Voting for hope: Elections in Haiti[FULL VERSION]

Late in the night of 29 February 2004, after weeks of confusion and
uncertainty, the enemies of Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide
forced him into exile for the second time. There was plenty of ground
for confusion. Although twice elected with landslide majorities, by
2004 Aristide was routinely identified as an enemy of democracy.
Although political violence declined dramatically during his years in
office, he was just as regularly condemned as an enemy of human
rights. Although he was prepared to make far-reaching compromises
with his opponents, he was attacked as intolerant of dissent.
Although still immensely popular among the poor, he was derided as
aloof and corrupt. And although his enemies presented themselves as
the friends of democracy, pluralism and civil society, the only way
they could get rid of their nemesis was through foreign intervention
and military force.


Four times postponed, the election of Aristide's successor finally
took place a couple of months ago, in February 2006. These elections
were supposed to clear up the confusion of 2004 once and for all.
With Aristide safely out of the picture, they were supposed to show
how his violent and illegal expulsion had actually been a victory for
democracy. With his Fanmi Lavalas party broken and divided, they were
supposed to give the true friends of pluralism and civil society that
democratic mandate they had so long been denied. Haiti's career
politicians, confined to the margins since Aristide's first election
back in 1990, were finally to be given a chance to inherit their
rightful place.

Instead, what actually happened in February seems to have taken these
politicians and their international backers by surprise. This is
itself surprising, since both the conduct and the outcome of these
elections were squarely in line with all three of the most salient
features of Haitian politics in recent years.

The first and most obvious feature is that ever since 1990,
presidential elections in Haiti have been won either by Aristide or
by the person Aristide chose as his first prime minister, Rene Preval
- a man who, though far from a mere acolyte, is still widely and
fondly known as the marassa or twin brother of Aristide. Aristide won
67% of the vote in 1990. Preval won 89% of the vote in 1995. After
his Fanmi Lavalas party swept the legislative elections in both
houses of parliament in May 2000, Aristide was re-elected with 92% of
the votes cast in the presidential election of November 2000. And in
February 2006? After a very limited and last-minute campaign in a
crowded field, Preval won another outright majority. The official
count gave him 51%, though most credible observers estimate that his
actual tally was more like 60%. His closest rivals, the academic
Leslie Manigat (a prominent member of the elite Democratic
Convergence that led the campaign against Aristide in 2001-2003) and
Charles Baker (a maverick white businessman with powerful
international connections) won 12% and 8% respectively. Guy Philippe,
the US-trained leader of the disbanded soldiers whose uprising
eventually toppled Aristide, also stood as a candidate. Along with
Jodel Chamblain, Jean Tatoune and other convicted killers, in March
2004 he was hailed as a hero and a 'freedom fighter' by the man the
US chose to run Haiti's post-Aristide government, GÈrard Latortue. In
February 2006, Philippe won less than 2% of the vote.

It isn't hard to figure out why Aristide and Preval are so much more
popular than their rivals. In the eyes of most people, they continue
to represent the aspirations of the extraordinary mobilisation that
first brought democracy to Haiti in the late 1980s, the mobilisation
that Aristide dubbed the Lavalas, or flood. As the remarkable
American activist and doctor Paul Farmer explained in 2005,
'everybody knows that Aristide was bad. Everybody, that is, except
the Haitian poor _ who are 85 per cent of the population.' Although
support for Lavalas appears to have subsided somewhat among the
peasantry over the last few years, as far as I could tell when I
visited the poorer neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince over several
weeks in April 2006, enthusiasm for Aristide and for the Lavalas
project more generally remains undiminished. I met with community
leaders and interviewed dozens of people at random; virtually all of
them said they continued to support Aristide or his party, and most
told me they supported him less on account of what he managed to
achieve than because of what he symbolised and said. Despite massive
cuts in international support, Preval and Aristide built more
secondary schools than in the whole previous history of Haiti; they
opened thousands of literacy centres and with Cuban assistance
established or renewed hundreds of health clinics; they invested in
transport and infrastructure; in the oppressively crowded
neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince, they created dozens of new public
squares. But more important than any of this, in the eyes of their
supporters, is the simple fact that they spoke to and for the poor
majority. They know that Aristide made mistakes, that he was too
reluctant to crack down on reactionary dissent and too tolerant of
the opportunists who forced their way into his entourage. But no
other politician ever had anything remotely like his rapport with
both the urban and the rural poor. Aristide was the first politician
regularly to speak in Kreyol, to mix with people from the quartiers
populaires, to recognise their religion and their values, to affirm
them as genuinely political actors. He was the only significant
politician of his time to address the reality of class struggle,
inequality and injustice in terms that made concrete sense to those
who suffer their effects.

