The following three articles appear in the current issue of the weekly Haiti Liberte.
ELECTION COUNCIL SPLIT ON WHO SHOULD BE IN PRESIDENTIAL RUN-OFF RECENT ANNOUNCEMENT INVALID, GROUPS CONTEND
By Kim Ives
At 7:34 a.m. on Feb. 3, well past the midnight deadline imposed by Washington, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) spokesman Richardson Dumel made a sheepish 90 second statement (followed by no questions from the press) that the second round in Haiti’s presidential election would be between former First Lady Mirlande Manigat and former konpa singer Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, who displaced ruling Unity party candidate, Jude Célestin, from second place.
That result was “recommended” by an “expert mission” of the Organization of American States (OAS) as well as strongly and not surprisingly backed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a Jan. 30 visit to Haiti. It came after a night of raging debate at the CEP.
But, at least four of the CEP’s eight members did not sign the decision to change the Manigat-Célestin run-off preliminarily announced on Dec. 7. According to Article 8 of Haiti’s electoral law, any CEP decision must be made by an “absolute majority of its members,” that is, five votes.
“No, I did not sign,” Ginette Chérubin, the CEP’s Women’s sector representative, told Le Nouvelliste. “I was the first to leave the room, well before the end of discussions... I know that Jean Théleve Pierre-Toussaint [representing the local communal assemblies – CASECs and ASECs] did not sign. I just spoke to him, and he gave me permission to cite his name.”
The other two non-signing members are Jacques Belzin, representing Unions, and Ribel Pierre, representing Political Parties.
Originally, the CEP had nine members. But last summer, Catholic sector representative Jean Enel Désir was kicked out for corruption.
The Feb. 6 New York Times noted that the four CEP members “did not sign on to the decision adding Mr. Martelly to the runoff, casting further doubt on its legitimacy.”
In a Feb. 7 statement, the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) issued a statement noting that the CEP “has not approved a run-off election between candidates Michel Martelly and Mirlande Manigat.”
“IJDH notes that the current run-off controversy is the result of trying to create a ‘good’ result from the deeply flawed Nov. 28 elections in Haiti,” the statement continued. “IJDH supports the efforts of many Haitian civil society groups and political parties, joined by the Congressional Black Caucus and several U.S. human rights groups in calling for new, inclusive elections as the only practical solution to Haiti’s election crisis.” An inclusive election would include Haiti’s largest party, exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas Family, which was barred from the Nov. 28 polling. Only 22% of Haiti’s electorate participated in the vote, a record low for the hemisphere.
Nonetheless, the OAS, which Cuba has dubbed “Washington’s Ministry of Colonial Affairs,” appears ready to forge ahead, despite troublesome technicalities like voter participation and law.
“For us, it's clear which candidates move forward to the next round,” said OAS Assistant Secretary General Albert Ramdin, reports the Miami Herald’s Trenton Daniel. “We've started preparations for the second round... There was an official statement made by the CEP and it was issued in the name of the CEP.”
Meanwhile, the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, which conducted the only independent recount of the tally sheets posted by the CEP, found there to be so many irregularities that “it is impossible to determine who should advance to a second round. If there is a second round, it will be based on arbitrary assumptions and/or exclusions.” Although the rump CEP announced a Manigat/Martelly run-off, it has posted no final vote tallies for either candidate.
AN INTERVIEW WITH CEPR’S MARK WEISBROT
In recent weeks, Mark Weisbrot, an economist and co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), has been one of the most outspoken and relentless critics of the Nov. 28 Haitian elections and the Organization of American States (OAS) report that sought to “correct” them.
In response to the Provisional Electoral Council’s Feb. 3 announcement that it would change the presidential candidates in the Nov. 28 election’s second round, now scheduled for March 20, Weisbrot wrote: “What a disgrace this is to the United States government: the richest country in the world has forced one of the poorest to change the results of its presidential election, literally under the threat of starvation. Now two right-wing candidates, who received votes from around 6.4 and 4.5 percent of registered voters, respectively, will compete for the presidency, in another farcical 'election.' This is a big setback for democracy in Haiti. Far from fixing the problems with the first elections, this is simply an attempt to impose an illegitimate government on Haiti, and it will backfire.”
Weisbrot received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan and has written numerous research papers on economic policy, especially on Latin America. He is also co-author with the other founder of CEPR, Dean Baker, of “Social Security: The Phony Crisis” (University of Chicago Press, 2000). He writes a weekly column for The Guardian in England, for McClatchy-Tribune Information Services in the U.S. and for Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper. Haiti Liberté’s Kim Ives conducted this interview with him on February 8.
