WikiLeaks' lesson on Haiti
What the US embassy cables reveal about Washington's malign influence should make Latin American nations quit the UN force
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A boy holds a picture of the ousted former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as he sits on a chair outside the presidential palace during a visit by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy to Port-au-Prince, in February 2010, in the wake of the earthquake. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters
The polarisation of the debate around WikiLeaks is pretty simple, really. Of all the governments in the world, the United States government is the greatest threat to world peace and security today. This is obvious to anyone who looks at the facts with a modicum of objectivity. The Iraq war has claimed certainly hundreds of thousands, and, most likely, more than a million lives. It was completely unnecessary and unjustifiable, and based on lies. Now, Washington is moving toward a military confrontation with Iran.
As Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, pointed out in an interview recently, in the preparation for a war with Iran, we are at about the level of 1998 in the buildup to the Iraq war.
On this basis, even ignoring the tremendous harm that Washington causes to developing countries in such areas as economic development (through such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation), or climate change, it is clear that any information which sheds light on US "diplomacy" is more than useful. It has the potential to help save millions of human lives.
You either get this or you don't. Brazil's president Lula da Silva, who earned Washington's displeasure last May when he tried to help defuse the confrontation with Iran, gets it. That's why he defended and declared his "solidarity" with embattled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, even though the leaked cables were not pleasant reading for his own government.
One area of US foreign policy that the WikiLeaks cables help illuminate, which the major media has predictably ignored, is the occupation of Haiti. In 2004, the country's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown for the second time, through an effort led by the United States government. Officials of the constitutional government were jailed and thousands of its supporters were killed.
The Haitian coup, besides being a repeat of Aristide's overthrow in 1991, was also very similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002 – which also had Washington's fingerprints all over it. Some of the same people in Washington were even involved in both efforts. But the Venezuelan coup failed – partly because Latin American governments immediately and forcefully declared that they would not recognise the coup government.
In the case of Haiti, Washington had learned from its mistakes in the Venezuelan coup and had gathered support for an illegitimate government in advance. A UN resolution was passed just days after the coup, and UN forces, headed by Brazil, were sent to the country. The mission is still headed by Brazil, and has troops from a number of other Latin American governments that are left of centre, including Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay. They are also joined by Chile, Peru and Guatemala from Latin America.
Would these governments have sent troops to occupy Venezuela if that coup had succeeded? Clearly, they would not have considered such a move, yet the occupation of Haiti is no more justifiable. South America's progressive governments have strongly challenged US foreign policy in the region and the world, with some of them regularly using words like imperialism and empire as synonyms for Washington. They have built new institutions such as UNASUR to prevent these kinds of abuses from the north. Bolivia expelled the US ambassador in September of 2008 for interfering in the country's internal affairs.
Is it because Haitians are poor and black that their most fundamental human and democratic rights can be trampled upon?
The participation of these governments in the occupation of Haiti is a serious political contradiction for them, and it is getting worse. The WikiLeaks cables illustrate how important the control of Haiti is to the United States. A long memo from the US embassy in Port-au-Prince to the US secretary of state answers detailed questions about Haitian president Rene Preval's political, personal and family life, including such vital national security questions as "How many drinks can Preval consume before he shows signs of inebriation?" It also expresses one of Washington's main concerns:
"His reflexive nationalism, and his disinterest in managing bilateral relations in a broad diplomatic sense, will lead to periodic frictions as we move forward our bilateral agenda. Case in point, we believe that in terms of foreign policy, Preval is most interested in gaining increased assistance from any available resource. He is likely to be tempted to frame his relationship with Venezuela and Chávez-allies in the hemisphere in a way that he hopes will create a competitive atmosphere as far as who can provide the most to Haiti."
This logic is why they got rid of Aristide – who was much to the left of Preval – and won't let him back in the country. This is why Washington funded the recent "elections" that excluded Haiti's largest political party, the equivalent of shutting out the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. And this is why Minustah is still occupying the country, more than six years after the coup, without any apparent mission other than replacing the hated Haitian army – which Aristide had abolished – as a repressive force.
People who do not understand US foreign policy think that control over Haiti does not matter to Washington, because it is so poor and has no strategic minerals or resources. But that is not how Washington operates, as the WikiLeaks cables repeatedly illustrate. For the state department and its allies, it is all a ruthless chess game, and every pawn matters. Left governments will be removed or prevented from taking power where it is possible to do so; and the poorest countries – like Honduras last year – present the most opportune targets. A democratically elected government in Haiti, due to its history and the consciousness of the population, will inevitably be a left government – and one that will not line up with Washington's foreign policy priorities for the region. Thus, democracy is not allowed.