The people's investment in Aristide and his legacy remains the single
most decisive and divisive element of Haitian politics. Ask someone
in Haiti how they interpret this investment and you are likely to get
a good sense of where they stand. Aristideís opponents, including
left-leaning members of the intelligentsia who also oppose the US,
the IMF and the status quo, frame their interpretation in terms of
delusion and betrayal: a manipulative and self-serving demagogue,
Aristide wasnít worthy of the people's trust. He didnít focus on
institutions and procedures. He was more of a priest than an
administrator. He made too many compromises with the US. If you
confront people in places like Cite Soleil or Bel-Air with this sort
of objection, they tend to smile or shrug. Aristide helped us to
organise ourselves, they say. Of course his own freedom of movement
was limited, but he helped us to constitute ourselves as active
participants in national politics, to gain the measure of our
strength. Aristide loyalists cannot easily be portrayed as the dupes
of a populist manoeuvre. Their investment is independent of its
object, and it remains as resilient as ever. Again and again, they
told me that they believed in Aristide less as a leader than as their
spokesman.

The same goes for the popular investment in militant local leaders -
veteran advocates like Father Gerard Jean-Juste, or younger activists
like Samba Boukman, MoÔse Jean-Charles, Amaral Duclona, William
Baptiste, who continue, often at the risk of their lives, forcefully
to articulate Lavalas demands. People like Duclona or Jean-Charles
are the only political activists in Haiti today who can organise
disciplined and massive political demonstrations, if need be at a
moment's notice. At one point during the 2006 presidential campaign,
for instance, the leading elite candidate Leslie Manigat advertised a
major rally in the historically charged town of VertiËres (site of
the last major battle in Haiti's war for independence from France).
According to Jean-Charles, the event was plugged in the press and on
national radio for over a week, but only a tiny handful of supporters
showed up. In order to demonstrate the real balance of forces, Jean-
Charles and other Lavalas activists in the north of the country made
a single fifteen minute pitch on local radio, calling a counter-
demonstration for the following day; though only organised at the
last minute, it was attended by tens of thousands of people.

Wherever they stand on the political spectrum, most 'well-educated'
critics of Aristide and Lavalas share similar values and priorities,
and suffer from similar limitations. Their lack of any popular
appeal, their reluctance to work in the neighbourhoods where most
people live, their contempt for what they call 'populism,' deprives
them of any significant political strength. The left-leaning critics
of Aristide and Lavalas who work for media-friendly groups like PAPDA
or Batay Ouvriye are now regularly cited as 'alternative' voices in
the international press, but when they hold a sit-in or demonstration
in Haiti's capital, perhaps fifty to a hundred people are likely to
attend.

For now and for the foreseeable future, no-one will win an election
in Haiti if they donít enjoy grassroots Lavalas support.

The second and equally obvious feature of contemporary Haitian
politics stands in acute contradiction with the first. If Lavalas
remains the decisive electoral force, all significant social and
economic power is still securely concentrated in Haiti's tiny ruling
class. No other country in the western hemisphere is structured along
such dramatically polarised lines. Just 1% of Haitiís population
controls around half of its wealth. While the great majority of the
people subsist on one or two dollars a day, a tiny clique of wealthy
and well-connected families continues to dominate the economy, the
media, the universities and professions, along with what remains of
the state. They alone dispose of the country's disposable income.
They speak French and sometimes English, in a country where the vast
majority speak only Kreyol. They have university degrees, in a
country where most children have little chance of getting to
secondary school. They travel and often live abroad, in a country
where most can move only as far as they can walk. They have far more
in common with their corporate, diplomatic or intellectual colleagues
in France and North America than they do with their compatriots in
the countryside or the poorer neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince. These
are the people who interact with the UN and with foreign embassies,
who are hired by and who profit from the chaotic and growing
profusion of national and international NGOs that now provide around
80% of Haiti's basic services.

