By Kenneth Kidd, Feature writer, Toronto Star, April 21, 2011
Michel Martelly, officially confirmed this week as Haiti’s neophyte president, likes to boast that he’s not a politician. But Martelly will need a raft of political and diplomatic skills if he hopes to implement many of his election promises or bring about the national reconciliation he openly covets. On both fronts, he risks offending many of the people who could prove key to his success or failure.
In a Twitter message from Washington, where he was meeting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Martelly wrote: “Let’s pick up our tools and get to work to clean up our country.” He meant it both physically and metaphorically. Much of the rubble from last year’s earthquake still hasn’t been cleared, yet removing the entrenched corruption of the bureaucracy is a daunting task in a country as desperately poor as Haiti.
In a bid to re-establish the rule of law and a functioning judicial system, Martelly has vowed to fill the three vacancies on Haiti’s Supreme Court, which has been widely applauded as long overdue.
His other opening gesture is potentially more problematic. Martelly, scheduled to take office May 14, has invited both former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to attend his inauguration. He has also mused about extending an amnesty to Haiti’s former leaders, something that is bound to alienate the Haitian diaspora, many of whom fled the brutal Duvalier regime, and whose economic and managerial help Martelly otherwise needs to court.
Any talk of amnesty also separates reconciliation from justice. “That’s an insult, not just to the diaspora, but also the people of Haiti, who have never had a chance to have any kind of public reconciliation for the loss of family members,” says Melanie Newton, a history professor at the University of Toronto.
Nor does Martelly, despite his popularity as “Sweet Micky” the kompas singer, enjoy truly mass support. Although he won just under 68 per cent of the vote, voter turnout was a scant 23 per cent. And his fledgling Repons Peysan party won only 3 seats in Haiti’s 99-member chamber of deputies, a body still dominated by the Inite party of outgoing president René Préval, with 34 members.
In a post-election report to the UN Security Council, even Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that Haiti’s incoming president “may well face a protracted period of difficult cohabitation with a divided and potentially fractious parliament.”
Against that political landscape, Martelly has vowed to concentrate in his first six months on agricultural reform and moving people to more permanent homes from the makeshift tent cities that now house as many as 700,000 people. On both fronts, he will face the thorny issue of land ownership — over which there are often disputed claims in Haiti — and risk alienating some of the country’s wealthy landowners, who happen to control Haiti’s only domestic source of capital.
Martelly has also said that, if there is a job-creating investment at stake on disputed land, the government will simply step in and declare the land public. “It’s the right thing to say,” argues Newton. “It is something that needs to happen. It is a fundamental limit to reconstruction, the issue of land.”
But gaining control over the broader reconstruction process could prove tricky in other ways. Under Préval, the Haitian government was essentially sidelined, with the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission co-chaired by former U.S. president Bill Clinton taking centre stage.
Newton likens this foreign stewardship of the country’s rebuilding efforts to a kind of “informal colonialism,” one that Martelly must address. “That needs to be a process under the control of a central government authority,” she says. “Who is setting policy?”
Just doing that, however, has often been problematic for past Haitian leaders. “Is there any statement that a Haitian president can make that isn’t going to get them in trouble if it sounds like sovereignty?” wonders Newton. “I don’t think there’s anything he could say that speaks to people’s democratic desires that wouldn’t get him into trouble with Haitian elites and people outside.”