Thousands of Haitians have been protesting the sham elections, as well as Minustah's role in causing the cholera epidemic, which has already taken more than 2,300 lives and can be expected to kill thousands more in the coming months and years. Judging from the rapid spread of the disease, there may have been gross criminal negligence on the part of Minustah – that is, large-scale dumping of fecal waste into the Artibonite river. This is another huge reason for the force to leave Haiti.
This is a mission that costs over $500m a year, when the UN can't even raise a third of that to fight the epidemic that the mission caused, or to provide clean water for Haitians. And now the UN is asking for an increase to over $850m.
It is high time that the progressive governments of Latin America quit this occupation, which goes against their own principles and deeply-held beliefs, and is against the will of the Haitian people.
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I’m from the UN and I’m Here to Help
Beware of internationalists trying to do good: how the UN inadvertently supplied Haiti with cholera.
Among the activities that often have results very different from those envisaged or desired is foreign aid. There is probably not a single case of a very poor country being hauled out of poverty by such aid; there are many instances of dictators being kept in power and of civil wars virtually funded by it.That human action or activity often has unintended consequences is not a new observation.
Peacekeeping forces may likewise do things other than keep the peace (though they rarely do that).
To the roll of unintended consequences must now be added the likely introduction of cholera into Haiti by Bangladeshi troops there who are part of the UN peacekeeping force there.
A paper in the New England Journal of Medicine for December 9 from Harvard Medical School shows that the strain of cholera that has caused an epidemic in Haiti probably originated in South Asia, that is to say Bangladesh. The authors arrived at this conclusion by genetic analysis.
Rather coyly, they state:
Our findings have policy implications for public health officials who are considering the deployment of vaccines or other measures for controlling cholera.
This is indeed the case, and the implications are serious. The strain of cholera, that could easily spread, is more virulent than the strain already resident in Latin America; and while the measures necessary to prevent spread are known in theory, they may be difficult to put into practice. Among other things, there is a world shortage of cholera vaccine.
There is a terrible irony to all this that the authors do not mention. The Bangladeshis now suffer from the largest mass outbreak of arsenic poisoning in the history of mankind, thanks to the wells in their country drilled (with the best of intentions, no doubt) by UNICEF. The arsenic was in the groundwater, and millions of Bangladeshis now suffer from chronic arsenic poisoning; and one in four deaths in Bangladesh has now been attributed to it.
Humanitarian action has thus imported mass poisoning into Bangladesh and humanitarian action has now exported cholera from it. Beware of internationalists trying to do good.
One cannot help but wonder whether Bangladeshi troops were used by the United Nations as a means of giving foreign aid, of killing two birds with one stone, as it were. But the whole episode could scarcely have been better designed to feed into Haitians’ paranoia about the designs of the rest of the world on their country. It is interesting that much of the population was convinced that it was the UN troops who had brought the disease, which has now killed more than a thousand people in Haiti, with them, and it appears that they were right. Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences is not universally accepted: when something bad happens, people suspect human malignity.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at theManhattan Institute. His new book is Second Opinion: A Doctor's Notes from the Inner City.
>via: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/im-from-the-un-and-im-here-to-help/?singlepage=true
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Fidel Castro Lambasts Clinton on Haiti
HAVANA TIMES, Dec. 17 — Former Cuban President Fidel Castro had sharp criticism Friday for his US counterpart Bill Clinton, the current UN Special Envoy to Haiti, in a commentary published in the Cuban press. HT brings you the full text of Castro’s observations.
CLINTON’S LIES
By Fidel Castro
It truly pains me having to deny it. Today he is nothing more than a simple fellow consigned to history, as if the empire’s history, and even more importantly, the history of the human race, were guaranteed beyond a few dozen years, without a nuclear war breaking out in Korea, Iran or some other area of conflict.
As is known, the United Nations has sent a special envoy to Haiti.
Clinton – who was of course President after George H. W. Bush and before George W. Bush – prevented former President Carter from participating in immigration negotiations with Cuba for reasons of ridiculous political jealousy, promoted the Helms-Burton Act and was complicit with the Cuban-American National Foundation’s attacks on Cuba.
There is abundant evidence about this behavior, but we did not for that reason take it too seriously, nor were we hostile towards his activities related to the mission to which, for obvious reasons, the UN assigned him.
We had been cooperating with this sister country for many years in various fields, especially in the training of doctors and the provision of health services to the population, and Clinton didn’t bother us at all. If he was interested in any success, we saw no reason to limit our cooperation with Haiti in such a sensitive area. Then came the unexpected earthquake, bringing death and destruction, and subsequently, the epidemic.
Just two days ago, a meeting took place in the capital of the Dominican Republic about the reconstruction of Haiti, and has complicated things. Approximately 80 people, including several ambassadors, representing the donors of more than $100 million; many members of the Clinton Foundation, of the U.S. government and of that of Haiti participated in it.
