29712: Potemaksonje (News) Struggle for Decentralization in Rural Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Potemaksonje@yahoo.com

The Struggle for Decentralization in Rural HaitiIJDH — Fond des Blancs, Haiti - 
When the international media chose to bypass reporting on Haiti's municipal 
elections this past Sunday, it may have suited those responsible for organizing 
the election perfectly well. After two years of mismanaged election funds, 
logistical failures, and technical problems that characterized much of the 
process to replace the extra-constitutionally selected Interim Government of 
Haiti (IGH), the Provisional Electoral Council, the U.N.'s peacekeeping and 
stabilization mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, the European Union, the governments 
of the United States and Canada, and the IGH itself may have felt more relief 
than satisfaction when the polls closed finally closed Sunday evening.
       In this third and final stage of voting, Haitians voted 1,420 candidates 
into offices at the level of local government. In each of Haiti's ten 
departments, voters cast ballots for cartels of three commune magistrates that 
will govern each municipality for the next four years along with cartels of 
three commune section administrators, known as CASECS, and their parliamentary 
counterparts, the Communal Section Assembly members, known as ASECS. In theory, 
the CASECS play an administrative roll in each communal section while the ASECS 
undertake the dual responsibility of counseling the CASECS and acting as their 
budget watchdogs during the same four years.
       But in rural Fond des Blancs, an area ninety kilometers southwest of 
Port-au-Prince that occupies the four western-most sections of the commune of 
Aquin, the voters did not move on so quickly. In fact, a significant 
representation of the 45,000 predominately illiterate peasants that call Fond 
des Blancs home stood surrounding the makeshift voting center long after many 
of them had voted, as if watching the event unfold meant just as much to them 
as casting a ballot.
       Among those present outside the small courthouse was Briel Levielle, a 
longtime leader of his community and the current director of Fond des Blancs' 
largest peasant cooperative. To Briel, watching his community participate in 
electing their neighbors to local government posts, the day was a quiet 
commemorative to Fond des Blancs' two-decade struggle to move from its 
dictatorial past to a fully functional component of a decentralized Haitian 
state.
       Sunday's municipal elections were another delayed attempt to respect 
Haiti's 1987 constitution that affords communities like Fond des Blancs the 
right to have representation in the national decision making process. While the 
constitution now supports government-recognized and financed administration 
positions at the commune section level, the real hope of this years election is 
that Preval's government can finally bring to fruition Haiti's ASEC system, an 
advisory structure that, in theory, should form a pyramid of parliamentary 
counterparts to every level of executive power from the local CASECS in each 
commune section to President Preval himself. Essentially, each commune section 
sends one ASEC to the commune's Municipal Assembly. Each Municipal Assembly 
then sends one ASEC to the commune's Department Assembly, each of which sends 
one representative to the Interdepartmental Assembly. Along the way, the ASECS 
are empowered to nominate judges for peace courts at the
 municipal level and nominate members of Haiti's Permanent Election Council 
(CEP). Should the system function as proposed, these responsibilities would be 
of particular importance to communities like Fond des Blancs, which have 
suffered a repeated history of neglect by Haiti's government.
       Briel Levielle remembers when Fond des Blancs was considered a "Komin 
Riral," or a rural commune, run by the repressive "Kod Riral," the rural code 
of Francois Duvalier, which placed Section Chiefs at the head of each commune 
section. At this time in Fond des Blancs, Tonton Macoutes, the feared 
paramilitary thugs of the Duvalier dictatorship, filled the role of Section 
Chiefs, using terror tactics to keep the community quiet, fearful, and 
powerless.
       Only with courageous participation in community mobilization projects, 
such as "Ti Legliz," Haiti's liberation theology movement, were these rural 
communities able to begin instigating changes in their local power structures. 
