired, free of competition from the 900 pound gorilla, Lavalas ? but, just
to cover the bet, free of potential Lavalas voters as well. Just this week,
a diplomatic source told Agence Haitienne Presse that the international
community was prepared to accept a Haitian election with only 200,000 to
300,000 voters, or less than 7 percent of the electorate.

And why not? Evidence continues to emerge that the same international
community that howled about the invasion of Iraq was not only untroubled but
supportive of the 2004 coup in Haiti. Yet coups are, by their nature, nasty
affairs that tend to leave lingering doubts about the legitimacy of the
replacement government.

An election is the tried and true method for erasing those doubts. That the
Haitian election is totally rigged seems to trouble no one. International
election observers are already being prepared.

Sue Ashdown, with the Washington, D.C., branch of the Women?s International
League for Peace and Freedom, can be reached at sashdown@hotmail.com.

The violence to fear is state-sponsored, not ?gang? violence

by Shirley Pate

A few days ago I had the opportunity to speak with a journalist who wishes
to visit Haiti and is trying to figure out how best to hook his newspaper
into supporting him in his pursuit of the ?story? there. He said that he
thought it might be best to pick a simple aspect of the story that wasn?t
too politicized and his paper would pick it up.

I told him that I prefer he write nothing if this is his aim. Nothing in
Haiti is simple and nothing is unpoliticized. To suggest so is an injustice
to the people of Haiti.

After thinking about that conversation, I know that my primary job is to
support the Haitian people?s fight against occupation and state-sponsored
violence. This includes fighting continued intervention from the original
coup plotters and all other states who wish to perpetuate the rotten
situation in Haiti for strategic and/or commercial reasons.

I am not confused about the source of the problems in Haiti. It is part of a
larger package consisting of unbridled, worldwide imperialism and old time
colonialist racism. When you see Haiti from this perspective and especially
when you see the same thing playing out in other countries ? as I do in
other areas of my work on Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc. ? you understand
how big it is and how important it is to work in ways that do not ?feed the
dog food to the dog.?

This brings me to the debate over acknowledgement of ?gang? violence in
Haiti and its role in our denouncement of things taking place there. We need
to remember the origins of the plot to destroy Aristide and Lavalas. Let?s
not forget that the word ?chimère? was a creation of a reporter, working for
the imperialists, whose dossier included instructions to destroy Aristide,
Lavalas and the people?s hopes for a better Haiti.

Today?s relentless media reference to ?gangs? is a distraction from the
state-sponsored terror against the people of Haiti. Are there gangs in
Haiti? Human rights workers on the ground tell us there are. Are they the
primary or even secondary source of Haiti?s troubles? Hell, no.

Haiti is under occupation and all levels of the de facto government and
security apparatus are involved in the persecution of the people.
State-sponsored violence is very insidious, and this is why we need to be
careful.

The state is infinitely better armed ? usually because its patrons see to
that ? and, as a result, maims and kills more efficiently and at a much
higher rate. Also, it is tougher for international institutions to discern
state culpability in violence, because the state steers the international
inquirers directly to the imperialist operatives, who read from the script.

So, state-sponsored violence is far more dangerous, more difficult to prove
and, thus, much more difficult to stop. The machinery of state-sponsored
violence is of massive proportions, and that is part of the reason why I am
not interested in talking about ?gang? violence, because it is not as
pervasive, it is not as significant and it is not always ?gang? violence.

Sometimes it is state-sponsored violence masquerading as ?gang? violence. I
leave this issue to the people on the ground in Haiti to sort out and to
report.

Finally, I do not think my concentration on state-sponsored violence is less
valid because I choose not to focus on nor engage in ?gang? violence
discussions. The primary reason is that I am not trying to balance my
comments.

The imbalances concerning Haiti are undeniable, and anyone who understands
Haitian history knows that the balance has always been heavily in favor of
the state. There are far too many reporters, government operatives and
liberals who are waiting to write that story, make that speech and recommend
that U.S. Marines land in Haiti based on ?gang? violence utterances.

> From my standpoint, focusing on ?gang? violence is the best way to take the
spotlight off the greatest purveyor of violence in Haiti ? the state. It?s
the best way to serve up the dog food to the dogs ? something I will not do.

Shirley Pate is a board member of the Ecumenical Program on Central America
and the Caribbean (EPICA). Email her at magbana@aol.com.




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