Few people took the floor; among them the Venezuelan ambassador who, as one of the most important donors, spoke briefly, using heartfelt, clear and accurate words. Clinton took up almost all of the time in a meeting which began at 5:30 pm and ended at midnight. The Cuban ambassador, as a key participant, was there silent witness at the request of Haiti and Santo Domingo. He was not conceded the right to say a single word, although he was a witness to a meeting that accomplished absolutely nothing. It was supposed to continue the following day. But none of that happened.
The meeting in the Dominican Republic was a deceptive maneuver. The indignation of the Haitians was absolutely justified. The country destroyed by the earthquake which occurred almost a year ago has been abandoned to its fate.
Today, Thursday, December 16, a dispatch from the U.S. agency AP published the following:
“Former U.S. President Bill Clinton declared his confidence in Haiti’s post-quake reconstruction effort Wednesday, making a one-day visit amid civil unrest, rampant disease and a seemingly intractable political crisis.
“The U.N. special envoy to Haiti travelled to the troubled country a day after the interim reconstruction commission of which he is co-chairman was forced to hold its meeting in the neighboring Dominican Republic after violence broke out following Haiti’s disputed Nov. 28 presidential election.
“Clinton visited a cholera clinic run by Doctors Without Borders that has treated some of the more than 100,000 people sickened in the epidemic that broke out in October. He then went to the main U.N. peacekeeping base for meetings with Haitian and international officials.
“The meeting a day before approved some $430 million in projects. But it was more notable for anger over the slow pace of reconstruction and a letter from frustrated Haitian members who said they were left out of decision-making and complained that approved projects do not advance the reconstruction of Haiti and long-term development.’”
Notice what he said later in a press conference, according to the dispatch.
“’I share their frustration…’”
“… Hundreds of thousands of Haitians would find new permanent housing next year and many more would move out of the tent and tarp camps that have been home to more than 1 million people since the Jan. 12 earthquake.
“But such promises have been made before. The house-less believed they would start getting new homes — or at least sturdier temporary shelters — months ago. Only $897 million of the more than $5.7 billion pledged for 2010-11 has been delivered.”
The $897 million mentioned is nowhere to be seen.
It constitutes, moreover, a total disregard for the truth to assert that 100,000 people have been treated in a clinic administered by “Doctors without Borders.”
In a statement to the press by Dr. Lea Guido, representing the Pan American Health Organization-World Health Organization (PHO/WHO) in Haiti, reported today that the number affected through December 11 had reached 104,918 people, a truly unprecedented number of people who could not have been treated in a “Doctors without Borders” clinic.
It is clear, and Clinton knows full well that Europe, the United States and Canada drain doctors, nurses, therapists and other health technicians from Caribbean countries, which lack the personnel needed to carry out that task, with a few honorable exceptions.
Obviously, with his lies, Clinton is presuming to ignore the work of more than 1,000 Cuban and Latin American doctors, nurses and technicians bearing the brunt of the battle against the epidemic in the only way possible that is by reaching the most remote corners of the country. Half of Haiti’s 10 million inhabitants live in rural areas.
Such a great number of people, under such conditions, would not have been treated without the support of the eminent Latin American woman who represents the WHO in Cuba and Haiti.
Our country has committed to mobilizing the human resources needed to complete this noble task.
As she stated, “The human resources Cuba is sending are, at this moment, moving to the most isolated areas of the country. And this is very timely.”
They are arriving now and very soon the necessary personnel will be there.
Yesterday, the Cuban Medical Brigade treated 931 patients, with two deceased, for a mortality rate for the day of 0.2%.
Translated by Granma International
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December 16th, 2010
by Jeb Sprague (for Haiti Liberte))
In the media coverage of Haiti's ongoing electoral crisis, presidential candidate?Michel "Sweet Micky"?Martelly, whom ruling Unity party candidate Jude Célestin edged out of Haiti's Jan. 16 run-off by less than 1%, has been portrayed as the victim of voting fraud and the leader of a populist upsurge against Haiti's crooked Provisional Electoral Council (CEP).
Some have questioned his presidential suitability by pointing to his vulgar antics as a konpa musician over the last two decades, where he often made demeaning comments about women and periodically dropped his trousers to bare his backside.
The real problem with Martelly, however, is not his perceived immorality, but his heinous political history and close affiliation with the reactionary "forces of darkness," as they are called in Haiti, which have snuffed out each genuine attempt Haitians have made over the past 20 years to elect a democratic government. Far from a champion of democracy, Martelly has been a cheerleader for, and perhaps even a participant in, bloody coups d'état and military rule.
DUVALIERIST AFFINITIES
Under the Duvalier dictatorship, Martelly ran the Garage, a nightclub patronized by army officers and members of Haiti's tiny ruling class.
At a recent press conference, Martelly spoke nostalgically of the Duvalierist era, when François "Papa Doc" Duvalier and later his son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" enforced their iron rule with gun and machete wielding Tonton Macoutes, a sort of Haitian Gestapo.
