Gonaives, Haiti (Reuters, February 7) - Haitian police trying to take back the poor country's fourth-largest city from an armed gang opposed to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were gunned down in street ambushes yesterday, and at least 14 were killed, according to radio reports. ...The article claims that resentment has been brewing since disputed 2000 elections, but the difficulty is older, deeper, and much more complex than that. Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest who was known as a champion of Haiti's poor, ran headlong into bitter conflict with entrenched forces of money and reaction as soon as he took office after Haiti's first democratic elections in 1990.
Buter Metayer began taking control of Gonaives on Thursday after his militia attacked a police station and burned it to the ground. Seven people, including three police officers, were killed and 22 wounded in the shootout.
The uprising appeared to be spreading as armed Aristide opponents seized the police station in the west coast town of Saint-Marc yesterday, firing into the air and chasing police away, private Radio Kiskeya reported. Militants also have attacked police stations and forced out police in at least five small towns near Gonaives. ...
At least 61 people have been killed in the country since mid-September in clashes between police, government opponents and Aristide supporters.
Within eight months he was forced to flee a bloody military coup. He was returned to office in 1994 with the help of the US military - but only after making so many promises to, and compromises with, the Clinton administration that it became impossible for him to fulfill any of the promises he'd made to the poor of Haiti to improve their lot. It didn't help that, as has happened so many unhappy times before, Aristide was a much better leader of a movement than an administrator of a government. Barred by law from running for a second consecutive term, he left office in 1995 only to be re-elected in 2000.
Those elections proved controversial. Human Rights Watch called the spring parliamentary elections "deeply flawed" because of the curious way the votes were counted.
Bypassing the country's constitution and electoral law, which required first-round winners to have an absolute majority of votes cast, the Provisional Electoral Council (Conseil Electorale Provisoire, CEP) dramatically shrunk the pool of votes counted, eliminating all but those accruing to the four or six leading candidates in each province. As a result, all nineteen Senate seats at issue in the elections were won in the first round, eighteen of them by Fanmi Lavalas.Fanmi Lavalas being Aristide's party. In 10 of those 19 cases, the shrinkage of the counted vote total meant the "winner" did not get an absolute majority of the actual total of votes cast, which should have meant a runoff. The opposition demanded such a runoff, but the CEP, under pressure from Aristide's backers, certified the results. Not only was such pressure legally and ethically wrong, it was extremely foolish since no one believed that runoffs would change the basic outcome of an overwhelming FL victory but it gave the opposition - and their supporters in the US government - a basis to deny the legitimacy of the elections and boycott the fall presidential balloting.
As a result of the ongoing political crisis and economic stagnation, many of the poor who'd been Aristide's strongest backers turned against him as just another corrupt sellout, while others continued to idolize him - and weren't above turning that feeling into violence against Aristide's opponents. Aristide himself, as a January 14 statement from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) puts it, "is not above lapsing into an Old Testament, 'eye for an eye,' mode."
In fact, Reporters Without Borders calls him a "predator" of press freedom and "the acknowledged master manipulator of double talk." It charges that by saying members of the press were trying to undermine his government, he was sending a signal to
"popular organisations" - paralegal militias whose job it is to "take care of" the President's detractors. In 2002, some 40 journalists were threatened or attacked in a vicious cycle that thrives on the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators....On the other hand, COHA notes that press reports now routinely refer to Aristide as "ruling by decree" without specifying what brought it about:
On January 12, the terms of one-third of the members of Haiti's two-chamber parliament expired, leaving the legislative branch of the Haitian government without a sufficient quorum to officially function. As of now, no elections had been held for the seats, which remain empty, and no parliamentary elections have been scheduled, although Aristide hopes to hold them this year. ...No representatives, no electoral council, no elections. So Aristide, unless he was to let the government come to a complete stop, had a choice between arbitrarily continuing in office those whose terms had expired or ruling by decree. He chose the latter; while the former might have been somewhat politically wiser, it really didn't matter: Either would have been easily denounced as undemocratic by an opposition still lead by the same reactionary forces that had driven him out of office years before. In fact, COHA argues that Aristide faces a
In fact, however, blame for the delay and turmoil surrounding the parliamentary election issues falls almost entirely on the ill-will of the opposition groups, which persistently have refused to nominate representatives to the provisional electoral council (CEP) that must be formed before elections can proceed.
calculated campaign that is now being brainstormed by Andre Apaid Jr., who is one of the island's richest individuals. This effort has the tacit if not overt support of the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.Right now, that opposition is demanding that Aristide resign as a precondition to elections; Aristide has refused, saying he will step down when his term ends in 2006.
No one is without guilt in this, no one can claim clean hands, no one can claim they haven't added to the total of brutality. But as the gangs wander and burn, seeking in blood what they lack in bread, there is one difference to be found: The reactionaries are driven by knowledge of what their people can win back - and Aristide is driven by the knowledge of what his people can lose again.
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