Haiti Liberté: How would you assess the mainstream media’s coverage of the November 28 election, of the OAS review process, and, today, the apparent hung jury at the CEP?
Mark Weisbrot: Well, it was better than usual in that much of the media coverage acknowledged that there was controversy over the OAS report and also reported on the U.S. pressure to force the Haitian government to accept the result.
However, one big failure was that no one in the major media actually considered the question of what the report said and did. They could have asked any independent expert, a statistician at a university for example, who would have told them that the OAS mission didn't do anything that would enable them to even estimate who actually won the first round. This was a major flaw in the report that CEPR pointed out, and last Friday Fritz Scheurer, the President of the American Statistical Association and a member of the OAS's Expert Verification Mission that wrote the report, admitted this when I questioned him. So we gave the media everything they needed but they didn't question the members of the OAS Mission, or if they did, we never heard about it.
From an editorial standpoint, the major newspapers accepted what the OAS/Washington were doing – forcing Haiti to change its first round election results, without even so much as a recount of the vote. This is outrageous and indefensible. These editorial boards should ask themselves why anyone in the world, outside of the U.S. government, should take them seriously when they say they support democracy or free elections.
HL: Previously, CEP Director General Pierre Louis Opont made most of the CEP’s important announcements. However, rarely-heard spokesman Richardson Dumel announced the CEP’S supposed acceptance of the OAS “recommendations” and then took no questions. Do you infer anything from Dumel making the announcement, and do you know anything about how he was chosen to do it?
MW: I can't say for sure but it could have something to do with recent reports that only four of eight members of the CEP signed off on the decision to accept the OAS "recommendations," which would mean that the decision is not legal; Haitian law requires a majority of the CEP.
HL: To what do you attribute the apparent reluctance of the other three CEP members who did not agree to the OAS “recommendations” to make statements clearly fixing their positions as Ginette Chérugin did?
MW: Political pressure from Washington is very intense. The cancellation of visas, which has already been done for a number of Haitian government officials, is only one threat; you can be sure that there are others.
HL: Who, in your assessment, is principally driving U.S. policy in Haiti: Clinton’s State Department, Obama’s White House, or another sector? Are you aware of any internal debate and/or conflicts within the administration over how to deal with Haiti?
MW: It is almost certainly the State Department. That is who has decided policy on Honduras, for example, in 2009 when the U.S. government made enormous efforts to support the coup government in Honduras. The White House appeared to have almost no involvement. My own view is that the White House mostly ignores the rest of this hemisphere, because it has to deal with two wars in the Middle East as well as Iran, Pakistan, and now Egypt and other countries that are much more important to the White House. The White House looks at these things primarily from an electoral point of view, and there is almost nothing in this hemisphere that is likely to affect U.S. elections, unless the White House were to seriously alter the status quo – e.g. lift the embargo on Cuba, which could affect the Florida vote and which they will never do, for that reason.
So mainly the White House leaves all of this to State, maybe checking to make sure things don't spin out of control in a way that could have electoral significance. The only electoral concern would be if there is serious political unrest in Haiti that leads to an outflow of refugees, as in the post-1991-coup period; and Haiti is seen as a foreign policy "failure" that could be used against them. The White House would care about that. But I doubt that they are much involved in the details at this point.
PRÉVAL GOVERNMENT FINALLY DELIVERS PASSPORT TO ARISTIDE’S LAWYER by Kim Ives
President René Préval’s government has finally delivered the diplomatic passport that former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, exiled for almost seven years in South Africa, has long requested. On February 8, a low-ranking official of Haiti’s Interior Ministry handed the document over to Ira Kurzban, Aristide’s long-time attorney, at the Toussaint Louverture Airport in Port-au-Prince. Kurzban had flown in that morning from Miami, where he lives.
Kurzban had formally requested the passport in a Jan. 31 letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Marie-Michele Rey and Interior Minister Paul-Antoine Bien-Aimé (see Haiti Liberté, Vol. 4, No. 29, 2/2/11). The entire process took eight days and “went very smoothly,” Kurzban told Haiti Liberté.
After receiving the document in the morning, Kurzban boarded the last American Airlines flight out of Haiti and arrived back in Miami at 8 p.m.. He declined to say how the passport would be transported from Miami to Aristide in South Africa.
Calling the passport’s delivery “an important first step,” Kurzban said now attention must be given to how Aristide will get back to Haiti. “The whole world is now looking to South Africa to see if they will assist in the return of the president,” he said.