"Today the dog is eating its vomit," lamented Marcus Garcia of Radio Mélodie FM in a Dec. 8 editorial. While "Michel Martelly openly defends the Duvalier regime in a press conference," the youth who have been duped into supporting him are "without memory of [the infamous political prison] Fort Dimanche-Fort La mort, without memory of the Nov. 29, 1987 electoral massacre," when neo-Duvalierist thugs killed hundreds of would-be voters.
In a 2002 article, the Washington Post explained how the konpa singer was a long-time "favorite of the thugs who worked on behalf of the hated Duvalier family dictatorship before its 1986 collapse." But the mainstream media of late has yet to pick up on the singer's past affiliations.
Duvalierist affinities should not be taken lightly. Human rights groups such as?the League of Former Political Prisoners and Families of the Disappeared compiled a partial list of several thousand of the Duvalier regime's victims, which was published in Haiti Progres in 1987, but total estimates of those killed under the U.S.-backed 29-year long dictatorship range from 30,000 to 50,000 people.
After Baby Doc's fall in February 1986, a mass democratic movement, long repressed by the Duvaliers, burst forth and became known as the Lavalas, or flood. Martelly quickly became a bitter Lavalas opponent, making trenchant attacks against the popular movement in his songs played widely on Haitian radio.
THE RISE OF ARISTIDE AND THE 1991 COUP
Following his dramatic election with 67% of the vote in Dec. 16, 1990 elections, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former parish priest and Lavalas movement leader, was inaugurated on Feb. 7, 1991 as Haiti's democratically elected president, but then deposed by a military coup, for the first time, on Sep. 30, 1991, only eight months into his first term. Martelly?"was closely identified with sympathizers of the 1991 military coup that ousted former President Jean- Bertrand?Aristide," the Miami Herald observed in 1996.
The military junta that ruled Haiti between 1991 and 1994 was bloody and brutal. According to Human Rights Watch, some 5,000 people were murdered by the junta's soldiers and paramilitaries, and thousands more tortured and raped. Hundreds of thousands were driven into hiding and exile. Martelly became the coup's joker, applauding the junta while it was in power.
He was friends with the dreaded Lt. Col. Michel François, who, as Police Chief, was the principal director of the coup's executioners. For instance, according to a fact-finding report by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark's Haiti Commission of Inquiry into the Sep. 30 Coup d'Etat, François drove a red Jeep leading several buses full of soldiers into large crowds demonstrating against the coup on the Champ de Mars in front of the National Palace on the night of Sep. 29, 1991. (A January 1991 coup d'état, nine months earlier, had been turned back by such massive demonstrations.) The crowds applauded the soldiers, thinking they had come to put down the coup. Instead, on François' signal, the bus windows opened, then police and soldiers mowed down hundreds of demonstrators with machine-gun fire.
Martelly claims his moniker "Sweet Micky" (also the name of his band) came from a nightclub performance in 1988, but it's a nickname Col. Michel François shared. U.S. documentary filmmaker and writer Kevin Pina recalls a concert at the El Rancho Hotel in Port-au-Prince in July 1993 where Colonel "Michel François, ... who was also called 'Sweet Micky' after the coup of 1991 because people claimed he would have a broad smile on his face as he killed Lavalas partisans, took to the stage" and "held up Martelly's hand announcing to the crowd, 'This is the real Sweet Micky.'"?Pina adds, "That's the first time I ever heard Martelly referred to as such."
One concert that Martelly performed at the request of Michel François and military junta leaders was billed as a?demonstration against Dante Caputo, the United Nations special representative to Haiti who was attempting to deploy UN human rights observers into the country.?At that same time, the Haitian army and the infamous FRAPH death squads were slaughtering members of the anti-coup resistance.
Martelly, known at the time to have many friends throughout the military, explained to the Miami New Times: "I didn't accept [the request to play] because I was Michel François's friend, I did not accept because it was the Army. I went because I did not want Aristide back."
Most shockingly, Father Jean-Marie Vincent (who was killed by a coup death-squad on Aug. 28, 1994) accused Martelly of accompanying the Haitian police on deadly night-time raids to track down suspected Lavalas resistance leaders. "We have information that Michel Martelly has been traveling with death squads from the police when they go out at night to hunt and kill Lavalas leaders," Vincent told filmmaker Pina in a videotaped interview.
After Aristide returned to Haiti in October 1994, Martelly spent most of his time living "in a condo on Miami Beach," where he "had a regular gig at the Promenade on Ocean Drive, where his band Sweet Micky performed compas, rhythmic Haitian dance music," according to the Miami New Times.
In 2000, Aristide was overwhelmingly elected to a second term. But the George W. Bush administration, also coming into power at that time, launched a destabilization campaign to overthrow Aristide, which is detailed in Peter Hallward's 2007 book Damming the Flood. Martelly became a willing participant in that germinating coup.