The richest and most powerful among them - Brandt, Boulos, Apaid... -
maintain a monopolistic grip on industrial production and
international trade. They are probably the only people to have
profited from the US-imposed structural adjustment plans that have
afflicted the country since the 1980s. The more Haiti's economy has
slid from an impoverished self-sufficiency toward outright
destitution and dependency, the richer and more powerful these
magnates have become. Subsidised American imports now undercut
domestic production, driving thousands of peasant families to abandon
their farms for the squalor of slums like Cite Soleil and Carrefour.
Take the case of rice, the staple food for most of the population. In
the 1980s Haitians grew almost all the rice they consumed. Today,
American rice currently trades at 75% of the price of local rice, and
over the last twenty years, Haitian rice imports from the US rose
from just 7,000 tons to more than 220,000 tons (out of a total market
of around 350,000 tons). If you visit a market in Haiti, the first
thing traders will tell you is that the prices of rice and other
foodstuffs have quadrupled over the last few years, as the Brandts
and other importers began to capitalise on this collapse in local
supplies.

Combine our first and second features and the third follows
predictably enough. Since 1990, perhaps nothing has served to
consolidate the ruling elite more than their paranoid and vitriolic
hatred of Aristide and Lavalas. If Haiti's class structure is to be
preserved, it is essential that whatever gains the popular movement
might make through the ballot box be reversible in some other way -
either by direct military action or through the more respectable but
equally malleable channels of 'civil society.' In the early 1990s, in
a hemispheric context still marked by the defeat of the Sandinistas
and the final skirmishes of the cold war, the military alternative
remained a viable option. The army duly sent Aristide into exile in
September 1991, and over the next three years, killed some four to
five thousand of his supporters. But Aristide deprived the elite of
its traditional mechanism for protecting the status quo when he
disbanded this same army in 1995. When he won his second and still
more resounding victory in 2000, consequently, it fell first and
foremost to the leaders of civil society to discredit his government
by any means necessary. A 'Civil Society Initiative' was cobbled
together in late 2000 for precisely this purpose, followed in quick
succession by the 'Democratic Convergence,' the 'Haiti Democracy
Project' and the 'Group of 184.' Financed and led by Boulos, Apaid
and other private sector magnates, in direct and generous cooperation
with USAID and the International Republican Institute (together with
their counterparts in Canada and France), none of these comically
ineffectual vehicles for the 'democratic opposition' ever stood the
remotest chance of defeating Lavalas in an election. A combination of
direct destabilisation, economic aggression and para-military
subversion was the only workable strategy.

As soon as the extent of the Fanmi Lavalas victory of 2000 became
clear, Aristide's frustrated opponents condemned the elections on
account of a minor technicality, concerning the method used in
several senate contests to calculate the number of ballots needed to
win a seat in just one rather than two rounds of voting. Although
Lavalas candidates would certainly have won most of the contested
seats no matter what counting method was used, the allegation of
'tainted elections' was used by the US to justify an immediate and
non-negotiable aid embargo, and became the most frequently cited (and
most infrequently explained) criticism of the FL administration in
the international press. The US aid embargo instantly stripped
Aristide's government of around half its revenue, with predictable
consequences; the US refused to lift it even when, in July 2001,
Aristide persuaded the winners of the contested senate seats to
resign. A US arms embargo further deprived the Haitian National
Police the means of defending itself and the population against
increasingly murderous attacks launched by disgruntled ex-soldiers -
ex-soldiers who later, in 2005, were publicly to admit the full
extent of their close cooperation with the leaders of the Convergence
and Group of 184. Meanwhile, groups like Human Rights Watch and the
blatantly partisan NCHR deprived the government of much of its moral
legitimacy, by portraying Aristide as a latter-day Duvalier
surrounded by lawless gangs of 'bandits' or 'chimeres.' To make such
a portrayal convincing was no easy task, since during Aristideís
second administration, reports from these same human rights groups
suggest that perhaps 20 or 30 individuals may have been killed by
people with some (often tenuous) connection to the FL - a number
difficult to compare with the tens of thousands killed by the
Duvaliers, to say nothing of the additional four or five thousand
killed during Aristide's exile in 1991-94.

