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It may well be that historians will look at the U.S. intervention in Haiti as a dress rehearsal for its insertion in Kosovo. U.S. troops were sent to both places to redress political injustices (in Haiti, restoring to power an elected president that had been deposed; stopping the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo); in both places much was made by the Clinton administration of the creation of a newly-chosen and American-trained police force (in Kosovo, this task was shared with our European allies) which would maintain order after the troops had done their job and see that everybody in each place behaved.
Although battered by eevents, the production in Kosovo is struggling to keep the show going, but the verdict is in for the road company left behind in Haiti: it’s a flop.
As in Kosovo, the brand new police force is nowhere to be seen and its existence is politely forgotten while Haitians kill each other regularly as part of their political discourse. Haiti’s president, Rene Preval, has ruled by decree in the 15 months since he dissolved the opposition-led Parliament and allowed all local officials’ terms to lapse. Long-delayed national polls to replace them were scheduled to be held on Sunday three weeks ago, but three days earlier the president postponed them by decree—indefinitely.
Citing a litany of registration problems that would have left out at least 1 million potential voters, Haiti’s independent Provisional Electoral Council earlier last month postponed until April 9 the national polls that are being financed with the help of more than $20 million from the U.S. taxpayers.
Preval's response: He, and only he, has the power to set the election date, the president told the nation. But still, he hasn’t. And in the continuing vacuum the country is descending even deeper into chaos.
Violent street demonstrations have broken out as confusion increases over the likelihood of the legislative elections scheduled for April 9.
Party factions have clashed in Port-au-Prince, the capital, and several people have died in the incidents. The protesters, claiming to support Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president expected to contest the presidential election in December, demanded the resignation of the elections commission.
By all accounts, the nine-member electoral council, which is as incompetent as it is independent, had ample justification to delay the vote. Materials for new voter identification cards have been lost or stolen. There are too few registration offices. And hours-long waits outside those offices, which testify to the strong popular desire to vote, deter many of the employed middle and upper classes from registering.
A poll published a couple of weeks ago in the daily Le Nouvelliste showed that 52 per cent of the eligible voters in Port-au-Prince want to vote but have yet to receive their cards. Part of the problem is the utter disarray in Haiti during the decades of dictatorship and army rule that preceded overthrown president Aristide’s 1994 return and on through the 1995 election and subsequent rule of his handpicked successor, Preval. Haiti’s last official census was in 1982, and no one knows how many citizens are qualified to vote beyond the 2.9 million who already have secured new voter ID cards.
But the election-date delays are deliberate tactics by Preval, with the tacit endorsement of Aristide and his Lavalas Family party. The Haitian Constitution required Aristide to step aside after one term. The former priest, who remains Haiti’s most popular politician, is expected to run again in presidential polls scheduled for December. And most Haitian analysts say his party would fare better behind Aristide’s coattails if the parliamentary, local and presidential elections were held simultaneously.
Whatever the motives, the lack of a functioning parliamentary government has cost Haiti dearly. It has led donors to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in international development aid earmarked for a nation where the majority are unemployed, the average wage is $400 a year and the rate of illiteracy stands at 80 per cent.
President Clinton routinely mentions Haiti as one of the foreign policy achievements of his administration. However, after having sent 20,000 troops to Haiti in 1994 to drive out its military dictatorship and reinstate elected president Aristide, the Clinton administration has issued no public condemnations of Preval’s repeated postponements. A U.S. special envoy left after two weeks of frustrating talks with Preval which led nowhere.
“The elections that are not taking place are not so much a political crisis as the cause of an economic chaos,” says a Haitian political analyst in Port-au-Prince. “The enduring economic crisis in Haiti has jumped to a new stage under the form of a preposterous escalation of the American dollar to 22 gourdes [the local currency] to the dollar. At this level everything comes apart. Business people can no longer import. Basic consumer products are nowhere to be found. The crisis destroys all sectors of society. Some can no longer eat. Others can no longer earn money. And no taxes can be collected. Can a country really shut down?”
Apparently it will, whatever that means, while President Clinton continues to claim as a great triumph what is in reality an unqualified disaster.
Claudio Campuzano is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com