In 2002, the noose was tightening around Aristide. Former soldiers had attempted a coup on Dec. 17, 2001, and the U.S. aid embargo was taking its toll. Nonetheless, Aristide's government had launched several social investment programs including food cooperatives, the building of unprecedented numbers of schools, subsidization of school books, and other literacy promotion. In his 2002 Carnival song, Martelly referred "to recent riots at a dockside warehouse... that were sparked by word that officials from Aristide's party were stealing from a food program for the poor,"wrote the Washington Post. Although corruption under Aristide paled next to that under the 1991 military junta which Martelly supported, his Carnival song hit a nerve.
By 2003, Martelly was on average spending $150,000 to $200,000 on his floats for Port-au-Prince's annual Carnival, according to the Miami Herald. During Carnival, in which mockery of the government is a tradition, Martelly aimed extremely sharp and vulgar criticism at Aristide. During that time, "Kolonget manman ou Aristide" was one of Sweet Micky's refrains, perhaps the worst curse one can make in Kreyol, meaning literally "the slave master fucked your mother."
THE 2004 COUP AND ITS AFTERMATH
In February 2004, Aristide was driven from power yet again. A U.S. Navy Seal team took the president from his home - Aristide called it "a modern kidnapping" - and sent him into exile in Africa, where he remains to this day.
In the build-up to that coup, so-called "rebels" composed of former Haitian Army soldiers and former FRAPH death-squad paramilitaries, ran raids into Haiti's Central Plateau and North, savagely executing dozens of Aristide supporters, government officials and some of their family members. Wyclef Jean, a friend of Martelly, described the "rebels" as freedom fighters "standing up for their rights."
Following the coup, U.S., French, and Canadian soldiers occupied Haiti and set up an illegal de facto regime. As outcry against the February coup grew, Martelly held a concert in Port-au-Prince in April 2004 to counter calls for Aristide's return. The concert was entitled: "Keep him out!"
In September 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne flooded the northwest city of Gonaives, killing some 3,000 people. U.S.-installed de facto Prime Minister Gérard Latortue was widely criticized for his ineffective and belated response to the disaster. One of his few initiatives was to hold a fundraiser with business leaders of the Haitian American Chamber of Commerce. Martelly, who had used his music only to undermine Aristide, headlined the Latortue gala, the Miami Herald reported.
In 2006, with Lavalas militants driven into hiding, jailed, or murdered, the Latortue regime held an election which brought former-President René Préval back to power. The Lavalas base supported Préval, thinking he would bring Aristide back, free all the coup's political prisoners, and reverse the neoliberal march of the Latortue dictatorship.
But Préval betrayed these expectations, creating a government dominated by coup supporters and working closely with the foreign military occupation which had now been handed off to the UN. He soon became reviled by large swathes of the poor for failing to enable Aristide's return or to restart many of Aristide's popular social investment programs. By 2009, Préval's CEP banned Aristide's party, the Lavalas Family (FL), from partial senatorial elections and later presidential and parliamentary elections. Préval's weak response to the catastrophic January 2010 earthquake accelerated his decline.
THE 2010 SELECTIONS AND MARTELLY'S RISE
Finally, the CEP fixed general elections for Nov. 28, 2010. The Associated Press reported Dec. 10 that Martelly's "political popularity took off in the weeks before the vote and seems to have surged since it appeared he had been narrowly disqualified from the race."
This surge owes a lot to Martelly's hi-tech campaign, which outgunned and outclassed his 18 rivals by launching tens of thousands of computerized messages asking people to vote for him.
Martelly hired a slick Spanish public relations firm to manage his campaign and break into the spotlight. "The Madrid-based Sola, who played an indispensable role in getting Mexico's Felipe Calderon into the president's chair in 2006, has been running the Martelly campaign for the past seven weeks, which goes a long way toward explaining how the antic-prone musician suddenly emerged as a leading contender for Haiti's presidency," reported The Toronto Star on Dec. 6.
Calderon is widely considered to have stolen the 2006 election from leftist candidate Lopez Obrador, a dirty victory which pleased Washington. The firm Ostos & Sola has also helped the campaign of Lech Walesa, the transnational elite's darling in Poland. Damian Merlo, Ostos & Sola's executive director and Martelly campaign point-man, worked on the presidential campaign of U.S. Republican John McCain before joining the firm. All of these associations raise questions about what "hidden hand" may be behind the Martelly campaign.
"Today's $50 million question: who is the Miami businessman who reached out to Antonia Sola to be Michel Martelly's campaign fixer?" wrote the Toronto Star. "Sola smiles at the question, all Spanish charm. He's not saying. 'A friend, a businessman, presented Michel to us in the U.S.,' he says."
