on Haiti::Elections

[fable]

Haiti's Elections:
Seeing the Forest and the Trees
By BRIAN CONCANNON, Jr.

Haiti's election dates have now been reset for the fourth time in the
last five months. The Interim Government of Haiti (IGH) will now miss
the February 7, 2005 deadline for transferring power that it had
promised to meet for 21 months. These delays, and the logistical
problems underlying them, are a cause for concern. But the logistical
defects should not obscure the more fundamental problems that will
prevent the elections, whenever held, from helping Haiti to break
from its brutal history of political instability.

The delays show a disturbing lack of organizational competence on
behalf of both the IGH and the Provisional Electoral Commission
(CEP), which has the responsibility to run the voting. Every step of
the process has been completed late, because of a failure to prepare
for obvious obstacles. Voting registration stretched past the August
deadline into October, because registration facilities were not
installed in poor urban and rural areas. An international outcry
pushed the CEP to expand the opportunities to register, and
eventually about 3.5 million people reportedly registered, out of an
estimated pool of 4.2 million eligible citizens.

The latest schedule calls for a first round of Presidential and
legislative elections on January 8, a runoff election on February 15,
and local elections on March 5. Several remaining hurdles make
reaching this goal unlikely, including distributing electoral cards,
printing the ballots, recruiting and training electoral officials and
establishing enough voting centers. The electoral cards pose a
particular challenge. Although the CEP held a ceremony to introduce
a "pilot" distribution in September, the Counsel announced on
November 30 that voters should listen carefully to announcements on
how they should pick their cards up.

The distribution of the electoral cards is complicated, involving
alphabetical order and date of registration, and the urban and rural
poor who had so much difficulty registering often lack access to
radio, television or other means of hearing the announcements. The
schedule leaves five weeks before the first round to distribute the
cards (and hire and train officials and find facilities for voting
centers, which the CEP announced it was starting to do on November
30), when registration alone took over five months. Those particular
five weeks may be the hardest of the year to get things done. They
include Christmas, Haiti's Independence Day on January 1 and the
beginning of Carnaval season on January 8, and much of that is school
vacation.

The Interim government may eventually overcome these hurdles and hold
technically acceptable elections. But logistical smoothness does not
in itself ensure that the elections will make a sustainable
improvement in Haiti's political stability.

Stability in Haiti requires a respect for the basic rules of
democracy, as written in the Constitution and international human
rights instruments. Voters must know that when they vote they have
the right to elect the candidates of their choosing for a specified
period of time. They must know they will have the opportunity to
renew officials' mandates if they keep their promises, and vote them
out of office if they do not. Those who seek political power must
know that their only path to power is through the ballot box; those
who attain power must know that they can stay as long as their term
allows, and no longer.

The IGH's current course is establishing (or reviving) several
dangerous precedents that undermine the basic democratic rules.
First, it is demonstrating that a mandate can be extended by simply
not holding elections for a replacement. The current best-case
scenario has the country missing the Constitution's February 7
deadline for handing over power by a couple of weeks. Missing this
deadline is serious, and will be more so as the two weeks stretches
into many more (imagine the uproar in the International Community if
President Aristide were in the National Palace and failed to hand
over the Presidential sash on February 7). But the IGH missed an
equally important deadline eighteen months ago. Article 149 of the
Constitution gives provisional governments 90 days to organize
elections, and that period expired on June 1, 2004, without any
attempt to hold elections.

The IGH will claim that it is trying to hand over power as soon as it
can, and that a lack of resources combined with logistical and
security problems kept generating delays. But in October 1994, when
Haiti's elected government was restored after a three-year
dictatorship, it had less financial support but managed to organize
full legislative and local elections in eight months, and the
regularly scheduled Presidential elections six months after that. The
IGH's claim of trying its best would have been more convincing had it
not diverted so much time and money to projects that were unnecessary
for an interim government: granting generous concessions for foreign
companies to exploit shipwrecks that had sat off Haiti's coast for
300 years already, backpay for soldiers for not doing work after the
army was disbanded in 1994, and most recently pursuing lawsuits
against the elected governments in U.S. (and not Haitian) courts.

