27958: Hermantin(news)Stop interfering in nation's politics

[corbetre@webster.edu]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Mon, Feb. 20, 2006


HAITI
Stop interfering in nation's politics

BY IRA KURZBAN
ira@kkwtlaw.com

The election of René Préval as president of Haiti can be a turning point in
our government's relationship to the Haitian people. Préval clearly has a
preference to help Haiti's poor, and it was the poor who gave him an
overwhelming electoral victory that was four times larger than his closest
rival.

In light of this preference for the poor, policymakers in Washington need to
review our own policies, which too often reflectively supported Haiti's tiny
elite in their effort to destabilize Haiti's popular democracy.

The current policies have led us to a dead end of continually trying to
suppress popular democracy without raising the economic status of the poor.
Although our short-term interests may be to stop Haitian migrants and drugs
from entering the United States, our long-term interests must be to alter
the economic conditions in a country that has the largest population and
therefore the largest potential market of all the CARICOM countries.

With President Préval we can begin to engage in a new foreign policy that
should include the following strategies:

? Stop interfering in the internal politics of Haiti. Who Préval picks as a
prime minister and members of his cabinet should be his own affair and not a
''litmus test'' for anything. Our efforts to force a government of national
reconciliation in Haiti is an affront to Haitian sovereignty as much as it
would be for the Chinese government to tell a Republican president that he
had to include Democrats, Libertarians, Socialists and others in his
government to show unity.

Similarly, we should not hamper efforts to allow all Haitians to return from
abroad who have been forced into exile or interfere in the reconstruction of
Fanmi Lavalas or any other party the Haitian people support.

Also, no funds from either the Agency for International Development or the
International Republican Institute should be expended to undermine Haiti's
political parties or to create new political parties. These are matters best
left to the Haitian people to decide.

? Work constructively with the Haitian government to provide assistance on a
national level. For the past decade our assistance has been directed to
nongovernmental organizations rather than to the Haitian government, and
from 2000 to 2004 we had a total development-assistance embargo against the
Haitian government. Préval's victory gives us an opportunity for a new
beginning where we can work with the Haitian government on their terms, not
ours. Haiti's massive health, infrastructure, environmental and educational
problems can not be solved through nongovernmental organizations.

We must provide substantial direct assistance to the Haitian government and
we must ensure that our assistance and that of other developed countries is
not coupled with political demands. Micromanaging Haiti's nascent democracy
by strangling its government economically has been a dismal failure and it
ignores our own history where democracy took decades to develop.

? Provide technical expertise and financial resources to transform agrarian
life. The United States possesses the world's greatest expertise on
eliminating agrarian and rural poverty. We have the most successful rural
electrification program in the history of the world. We have highly advanced
farming facilities and agricultural techniques that we could and should put
at the disposal of the Haitian government. Such efforts would help Haiti
move toward self-sufficiency in food production, and rural electrification
would reverse the downward ecological spiral Haiti faces.

Additionally, the United States has great expertise in rural health
programs. In a country where there is only one doctor for every 11,000
citizens and where most doctors are in urban areas, we have the capacity to
develop healthcare programs where none exist.

Interfering in Haiti's political life and conditioning assistance on
political benchmarks has failed Haiti and its poor. It is time that we begin
a new, more gracious strategy, that provides assistance simply to reverse
Haiti's massive poverty.

Ira Kurzban was the general counsel for Haiti for 13 years during the
governments of René Préval and Jean-Bertrand Aristide.






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