The interim government led by Latortue and imposed on Haiti by the US
after the second coup in 2004 immediately took up where the
perpetrators of that first coup left off. Some of the most
notoriously violent authors of the 1991-94 violence were set free on
the very day of Aristide's expulsion; in the spring and summer of
2005, in a perversion of justice spectacular even by Haitian
standards, Jodel Chamblain and his death squad colleagues were
retrospectively exonerated of all charges. Conservative estimates of
the number of Lavalas sympathisers killed over the last two years
stand at two or three thousand; many more were forced into hiding or
exile. Latortue's government has done nothing to prosecute those
responsible for the most gruesome killings, including the drowning of
scores of victims in Cap Haitien soon after then coup in 2004, the
public execution under police supervision of at least twenty people
at a football match in Martissant in August 2005, or the repeated
slaughter, condoned (and more often conducted) by the police and UN
troops, of hundreds of so-called Lavalas 'bandits' in neighbourhoods
like Village de Dieu, Bel-Air and Cite Soleil. Instead, the police
have packed the national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince with Lavalas
sympathisers and residents of the pro-Lavalas slums. Built to house
around 500 prisoners, the squalid penitentiary now holds more than
four times that number. Of the 2115 people imprisoned there as of mid
April 2006, only 81 had been convicted of a crime. The list of
overtly political prisoners still includes Aristide's final prime
minister Yvon Neptune and his interior minister Jocelyn Privert,
among many others; after being held for more than a year without
charge, both are accused, without any semblance of proof, of
collusion in a violent clash between pro and anti-government groups
at La Scierie in mid February 2004 _ a clash that the most widely
cited (and most widely discredited) Haitian human rights group
immediately sought to portray as a 'massacre.'
The international community could not bring itself to send soldiers
to defend Haitiís last elected government from para-military assault.
The job of killing and intimidating Aristide's supporters in the
slums, by contrast, has been zealously undertaken by some 7000
heavily armed UN troops, who to this day go to great lengths to treat
parts of Haiti's capital like a war zone. Meanwhile, although this
same international community went along with USAID's Sharon Bean when
she told journalists in 2002 that Aristideís inappropriately elected
government would 'never receive a penny of foreign aid,' Latortue's
unelected government has been treated rather more generously. $1.2
billion was pledged at a donors' conference in July 2004, and early
in 2005, the World Bank and IDP finally released millions of dollars
promised in long-delayed loans. No doubt there is now more money
available in the private sector too, since soon after taking office
in 2004 Latortue suspended income tax payments for the next three
years ó thereby reversing a policy of Aristide's that had proved
especially unpopular among the small minority of Haitians who have
any income to be taxed. You would be hard pressed, however, to find
much sign of this new money in Port-au-Prince or the countryside,
apart from the temporary appointment of lavishly equipped and mostly
foreign UN and NGO staff whose presence does little more than drive
up rents and prices in the capital. Critics of the Lavalas
administration are no doubt entitled to claim that it did not do
enough to benefit the poor. But the contrast is startling between
what the defenceless and cash-starved FL government managed to
accomplish - significant advances in health and education, investment
in public spaces and social housing, the creation of thousands of new
jobs for residents of the poorest neighbourhoods, the doubling of a
grossly inadequate minimum wage - and the absence of any pretence of
social investment under Latortue's incomparably better armed and
better funded government.