The key to Sola's formula for Martelly was to present him as an "outsider," even though he had been the ultimate "insider" with the pro-coup bourgeoisie that overthrew Aristide twice.
On Nov. 28, as it became apparent that Haiti's election was riddled with fraud and disenfranchisement, Martelly joined with 11 other candidates to call for the election's annulment. But later that day, Edmond Mulet, who heads the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), personally called Martelly to tell him that he was leading, Al Jazeera reported. Sweet Micky, without even telling the other candidates in the impromptu front, jumped back in the race.
The next day, Martelly denied he had ever signed the joint letter read in his nodding presence at the candidates' joint press conference on Nov. 28 calling for the election's annulment. He explained "his change of position by saying his candidacy had been leading in polling stations where there had not been fraud,"Chicago's Daily Herald reported.
"He saw all the fraud happening on election day," motorcycle taxi driver Weed Charlot told IPS about Martelly. "But now he sees he has some votes and power. So he'll accept the election."
The same day he spoke to Martelly, Mulet called candidate Mirlande Manigat to also tell her she was leading in the vote. She too pulled out of the candidates' annulment front.
Then, on Dec. 7, the CEP announced that Manigat was leading with Unity's Célestin in second-place, and hence the second-round. Martelly, who apparently came in third with just over 21%, about 6,800 votes short of Célestin, switched back into protest-mode.
Popular anger was already high with Préval and the CEP for excluding the Lavalas Family (only 23% of Haiti's 4.7 million voters turned out, according to the CEP). The election mess was the last straw.
Furthermore, there was rage at MINUSTAH for attempting to cover-up that its Nepalese troops in Mirebalais had accidentally introduced cholera into Haiti, where the disease is now a pandemic.
With Wyclef Jean at his side predicting "civil war,' Martelly channeled the deep popular frustration to attack the government for "robbing" him of a victory he claimed should have been his.
The result has been a wave of election-related mayhem. "It is clear that most of the acts of violence in Haiti around the election have been carried out by Martelly's supporters," said Ricot Dupuy of Radio Soleil d'Haiti, based in Brooklyn.
"Thousands of his supporters have paralyzed the capital and other cities in protests that included attacks on public buildings," Reuters reported.
Some people have died in drive-by shootings and skirmishes between Martelly's supporters and those of Célestin.
In late November, Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre witnessed a group of Martelly supporters at the Building 2004 voting center in Port-au-Prince throw rocks and chant: "If you don't let us vote, we will burn this building down."
Martelly supporters are responsible for burning a number of government buildings in the capital and in the southern city of Aux Cayes. They have also assaulted some opponents, while Célestin backers have been accused of killing at least one Martelly supporter.
Former Col. Himmler Rébu said on Haiti's Signal FM that he had witnessed the tactics of Martelly's troops in the street. "This is not something simple," he said, a Kreyol understatement that implies there are hidden forces at work.
In short, there are two movements in Haiti today which are being misleadingly simplified by some press reports into one. There are the Lavalas masses mobilized against Préval's fraudulent exclusionary elections and the UN occupation, as well as for Aristide's return.
Then there is the bid by Martelly, using his and Wyclef's celebrity and Ostos & Sola's scientific techniques, to coopt popular frustration with Préval in an effort to hoist himself into power. To confuse people, he equates Préval with Aristide, pretending they are the twin governments responsible for the "failed policies" of the past two decades.
In reality, Haiti's sad state today can be mostly attributed to the 1991 and 2004 coups which Martelly supported. Furthermore, the power behind Préval - Haiti's pro-coup bourgeoisie - is close to Martelly, and imperialism is not threatened by him. We are witnessing a fierce rivalry between two factions which share the same two backers: Haiti's anti-Lavalas business class and transnational elites with the U.S. as their most powerful state apparatus.
As Martelly explained to the Huffington Post's Georgianne Nienaber, he is very much in step with Washington's prescription for Haiti, supporting "anything that will help exports... anything that will help the private sector."
Secondly, Martelly does not support the people's call to end the UN occupation of Haiti: "I want to say to the international community, the diplomatic corps, and non-governmental agencies that we need them," he said in the same interview.
Ultimately, Martelly is not a "dark horse" candidate, as Canada's Globe & Mail suggests, who has come out of nowhere to lead "Haiti's young and dispossessed." He is a man with a long history of service to Haiti's "Morally Repugnant Elite."
During his campaign, Martelly was fond of saying, as he did during an October campaign stop in Miami, that in Haiti "it's more about the man than about the plan." If this is true, Haitians should have grave misgiving about a man who has backed two coup regimes that used death-squads to silence the poor majority and throttle Haiti's nascent democracy.
Jeb Sprague is a contributor and co-founder of HaitiAnalysis.com
>via: http://haitianalysis.com/2010/12/16/michel-martelly-democracy-hero-or-coup-d-...
