27169: Craig (news) Newsweek re: Haitian elections (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig


‘A Very Dangerous Moment’

Haiti has postponed elections for the fourth time since November.
But a national vote is unlikely to solve the troubled country’s many
problems.

Web Exclusive
By Malcolm Beith
Newsweek
Updated: 12:24 p.m. ET Jan. 7, 2006

Jan. 6, 2006 - Undecideds seem to hold the key to elections everywhere these 
days. But in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, just 600 
miles south of Florida, it’s the election officials themselves who are of two 
minds. A week ago, five members of the country’s nine-man election committee 
called for the Jan. 8 presidential vote to be postponed—the fourth time the 
elections have been rescheduled since November.

But as it awaited an official announcement from Haiti’s interim president 
Boniface Alexandre, the U.S. State Department repeated a familiar mantra. “We 
believe it is essential that elections move forward,” said department spokesman 
Sean McCormack on Wednesday, reiterating the position of both Secretary of 
State Condoleezza Rice, who visited the island in September, and Under 
Secretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, who was there shortly before 
Christmas. And even as the election postponement was at last confirmed late in 
the week, the U.N. Security Council continued to push Haiti to hold the vote 
soon—no later than Feb. 7, to be precise.

In the minds of most Haiti experts, however, that could still be too soon. “The 
last thing those interested in Haiti want is a process that is not viewed as 
legitimate and credible,” says Robert McGuire, a Haiti expert at Trinity 
University in Washington, D.C. There’s certainly little chance that could have 
happened this weekend. A motley crew of 35 candidates—among them a former 
guerrilla believed to have drug ties and an alleged assassin who was arrested 
earlier this week for possessing illegal weapons—are contesting the election, 
making it extremely likely that any result would have been challenged by 
everyone but the winner. “If they lose, they’re not going to accept it,” says 
Robert Fatton Jr., a Haiti expert at the University of Virginia. “I don’t see 
any type of consensus.”

All of this assumes that anyone would have turned out to vote in the first 
place. Just days before the scheduled election, some 2.5 million registered 
voters still lacked the voting cards required to cast their ballots, while the 
40,000 volunteers needed to man the polling stations have yet to be properly 
trained. Who’s to blame? “You have too many cooks in the kitchen—the United 
Nations, the Organization of American States and the Haitian Provisional 
Electoral Council,” says Dan Erikson of the Inter-American Dialogue, a 
Washington-based think-tank. “None of these actors hold the key to organizing 
the elections.” So instead, Haitian officials have taken to pointing the finger 
at the U.N. and O.A.S. “We are fed up with those foreigners who sit there 
spending money and not delivering,” declared Rosemond Pradel, secretary general 
of Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council.

In all fairness, those foreigners have had their hands full dealing with 
security. Since the U.S.-led ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide nearly 
two years ago, Haiti has plunged into chaos. In late 2004, three policemen were 
beheaded in what thugs called “Operation Baghdad.” Daily protests and riots in 
the slums of the capital, Port-au-Prince, have since proven too much for the 
8,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force charged with controlling the island. (Two 
peacekeepers were recently killed in broad daylight, hundreds of Haitians have 
died as a result of the violence in the past year alone, and on Saturday, the 
head of the UN force was found shot dead in his Port-au-Prince hotel room.) 
Meanwhile, a frenzy of abductions—reportedly as many as eight to 10 a day over 
the past few months—has transformed Haiti into the kidnapping capital of the 
world. “[Haiti] has no institutions, no judicial system, no government,” says 
Fatton. “What’s amazing is that everything isn’t completely out of control, 
because no one is in control.”

Can elections be organized in time to keep the country from total collapse? 
Some observers suggest that Caribbean and South American drug traffickers—who 
use Haiti as a shipment point en route to the United States—may be doing their 
best to spoil the elections, given how freely they can operate in the current 
environment of instability. Meanwhile, a loose coalition of more than three 
dozen political parties has now called for the hapless interim government to 
resign, proposing instead a “national unity government”—a notion analysts 
discard as ludicrous given Haiti’s already fractious political environment.

Even if free and fair elections do go ahead in the near future, there’s little 
hope for a period of peace and prosperity. “The international community simply 
sees the elections as an exit strategy,” says Erikson, of Inter-American 
Dialogue. Given the current security mess—and the lack of a Haitian military, 
which was disbanded by Aristide in 1995 at America’s behest—the prospect of a 
post-election departure on the part of the international community doesn’t bode 
well for ordinary Haitians, nearly 80 percent of whom live below the poverty 
line. “Everything points to some sort of deterioration, [and] everyone is 
afraid of that possibility,” says Fatton. “The question is whether the United 
Nations, O.A.S., and the United States are prepared to send more troops, and I 
don’t think that’s going to happen.” Indeed, the current U.N. mandate to 
enforce stability in Haiti runs out on Feb. 15, and the United States has shown 
no signs of willingness to increase its own involvement. “It’s a very dangerous 
moment,” says Fatton. “Everything is up for grabs.”

For a country that has endured 33 military coups in its 200-year history, that 
must have a familiar ring to it. Worryingly, it’s an eerie one, even for Haiti.

//© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.//

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10743199/site/newsweek/