Given all this, what was supposed to happen in February 2006 is clear
enough. There should have been a smooth transition from the Latortue
government to a similarly-minded administration run by a tried and
tested veteran of the Democratic Convergence like professor Leslie
Manigat. Aristide supporters were be barricaded into a few forgotten
slums. Fanmi Lavalas was either to be excluded from the process
altogether, or 'integrated' into the system like a more conventional
political party. As it turned out, at least this last expectation was
indeed partly though just temporarily fulfilled. At a party
conference in August 2005, the FL decided that it would only
participate in the elections if it could run Aristideís close
associate Father Gerard Jean-Juste as its new presidential candidate.
Latortue's government imprisoned Jean-Juste on an absurdly
implausible charge, thereby blocking his candidacy. Frustrated, the
FL leadership then split into two camps. A couple of former senators
were somehow persuaded to adopt Aristide's old opponent Marc Bazin as
their candidate. Two other formerly influential figures in the party
decided to present themselves as candidates in their own right. The
rest of the leadership, including all those who enjoy genuine
grassroots support, decided that the party should boycott the
election unless Latortue agreed to free the political prisoners and
allow FL exiles to return. At the same time, however, these same
leaders - including Jean-Joseph Joel, Moise Jean-Charles, Rene
Montplaisir, as well as Jean-Juste himself - joined progressive
peasant groups in pressing Rene Preval (who relied on but never
officially joined the FL itself) to make a last-minute candidacy. In
the space of a few short weeks, Preval's supporters cobbled together
an ad hoc political coalition they dubbed Lespwa, or 'hope.' This
way, the FL party could officially abstain from the election, while
encouraging individual members to vote for the marassa d'Aristide.
Much to the horror of the traditional elite, the stratagem worked
like a charm. Grassroots FL activists threw their full organisational
power behind Preval's campaign, while the hapless Bazin went on to
win just 1% of the vote.

The interim government then did everything it could to avoid the
inevitable outcome. Whereas Preval's own government had provided over
10,000 voter registration centres for the 2000 elections in 2000,
Latortue set up less than 500, in sites carefully chosen to
disadvantage pro-Lavalas neighbourhoods. In 2000, some 12,000 polling
stations were distributed all across the country; in 2006, a much
smaller number were concentrated in just 800 voting centres, again
situated in such a way as to marginalise voters in politically active
and well-organised places like Cite Soleil, most of whom would have
to walk and queue for the entire day to cast their vote on 7
February. By 9 February, with 22% of the votes counted and in keeping
with reliable exit polls, it was announced that Preval was leading
with 62%, ahead of Manigat with 11%. Two days later, however, the
electoral council had lowered Preval's tally to just 49.6%, and early
on the morning of February 13th, it was estimated at a mere 48.7%.
This was about 22,000 votes short of the 50% majority a candidate
needs in order to win in a single round of voting. Around the same
time, thousands of Preval ballots were found half-burned in a rubbish
dump, and election officials started reporting exceptionally high
numbers of null and blank ballots. Some 85,000 ballots (or 4.6% of
the total) were classified as blank, a number that veteran political
journalist Guy Delva describes as dramatically inconsistent with
normal electoral practice. In response, tens of thousands of Aristide
and Preval supporters paralysed Port-au-Prince with demonstrations
and barricades. On the afternoon of February 13th, thousands of angry
voters streamed up from CitÈ Soleil to demand a recount from the
electoral council at its headquarters in the exclusive Montana Hotel;
several hundred demonstrators grabbed the opportunity to take a quick
swim in the Montanaís pool, before leaving the hotel and its rattled
guests undisturbed. Under pressure, the council eventually decided to
fudge the issue, and divided the number of allegedly blank ballots
proportionately among the candidates. This was just enough to nudge
Preval's proportion over the requisite 50% mark, giving him a
marginal victory in the first round. It was also enough, no doubt, to
leave the impression that this was again a 'tainted' or 'compromised'
election, should the need for another corrective round of democracy
enhancement arise.

Preval is more pragmatic than Aristide, more comfortable with the
language of compromise and the routines of administration. He may not
risk taking decisive action on behalf of the poor majority if it is
likely to stir up opposition from within the closed ranks of Haiti's
'civil society' and its international patrons. Even so, the imminent
emergence of such opposition is almost a foregone conclusion. Even
mildly progressive policies are sure to provoke a new campaign of
'democratic' and 'humanitarian' destabilisation. The FL activists in
the slums of Port-au-Prince already anticipate it. And they are
already preparing for another, more decisive victory, in the
elections scheduled for 2010.


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