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INTERVIEW WITH CANDIDATE CHARLES BAKER (13 DEC 2010)
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Haiti's Structural Crisis
December 17, 2010
The Haitian government started to rig the recent presidential election well before the actual balloting on November 28. Mainstream US press accounts have mistakenly used words like “chaos,” “confusion” and “disorganization” to describe the election, which triggered street uprisings that closed the country down for several days after the falsified results from the first round were announced.
James North (
jamesnorth@mail.com) has reported from Africa, Asia and Latin America for thirty-five years.
Amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud and a chaotic international relief effort, Haitians themselves are surviving with dignity and heroism.
From a church in a rugged rural parish in Honduras, Father Andres Tamayo leads a grassroots movement to protect dwindling timberlands. Bills introduced in the US Congress might help save the forests.
In fact, the strategy to install the unpopular president René Préval’s handpicked successor, Jude Célestin, was well planned. First, the government recognized that the 1.5 million displaced Haitians, most of them still living in tents nearly a year after the killer January earthquake, were naturally the most hostile, due to its inept and corrupt response to the disaster. So it made no serious effort to re-register the tent-dwellers to vote, or even to set up convenient polling stations for them.
On election day, my great friend of fifteen years, Milfort Bruno, guided me through the vast tent city on the Champs Mars, Port-au-Prince’s equivalent of Central Park or the Boston Common, right next to the damaged white presidential palace. We did not find a single person who had been able to vote. We did run into Madame Marie Chavannes, one of Milfort’s former neighbors, a dignified woman in her 70s who is under five feet tall and is still sweltering in one of the tents. She showed us her photo-ID voting card and said with a mixture of disappointment and disgust, “I walked all the way over to the bureau de vote and they said my name was not on the list.”
Another government maneuver was just as sneaky. A few days before the vote a political pollster announced that Célestin was in second place, behind law professor Mirlande Manigat but six points ahead of Michel Martelly, the popular singer. This poll posed a big puzzle: Célestin’s well-financed campaign had pasted up his posters everywhere, but you could hardly find anyone who actually planned to vote for him. Meanwhile, Martelly, known as “Sweet Micky” from his singing days, was drawing gigantic, enthusiastic crowds.
Another Haitian friend, who is close to the centers of power, cleared up the mystery. “They exaggerated Célestin’s support in the poll,” he said the day before the election. “That way, they have a false prediction so they can fix the results.”
The actual vote-counting was done by the Provisional Electoral Council (the French initials are CEP), which many Haitians regard as a government tool. Even before the vote, the International Crisis Group, a prestigious, sober organization headquartered in Brussels, had raised doubts about the CEP’s neutrality and fairness.
Despite dark rumors of these and other machinations, election day itself was peaceful, and full of hope. Vehicular traffic was banned, so groups of people, particularly young Martelly supporters, walked up and down the unusually quiet streets in a celebratory mood, sensing they were part of a widespread and growing movement for change. So that when a week later the election commission tried to claim that Célestin had somehow edged out Sweet Micky and would face Madame Manigat in a January 16 runoff, the explosion of disappointed rage was completely understandable.
For once, the United States was on the right side. Just hours after the announcement, the US Embassy said pointedly it did not believe the results, and other international donors added to the pressure. The Préval government backtracked, offering a partial recount. But the opposition refused to agree. As of December 16, the sullen stalemate continued, although the government would probably have to yield even further.
The Préval government’s descent into corruption and vote-stealing is repugnant, but also a tragic betrayal of once proud hopes. The 2010 election represents the final collapse of the huge reform movement that brought Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the charismatic slum priest, to power twenty years ago. René Préval was Aristide’s right-hand man, succeeding him twice as president. Only five years ago Préval won a convincing and genuine popular victory; his support included all those people who filled the streets to try to stop his effort to steal this latest election.
This time around, neither leading opposition candidate is offering anything like a radical alternative. Madame Manigat seems sincere, and promises good government. Michel Martelly is a vague populist who emphasizes primary education. (Many of his supporters are in fact overlooking his past, when, as a performer, he was close to Haiti’s military rulers.) Either Madame Manigat or Martelly would be better than the government’s candidate. But neither will threaten the Haitian elite’s grip on power in any fundamental way.
Haiti still needs profound, revolutionary change, even if this particular reform movement is exhausted. Daily life for most Haitians is a struggle that is incomprehensible to outsiders. Take water, for instance; most people, even in Port-au-Prince, have no piped water and buy from young women who walk up and down the streets balancing buckets on their heads. Two decades ago, the American professor Simon Fass (his Political Economy in Haiti is a masterpiece) estimated that poor people in Port-au-Prince could only afford slightly more than three gallons per adult per day for all their drinking and washing. (By comparison, a single American toilet flush uses over five gallons.) That figure has probably not improved, which makes the fight against the cholera epidemic that has already killed more than 2,000 people even harder.
