This week in Haiti
Annan Report Fuels False Crisis
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan lent tacit support to Haiti's Democratic Convergence (CD) opposition front this week in a report to the U.N. General Assembly, released May 21.
In the agnostic, innuendo-laden language so favored by U.N. diplomats, Annan portrayed the CD as legitimate and representative and encouraged internationally-mediated negotiations between it and the Haitian government. But it is evident to the vast majority of Haitians (and even the most casual observer) that the CD is nothing more than a tool of Washington to politically destabilize Haiti and prod President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas Family party (FL) to the right.
Throughout the report, Annan portrays the Haitian government's timid responses to CD provocations as "intimidation" while calling the CD's seditious and illegal declaration of a "parallel government" last February merely "questionable."
Meanwhile, presidential and senate elections held on Nov. 26, 2000 "generated little public interest," according to Annan, even though the sole monitoring bodies, the 25-member International Coalition of Independent Observers (ICIO) and a national observer group, concurred with the 60.5% turnout figure of Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP). Annan favored the assessment of a 4-member CARICOM team and "local and international news media" (which mostly took its information from the CD) which set participation between 10% and 20%. Annan echoes the charge of "Haiti's main international partners" (i.e., the U.S. and France) that last year's elections were held "without a credible, independent electoral council."
Annan claims that then President René Préval and Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis made "implicitly threatening statements" in the face of terrorizing and destabilizing bombing campaigns and the CD's "parallel government," when in fact the Haitian government was chided by those which elected it for not acting more forcefully against terrorists and the destabilizers.
"I find it regrettable that various opportunities to reach a political compromise that existed before the elections were not seized and that impediments to the resumption of much-needed international assistance remained in place," Annan concluded. The assumption underlying Annan's whole 10-page report is that a "political compromise" must be reached with an artificial "opposition front" which has no popular support and remains alive only through foreign backing. This is why Haitians think their country is enduring a "false crisis."
Meanwhile, faced with outrage from thousands of local elected officials, Aristide sought to backtrack from some of his headlong concessions of recent weeks. In a meeting with local officials last week he said that the May 21, 2000 elections were not negotiable. "You are all elected," Aristide told the gathering on May 16 at the National Palace. "Everyone should remember to never dare to change what the masses with their ballot have decided."
Then in a speech filled with his trademark elliptical poetry for Haitian Flag Day, May 18, Aristide told the CD that "Haiti can only have one democratic sun, of which we can all be rays of peace." Nonetheless, Gérard Gourgue, the nominal president of the CD's "parallel government," also issued a declaration asking Haitians "to join the [CD's] provisional government to together bring unity, reconciliation, security, and peace for this country."
While mainstream analysts have argued that Aristide is hardening his position, Ben Dupuy of the National Popular Party (PPN), a former FL ally, doesn't detect a new direction for the FL, just a move by Aristide to appease his troops. "Aristide faced a rebellion if he had sold out the thousands of officials elected last May, so he had to take that concession off the table," Dupuy said. "The point is that he should never have accepted the Organization of American States' verdict challenging those elections in the first place. The Constitution says the CEP is the final arbiter, not the OAS."
More importantly, the FL shows no signs of removing Duvalierists from key government posts nor disavowing the neoliberal agenda being implemented by Planning Minister Marc Bazin, a former Duvalierist Finance Minister and putschist Prime Minister.
On May 18, the PPN distributed thousands of flyers around Haiti which denounced both the CD and the FL as two political currents which increasingly resemble each other. "Both have agreed to apply the neoliberal death plan which foreigners are ramming down the Haitian people's throat and which will bring even more hardship to the people," the flyer said. "Both have included in their ranks soldiers, Macoutes, putschists, and elements from the 'pocket patriot' bourgeoisie." The PPN called on the people to join with it in "continuing the fight for a true popular alternative, for a true popular power."
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