Haiti held elections yesterday. I haven’t looked for anything new for some hours now.
Dennis Bernstein should have up-to-date reports on FlashPoints Radio today, 5:00 PST. Pretty sure there is an online feed.
Haitian People Turn Out in Force for Democracy, By Benjamin Melançon:
The many foreseeable problems with lack of voting stations and the ineptitude and criminality of the coup regime have come to pass. But the Haitian people’s drive for democracy could not be stopped.
From the AHP translation mailing list . . . translated by Mike Levy:
Port-au-Prince, February 7, 2006 (AHP)- Tens of thousands of people have been in the streets since this morning in several districts of Port-au-Prince to denounce maneuvers aimed at preventing them from voting.
Thousands of citizens took to the streets in the Delmas 75 district. Thousands of other frustrated would-be voters left Cité Soleil and the surrounding neighborhoods and headed for the headquarters of the Provisional Electoral Council.
Thousands more who were prevented from voting at city hall set off in the same direction.
The lines of people waiting to vote since 5 o’clock to ensure that they would be able to vote this morning number in the hundreds of thousands.The problems were either that the voting materials were not available or the polling officials were not present or else the voters were not able to find their names on the lists or were not able to find the polling stations at all.
“This is a complete shambles” protested the voters, who announced their intention to remain in line all night long until the CEP gives them the opportunity to vote.
In several districts, poll watchers from political parties were denied access to the polling stations.
Polling officials turned away voters who did not know how to read on the pretext that their names would not be on the lists.
Other officials are questioning voters before they allow them to vote.
Counting of Ballots Continues in Haiti:
Guarded by U.N. troops, mules carrying sacks of ballots trotted down from mountain villages Wednesday as authorities began the slow process of collecting and tabulating election results . . . The leading contender heading into the vote was Rene Preval, a 63-year-old agronomist and former president widely supported by Haiti’s poor masses. The shy, soft-spoken Preval, Haiti’s only leader to finish his elected term, is a former ally of Aristide, who is in exile in South Africa. {snip}
More than 50 percent of the 3.5 million registered voters were believed to have cast ballots, said David Wimhurst, a U.N. spokesman, adding that a precise figure wasn’t yet available.
“I think no one can deny the legitimacy of this process because people really participated,” the special U.N. envoy to Haiti, Juan Gabriel Valdes, told Associated Press Television News.
However, he conceded that polls opened too late and “some people were not even able to vote.” {snip}
“We are very worried that Preval has won on the first round,” Manigat told The Associated Press . . . If no candidate wins a majority, a runoff between the top two vote-getters will be held March 19. {snip}
Initial results were expected to be released after 20 percent of the vote is counted, which could happen late Wednesday, said Stephan Lacroix, a spokesman for Haiti’s electoral council. Final results are expected later this week.
The huge turnout all but overwhelmed electoral officials, who conceded they were ill-prepared for the crush of voters.
Many Haitians voted Tuesday night after spending hours in lines stretching up to a mile at some polling stations.
Many stations opened late, lacking the necessary workers, security and ballots to handle the number of voters who turned out by foot, car and brightly colored buses.
There were no polling stations Tuesday in the Lavalas stronghold of Cite Soleil, home to at least 200,000 people. Voters swarmed out of that poor neighborhood as well as Bel Air and other areas to discover that voting stations had failed to open, election officials had no ballots, registration lists were incorrect and lines stretched for blocks. Angry crowds stormed the gates of the voting stations. At least four people died, including a police officer who was killed by a mob after fatally shooting a voter . . . Official results are expected on Friday. {snip}
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe what happened yesterday, election day in Haiti.
ANDREA SCHMIDT: Well, I want to say to start the day at 4:30 and to roam the streets of Port-au-Prince was one of most incredible experiences of my life, because it was extremely inspiring to see, after two years of political repression in many areas and human rights abuses and a disintegrating – further disintegrating infrastructure, to see Haitians come out to vote and to be in the streets, lined up, ready to vote by 5:00 A.M. It was extremely powerful.
Then we arrived in Cité Soleil or rather, on the outskirts of Cité Soleil because, as you mentioned in the introduction, there was a decision made by the C.E.P., the Provisional Electoral Council, to not have voting stations inside Cité Soleil for alleged reasons of insecurity, but of course, there is always a question of how politically motivated these things are.
So people had to leave their neighborhood and walk to the outskirts to one of four voting centers, and the scene, when we arrived [inaudible] was, again, incredibly inspiring. At 5:00 a.m., people waiting to vote. By 6:00 a.m., the voting stations, the polling booths were supposed to open.
There’s, I believe, 43 different polling stations within that one voting center. Which means that over 2,000 people – sorry, 20,000 people would have been set to vote in that area. People became very, very inpatient when they realized that it was 6:00 a.m. They wanted to vote before the sun got too hot because they were in a warehouse area, no shade whatsoever, except inside. And they realized that the voting booths hadn’t even been set up yet.
