This Week in HaitiHaïti Progrès
17 au 23 Mai 2000
Elections, and Violence, Now Seem
Certain for SundayThis time it looks like they are going to happen. Parliamentary and municipal elections postponed from December to March to April and finally to May 21 seem to be on track, even though there may be a train-wreck.
Most of the opposition parties, which had threatened a boycott, have grudgingly announced that they will take part.
But political violence has spiked in recent days, threatening everything. Last week, three men believed to be members of the Espace de Concertation (Space of Concord), a center-right opposition front, were gunned down in the Central Plateau town of Savanette. On May 12 in Port-au-Prince, three men shot to death Branord Sanon, a campaign director of the Lavalas-tinged Louvri Baryè (Open the Gate) party. The same day, a 29-year-old businessman, Guerline Léveillé, died at the General Hospital after being shot, also in downtown Port-au-Prince. The next day, the residents of the capital's Martissant neighborhood discovered the bodies of two brothers and their brother-in-law near St. Bernadette Church.
Police spokesman Jean Dady Siméon denied, in the face of resurgent violence, that his superiors had abandoned their campaign to deploy cops at strategic intersections at night to stop and search suspicious vehicles for illegal arms."'Operation Buckle Up Port-au-Prince' is still in effect, although of course with some modifications," Siméon said. "We have had to take different approaches, which cannot remain static, since the bandits have developed their own strategies of how to get around the police. We have had some very positive results, which we will make known very soon."
Justice Minister Camille Leblanc also announced a new policy of "zero tolerance," saying that even political big-shots had better be careful. "There are no untouchables in the country now," Leblanc said. "In this period of elections, whatever your affiliation or your friends, you are in trouble if you make trouble. We will not tolerate or accept any disturbance of the public order."
Some popular organizations have questioned whether this get-tough policy is also get-illegal after Leblanc forbade all street demonstrations except those connected with a candidate's campaign. Such a prohibition, which has not been tested by demonstrators nor seconded by Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis, would be a flagrant violation of Article 31 of the 1987 Constitution.
For his part, Alexis said, obliquely, that the cops would provide more security by increasing "intelligence" and "mobility" or, more comically, "mobilizing the Boy Scouts to support the efforts of the police."
Many Haitians feel that their nation's political violence is being fomented by the "laboratory," as they call the unholy alliance of the CIA, Pentagon, and former Haitian soldiers and Tonton Macoutes. Some credence was given to this notion this week when police arrested eight former soldiers on May 11 at a house in Pétionville, according to the Info-Haiti website.
The police also seized military uniforms and caps as well as "several pieces of photographic equipment... at Technique Studio Photo on Delmas 101, a rendez-vous place for the making of identity cards with the heading of the Haitian Armed Forces," the agency reported. The Haitian Army was disbanded by then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1995.
The police are now looking to arrest the man who signed the cards, a certain Serge Justafort, who just happens to be the coordinator of the security corps which guards the U.S. diplomatic installations in Haiti.
Furthermore, the police are also looking for Lynn Garrison, the Canadian pilot who was the principal foreign advisor to Gen. Raoul Cédras during the 1991-1994 coup d'état in Haiti. Info-Haiti cites a police source saying that Garrison has been roving around different regions of Haiti in recent days carrying out "activities which are likely to be considered as being destabilizing to the Haitian democratic order."
Right-wing death-squads linked to the Haitian Army were responsible for the massacre of dozens of would-be voters during the aborted elections of Nov. 29, 1987. The vivid memory of those killings may keep many Haitians away from the polls on Sunday. That is, if voters can even find the polls. With only days to go, there is still universal confusion about where polling stations will be and which ones voters must visit to vote (see below "Serious Obstacles May Prevent Popular Participation on Election Day").
The Patriotic Movement to Save the Nation (MPSN), a far-right-wing alliance, said that it will hold off announcing whether or not it is participating in the elections until 48 hours before voting begins. Popular organizations say that the right-wing wants to leave the door open to participate just in case their destabilization campaign is unsuccessful. "When we hear the MPSN spokesman ask his candidates to wait for a signal 48 hours before the election and when his camp has said that it wants foreigners to come hold the elections, we wonder: have they made some arrangement for that kind of invasion?" asked the Front of Organizations of Cadres of Carrefour (FOK) on May 15.
(As we go to press, we learn that MPSN leader Hubert Deronceray has called on his partisans to participate in Sunday's election.)
Meanwhile, foreign sponsors of the elections have finally shelled out some dough, but mostly to pay other foreigners. This week Canada gave $600,000 (Canadian) for Organization of American States (OAS) and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) election observers. The OAS observer mission was about to close due to lack of funds. France also kicked in 2.74 million gourdes (about US$160,000), and said they might send "supplemental observers." Election aid is also awaited from Japan.
The principal worry of the OAS mission is the violence. Three observers from Quebec decided to return home. "I don't say I have apprehension," said Orlando Marville, the Barbadian head of the OAS observer mission, "but I do have concern. In the days before and after the polling, the political actors and the voting population must be peaceful."