A second dangerous precedent is the government deciding who the
people can vote for, and who can organize electoral activities. One
of the most popular potential Presidential candidates, and the IGH's
most prominent critic, Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, is four months into his
second stay in prison, despite no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Haiti's last Constitutional Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune, has spent
seventeen months in prison. Even the U.S. Ambassador called his
detention a "violation of human rights, injustice and abuse of
power." Dozens of grassroots activists, including well-known people
like "So An," but also many more known only to friends and family in
Haiti, are held illegally. On November 27, Louis Joinet, the UN Human
Rights Commission's Independent Expert on Haiti, called a press
conference to denounce the IGH's illegal jailing of political
opponents.

A third dangerous precedent is the use of political terror as a
campaign strategy. Over and over again over the last six months,
Haitian police, and even troops from MINUSTAH, the UN mission in
Haiti, have gone into neighborhoods known as strongholds of
government opponents, killing, maiming and arresting people and
destroying houses. In October, MINUSTAH's top human rights official
called the human rights situation in Haiti "catastrophic," citing
summary executions, torture and illegal arrests. Keeping the poor
neighborhoods under siege and imprisoning activists keeps government
opponents from organizing and campaigning. It also keeps voters
indoors, now and on election day.

On August 20, police accompanied by civilians called the "Little
Machete Army" attacked a crowd at a soccer game in the neighborhood
of Grande Ravine, killing at least ten people. The police initially
denied involvement, but after an outcry the force conducted a partial
investigation. Police leadership made the report public, and
disciplined eighteen officers, both positive signs. But no members of
the Little Machete Army have been arrested, even though victims of
the massacre report that they continue to operate openly. One
MINUSTAH patrol did arrest a member of the victims' association,
illegally (without a warrant), while he was working with another
MINUSTAH unit to bring victims to the hospital. After another outcry
the police released the leader.

The IGH cannot claim logistical or financial obstacles to stopping
the political repression. Releasing political prisoners will actually
save the money spent to incarcerate them; not shooting political
opponents saves money spent on bullets. Many political prisoners have
never seen a judge, and can be released by an order of the police or
prosecutor. Most of the rest are held by judges hand-picked by the
government, who would dismiss the case or at least let the person out
on bail if prosecutors asked.

The "official" watchdogs for this election are maintaining their
focus, and will not let the organizational chaos or widespread
persecution dim their enthusiasm.. Last July, Organization of
American States (OAS) Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza provided
a glowing report, claiming the elections were "moving ahead," and
predicted that a one-month extension of registration would solve the
problems. Registration was eventually extended over two months,
during which time the police arrested Fr. Jean-Juste and the death
squads massacred the Grande Ravine soccer fans. When the latest dates
were announced, Mr. Insulza conceded in retrospect that "the
electoral process was slow to get off the ground," but trumpeted that
now "considerable progress has been made, which allows us to be
cautiously optimistic about having organized, orderly and credible
elections early in the new year."

MINUSTAH reacted to the fourth postponement of the elections with an
equally glowing report- it even predicted the new President would be
inaugurated a week earlier than the electoral decree did. MINUSTAH's
press release did not even mention the "catastrophic" human rights
situation that its own human rights department denounced in October,
or the political prisoners that Mr. Joinet discussed just three days
before. MINUSTAH Chief Juan Gabriel Valdes did warn of "dark
interests in Haitian society" that could disrupt the elections, but
could find no fault with the IGH's lack of preparation or persecution
of opponents.

Haitian voters may decide that the best thing they can do in the face
of a deeply flawed process rubber-stamped by the International
Community is to participate anyway. They may find a candidate they
can support enthusiastically, and be happy with the end result. But
this will not mean Haiti is any closer to escaping its centuries'-old
cycles of violence. The shortcomings of the process will inevitable
detract from the victor's legitimacy, making a tough job even harder.
The precedents of extending a Presidential mandate, keeping opponents
off the ballot and deploying electoral terror will soon enough return
back to once again deprive the Haitian people of the stability and
democracy theY deserve.

Brian Concannon Jr., Esq. directs the Institute for Justice and
Democracy in Haiti, www.ijdh.org, and is a former OAS Elections
Observer and UN Human Rights Observer in Haiti