The questions about why these failures in logistical planning took place remain. One of the things I observed later on in the day was going up to [inaudible] going up the hill to the wealthy areas of the city where voting was going on in a very orderly fashion, where people were able to go into a building, line up, vote within half an hour of arriving, is that if you plan to hold an election in a warehouse where there are no walls and you assume that the poorest people in the city should have to use the poorest infrastructure in the city, you are going to have elections that look like people taping cardboard boxes up to create private polling stations. You are going to have the sort of elections that are very, very vulnerable to all sorts of spoiling and a sort of disenfranchisement based on class, and that’s what we observed yesterday.
By about 8:30 in the morning, I’d been doing [inaudible] and as far as I could observe, no had yet been able to vote. People became very frustrated. There was a remarkable demonstration of, I’d say, about 10,000 people that grew as it went from Cité Soleil, where it picked up people who had not yet been able to vote, up to Bellaire and was about to go to the C.E.P. headquarters on Del Meaux when the demonstration turned around, and people returned to their neighborhoods, saying that they were going to try to vote again. And then as you mentioned, polling stations closed two hours later.
Then foreseen at least in Cité Soleil, or in the environs, where we were watching the closings. Again, some very poor infrastructure and security arrangements made for increased frustration, increased disenfranchisement where, you know, people were basically having to wrestle with Jordanian soldiers who had been patrolling their neighborhoods, shooting for several months.
Election Day and Beyond, by Brian Concannon:
But the biggest question of all will not be answered on February 7 or in Haiti at all: whether the international community will accept the Haitian voters’ choice this time. Haiti’s last elections, in November 2000, were held in relative security, with broad public participation and a clear popular choice. But the U.S., France, Canada and other countries disagreed with that choice, so they undermined the elected government with three years of political and economic coercion, and eventually bundled the President onto a U.S. plane headed for the Central African Republic. {snip}
If past is any guide, Haitian voters will do what they can on Tuesday. They will collectively make a Herculean effort to vote, and will persist against all obstacles except massive deadly violence. And their choice will, once again, be clear: one candidate will win, as usual, by a large margin, while the remaining 31 candidates split a fraction of the votes. And more importantly, behind the clear choice of leadership will be an unequivocal mandate to fundamentally change the horrible social and economic conditions that have plagued Haiti’s poor for centuries.
If the past is any guide, the powerful institutions will immediately try to limit the implementation of this mandate, through sanctions, embargos and other coercive measures that are explicitly prohibited by international law. If necessary, they will physically remove non-compliant elected officials.
Haitian voters’ persistence in choosing their own leaders, and the wealthy countries’ persistence in undermining that choice, challenges the rest of us- we who believe in democracy and can participate in government without walking for hours, dodging bullets or risking political prison. We are challenged to decide whether we believe in democracy enough to speak out when our tax dollars and political power are used to veto the Haitian voters’ choices.
Haiti: Dark storm brewing over elections:
Since a CID-Gallup poll taken in Haiti last December showed Rene Preval leading in the upcoming elections with 37%, the political forces that banded together to oust Aristide in Feb. 2004 have been organizing to contest the expected results . . . Preval’s closest rival, Charles Henry Baker, is a wealthy sweatshop owner and a co-founder of the Group 184, a so-called civil society organization that helped to overthrow Aristide and was heavily funded by the United States, France and Canada through an intriguing web of foreign non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) . . . Baker, is only polling at 10%. {snip}
Perhaps more menacing, and a portent of things to come, is a recent editorial entitled “Reconstructing the Lavalas Anarchy” written and circulated by Raoul Peck. Peck is the writer/director of the film Lumumba and HBO’s Sometimes in April (2005). He served as Haiti’s Minister of Culture from 1995 until 1997. In a virulent diatribe Peck writes, “Is the UN commitment to support the restoration of democracy in our country only lip service? Is the botched electoral process that our friends are endeavoring to shove down our throats “no matter what” consistent with the generous plans laid out by the UN Secretary-General for Haiti in the aftermath of the Aristide’s downfall?”
Peck concludes with the threat, “The International community did not learn the lesson of Aristide’s dismissal. They continue to call instability what is after all the historical capacity of the Haitian people to get rid of whoever is trying to take advantage of them. And it has a name: Resistance.”
Peck represents the intellectual tendency of those behind the forced ouster of President Aristide in Feb. 2004. His sentiments are currently being echoed in hundreds of letters currently circulating on the Internet to plant the concept of “resisting” the outcome of the elections if Preval wins as expected.
What all of this really shows is that the so-called “forces of democracy” that overthrew Aristide, and were backed by the United States, France and Canada, were anything but democratic. They were actually a minority of spoilers, a paper tiger and a creature of the media.
Peck’s diatribe exposes that, not unlike the history of U.S. foreign policy in the region, those who ousted Aristide are only willing to accept the principals of democracy if it results in elections that bring victory to candidates that represent their own political views and interests. It is an all or nothing political mentality that led Haiti into this current mess and unfortunately it shows no signs of changing.
Background: The Council on Hemispheric Affairs: Botched Job: The UN and the Haiti’s Elections