Peace, however, is unlikely, since right-wing forces will probably be upset if they can't steal the election from the Lavalas Family (FL), Aristide's party, and Aristide's partisans are likely to be upset if they do.
The FL is paying particular attention to the National Council of Observers (CNO), which is headed by Leopold Berlanger, an agent of the U.S. government's National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and owner of Vision 2000, a powerful anti-Lavalas radio station funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
In his final editorial, Jean Dominique, the radio journalist assassinated Apr. 3, pointed to the tremendous danger posed by Berlanger, through a secret accord he signed with Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) president Léon Manus in February.
Already, Berlanger was captured on tape convincing an election worker to falsify voting results during the 1990 elections, Dominique said. Now, through the accord, he is empowered to deputize observers to act as umpires over the election, to review the CEP's written report of the balloting, and to issue a final report on the vote, all in violation of the Electoral law.
"Is President Manus, the president of the CEP, qualified to sign an agreement which contradicts the text and the spirit of the electoral law?" Dominique asked. "Did President Manus sign this very important text to give Mr. Leopold Berlanger the possibility of altering the results of the vote?"
Despite such questions, the CEP delivered 7205 observer accreditation cards, out of the 8900 requested, to the CNO, which will give them to organizations of its choosing. "The electoral law gives the CNO the right to give electoral observer cards to organizations of the civil society which want to be observers," blithely asserted Carline Simone of the CNO, in flagrant contradiction of Dominique's revelations. "The only observer card which is valid is the one with the CNO seal and so anybody who wants to be an observer must come to the CNO to ask for his electoral observer card."
But the Haitian people are aware of the CNO's game. "We note with sadness that a number of distrusted politicians have plotted with the international community to form a CNO-CIA which has undertaken a number of maneuvers to give the people an electoral coup d'état," said Morantus Mitello, the FL's mayoral candidate for the town of Fond Verrettes.
In his final editorial, Jean Dominique spoke of "the legitimate suspicion that there is a threat to the [electoral] process with the successive unpleasant revelations of the role of IFES [International Foundation for Electoral Systems] inside of the CEP and financed and directly manipulated by USAID. So, these legitimate suspicions about the CEP are getting larger by that unbelievable accord with the CNO."
In short, the May 21 elections are already marred by violence, trickery, and foreign meddling. It will be no surprise if participation is less than overwhelming.
Serious Obstacles May Prevent Popular Participation on Election Day by Haiti 123MAR. 16 (Haiti123) - Five days before elections, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has still not fully published the locations of the purported 11,064 polling stations (BVs) where Haiti's four million voters are expected to cast their ballots this Sunday.
As of May 16th, 700 of those sites were not even designated despite the requirement in the 1999 Electoral Law (Chapter 10, Article 125) which requires the CEP publicize the list of all polling stations one week prior to the day of elections.
Serious irregularities during the registration period prevented countless people to register in their own neigborhoods. The OAS, in their May 2000 Report on the Registration Process, stated that "an undetermined number of voters registered in places other than their residences. It is not clear whether or not these voters know that they must vote where they register which could cause confusion on Election Day..."
Anticipating chaos on election day the OAS went on to say that: "The Mission believes it would be appropriate for the CEP to address this issue through public announcements leading up to the election." However, an informal survey held today of popular radio stations in the capital revealed that no public service announcements were being aired explaining how to determine where to vote.
The quick response that voters should go to the sites where they registered (BIs) is not enough. Many of the registration offices were not converted into polling stations (BVs). Furthermore, there will be almost four times as many BVs as BIs.
When on Sunday, May 21st, a voter finds that her BI is not a BV, where does she go to cast her vote? And if she is directed to another site after how long of a wait and how far will she have to walk? (In the past Haiti has suspended all but emergency and official vehicles from circulating on the day of elections. No announcements on this issue has yet been made.)
Several obstacles to an effective electoral process including the claim by many that they had no access to the registration process, poorly trained election workers (who were trained at the last minute because of labor disputes), lack of computerized, centralized or alphabetized voter lists, anticipated confusion and long-distance treks by foot, may serve to create voter frustration and disenfranchisement.
This week's paid insert in Le Nouvelliste, Haiti's (Port-au-Prince's) daily newspaper, purporting to publicize the voting locations (BVs) are not only late, they are wholly inadequate. First, the information is presented as a chart with no written explanation. What does the heading "Code BV" mean and how does it correspond with the codes on the electoral cards? Second, some of the BV "addresses" listed are nothing more than "Chez Eva Mercer" which is merely the name of a family in their private residence with no address listed.
In a country with 85% illiteracy, why isn't this vital information being blasted clearly and repeatedly - and in Creole - over the radio air waves where most Haitians get their news? More frightening is that less than 5 days from elections no one seems concerned that voters don't know where they have to go to vote.