In Fond des Blancs, Briel became involved with a branch of "Ti Legliz" called 
"Fraternitč Le Engaje," or The Fraternity of Engaged Laypersons. The group used 
religious-based arguments for taking progressive action against the rural code 
of Francois Duvalier that eventually led to the creation of a provisional form 
of CASEC after the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986. The three 
community members nominated to "KAZEK Pwoviswa" - provisional section councils 
- immediately began working to reform the local administrative position so that 
Fond des Blancs' local government, in Briel's words, "would not beat people 
down, but instead, help them to develop each commune section."
 After two more years of mobilization that included the bloodied, failed 
elections of 1987, critical changes made to Haiti's constitution the same year 
would allow Briel and two other community members to beat out a cartel of 
Tonton Macoutes that had stayed on in the commune to become the community's 
first official CASECS in January of 1988. However, despite the constitutional 
support for the office of CASEK, the governments of Aristide and Preval working 
successively to pay back the international community for debts accrued 
primarily under the Duvalier family dictatorship, could not finance the 
positions. For twelve years, Briel tended to the administrative 
responsibilities of Fond des Blancs as CASEC entirely voluntarily, while the 
ASEC system, though on the 1995 presidential ballot, would never function at 
all.
       The financial problems persisted when Briel stepped down in the 2000 
presidential election. Though the office of CASEC did appear on the 
presidential ballot, a continued lack of funding for the position would force 
all elected CASECS in Fond des Blancs to quit their posts or continue on a 
volunteer basis in 2003, preceding the ousting of President Aristide by 
ex-military officers in 2004.
 In last Sunday's election, the parties responsible for organizing the 
municipal elections again dishonored the hard-won progress by Haitians to 
decentralize Haiti's government by failing to provide adequate funding for both 
the election and the candidates' campaigns leading up to it. On the day of the 
election, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), the Interim Government of 
Haiti, and MINUSTAH used for the third time this year a scattering voting 
centers that differed little from what the government had use when Fond des 
Blancs was still considered a rural commune under the rural code of Francois 
Duvalier. Specifically, the organizers spread a total of five voting centers 
across ten square miles of mountainous terrain to serve Fond des Blancs' 
roughly 21,000 eligible voters, the majority of whom can only travel by animal 
or foot. This, despite the CEP's boasting to the media that it had opened 32 
new voting centers across the country to assure the election's "success."
 Then, having already spent all municipal election funds on the year's previous 
two elections, no candidates in Fond des Blancs receive any financial aid for 
their campaigns as promised, even after the candidates had paid the fees to 
register their candidacies. The community also received no explanation of the 
complex CASEC and ASEC system beyond what members of the community more 
familiar with the system could offer.
       People like Frékel Georges, a candidate for CASEC in the central-most 
section of Fond des Blancs, said he was left to speak at several churches and 
social organization meetings to both introduce his platform to voters as well 
as explain the role of the office for which he was running. In keeping with his 
own desire to participate in the decentralization of Haiti's government, his 
cartel wants create committees in each neighborhood of his commune section that 
would meet with the CASECS to both advise the CASECS and distribute 
administrative duties across the section.
 As surely as the organizers have already moved past Sunday's election, Frékel 
and his fellow newly-elected CASECS and ASECS are now left to wonder about the 
future of their offices. Although the U.S. State Department has praised Haiti's 
2007 fiscal budget as "demonstrating sound fiscal policy," is the United States 
ready to support Haiti in its efforts to finance a decentralized Haitian 
government? Will the U.S. Congress and the Inter-American Development Bank 
(IADB) move quickly enough to relieve Haiti of its onerous debt, a burden that 
has repeatedly contributed to hampering Haiti's full realization of the ASEC 
system? Will the International Monetary Fund, which has finally approved Haiti 
for its Heavily-Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative, similarly allow 
President Preval to begin spending funds from Haiti's modest fiscal budget on 
the local posts in a timely manner, even in rural areas of the country? If not, 
how long will Haitians living in communities like Fond
 des Blancs have to wait until their poverty no longer overrules their 
constitution?
       J.P. Shuster is a volunteer for the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation. He 
lives and works in Fond des Blancs, Haiti.

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