8877: Pina comments on statements by David Keene and Kenneth Roth (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: kevin pina <kpinbox@hotmail.com>


Anyone who would dare question this revisionist and naked attempt to rewrite 
history by Human Rights Watch and the Republican National Committee must 
certainly run the risk of being labeled an “Aristide apologist”. This is the 
new label reserved to dismiss anyone who would dare question the 
revisionists of the right or the romantic iconoclasts of the left who 
currently fall all over themselves to expose the excesses of the “great 
leader’s” clay feet.  Strange bedfellows indeed!!

It has truly been an education to watch and track how reality has been bent 
and twisted so that it has become fashionable to attack a populist movement 
of the majority of poor Haitians as a dictatorship while blatant 
manipulation such as this goes unquestioned. All one needs to do is refer to 
press accounts of May 22, 2000 to see that the elections were initially 
praised by the US and the OAS as the cleanest in the history of Haiti. Only 
when it became clear that Lavalas would win in a landslide, Orlande Marville 
and the OAS choose to seriously damage Haiti’s political process by leaking 
a report to the press questioning the method of calculating the ballots. The 
calculating of the ballots was all the OAS and Washington could question as 
it was obvious to most observers that the elections went off smoother than 
most had thought possible. There is no question that if the OAS, the 
historical proxy of US foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 
had supported the outcome they would have quietly negotiated a solution 
prior to the announcement of the results. The OAS would turn a blind eye to 
Fujimori’s fraud in Peru that same year while making it clear that an 
outright Lavalas victory in Haiti would not be tolerated by their handlers 
in Washington.

Now I can understand that the results of the May 21st elections were a 
bitter pill for IRI to swallow given the one million dollar investment 
administered by Stanley Lucas to “build plurality” and a “viable opposition 
in Haiti”.  It has had to be embarrassing that all that hard work and money 
has only yielded an opposition whose greater constituency lies in Washington 
and not in Haiti. Still, I somehow expected more from the party of Lincoln. 
Silly me.



Excerpt from: Human Rights Watch -- Letter to Convening Countries of the 
Community of Democracies

“Local and parliamentary elections held in May 2000 were marred by abuses. 
The OAS Electoral Monitoring Mission labeled them "fundamentally flawed" and 
quit Haiti before a second round of balloting.”

Excerpt from: Haiti: By David Keene
Note: David Keene was part of the RNC delegation that went to Haiti last 
week.

During the campaign, opposition candidates were targeted for intimidation, 
but on election day things really got out of hand. Police stormed polling 
places, seized ballot boxes and replaced them with pre-stuffed boxes 
thoughtfully provided by the government. At one point a truck carrying 
seized ballots hit a pothole as it careened through Port-au-Prince, 
scattering ballots onto the streets.

The election was a joke…


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