My friend Milfort Bruno is a 62-year-old guide and small businessman (he owns the Mahogany Craft Shop, just outside the famous Oloffson Hotel). He would be comfortably lower middle class elsewhere, but in Port-au-Prince he buys his family’s water by the bucket, and they are lucky to get electricity three times a week for several-hour stretches. He explained that the national power company rotates supply from one neighborhood to another—but without keeping to a schedule. “You might get power, suddenly, at 2 am,” he explained. “So you jump up and start ironing. Your clothes must look presentable when you go out into the street.”
This kind of deprivation is not an accident. Simon Fass found that the water economy was monopolized by a small group of people, part of the local elite, who controlled the pipes, water trucks and reservoirs, and who could therefore force the majority of poor Port-au-Princians to pay “what may have been the highest urban water prices in the world.”
A few months before the earthquake, Milfort Bruno and I had traveled down to the rugged hills in the south near Cap Rouge, to learn more about another way the Haitian elite exploited the poor and blocked economic growth. I wanted to look into why Haiti’s coffee exports, which had once been significant and high-quality, had collapsed over the past couple of decades.
Alongside a rocky dirt road, we met several members of the Marcelin family, who stood politely in their muddy clothes and rubber boots to answer our questions. One of them, Pierre, who was in his late 40s and wearing a yellow baseball cap, emerged as their informal spokesperson. He talked to us in clear sentences and paragraphs, pausing now and then to glance around the group, inviting them to confirm or add to his explanation.
As recently as 1949, Haiti had been the third-largest coffee exporter in the world, and the beans were the main source of the foreign exchange the country needed to develop. Pierre Marcelin gestured out into the surrounding trees as dusk fell and said: “There are still some coffee bushes out there. But we don’t bother harvesting them anymore.”
The Marcelin family explanation had several elements, but they said one of the most significant was the “rich merchants” in the nearby port of Jacmel. “The merchants gave us a very low price for our coffee, but they got a much better price when they exported,” Pierre explained. “And when we asked the merchants for loans to help buy our inputs, they turned us down.”
The Marcelins started to cut down the coffee bushes—Pierre gestured to the machete hanging from his belt—and instead planted bananas, sweet potatoes and fresh vegetables (“things we can eat”). Also, coffee bushes require shade, but the Marcelins are chopping down their larger trees to make and sell charcoal. Pierre said, with some shame, that they know they are contributing to Haiti’s deforestation crisis, but they have no choice: “It’s the only way we can earn a little money to buy cooking oil, or rice.”
The Marcelin family analysis is confirmed in Haiti: State Against Nation (1990), which is one of the most important books ever written about the country. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, a brilliant Haitian anthropologist who teaches at the University of Chicago, explains that the historic slave revolution of the early 1800s eliminated the French colonial elite that had owned the large plantations. But a new upper class emerged, merchants in the port cities and mostly of mixed racial background, who used their control of the government to tax the coffee exports of the independent small farmers. But over time the merchants grew too greedy, and people like the Marcelins stopped harvesting.
Today Haiti has the highest gap between rich and poor in the entire Western Hemisphere. This intense inequality is often compounded by the international aid effort, as I recognized once again during a brief, telling experience on my way to Haiti earlier this year. Just a few months after the earthquake, my flight had far more white passengers than on my usual visits. In the seat in front of me a young man, 30 or so years old and too formally dressed for Haiti’s climate, was reading a document called “Action Plan for Recovery and Development of Haiti.” He was part of the army of development consultants from the rich world who descended on the country after the earthquake.
His on-flight reading was jaw-dropping, the rough equivalent of leafing through a manual on brain surgery when you should be learning elementary first aid. Even Haitians who have spent their entire lives studying their remarkable nation, whether as distinguished academics or veteran community activists, are not sure exactly what to do next.
Unfortunately, the “Action Plans” devised outside Haiti so far call for more of the same: the same failed economic policies manufactured in Washington that helped sink Haiti into this current mess, and—what may be even worse—relying on the same local elite to help carry these “Plans” out. The Préval government, which has become part of that elite, is desperately clinging to power because it wants to administer the hundreds of millions of dollars in reconstruction aid.
A few of the international agencies, like Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health, are doing vital work, most recently in fighting the cholera epidemic. They are deeply appreciated by the Haitian people. But most of the army of outsiders will never fund the grassroots challenges to the local elite that are indispensable to genuine growth and real human development.
All over Port-au-Prince, you see ordinary Haitian citizens clearing earthquake debris and rebuilding, slowly but steadily, using simple hand tools, purchasing construction materials with financial help from their 1 million relatives in the diaspora. Unless the vast majority of these hardworking Haitians are allowed to participate fully in the recovery, their extraordinary energy and intelligence will be partly wasted.
December 17, 2010
