Haitian Politics Doesn't Pass the Smell Test

By John Ballard

It is important for me to state that I am neither an expert on Haitian politics nor informed enough to speak with certainty about what I am reporting.

That said, a liink at Crawford Killian's blog stirs in me a question that has nagged at me since the earthquake: Why has the name of Jean-Bertrand Aristide not been mentioned and why does he remain in exile in South Africa?

Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (Conseil Electoral Provisoire, or CEP) is the governing body whose members are selected by President Rene Pr�l and is tasked with carrying out the elections.

For the upcoming November elections, it has banned 14 political parties arbitrarily, including Fanmi Lavalas (or FL), the largest party in the country. Created by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president who was deposed in a coup d'etat in 2004, FL has been banned since the April 2009 elections.

According to lawyer Ira Kurzban, one-time legal counsel to both Aristide and Pr�l, the current situation is akin to a hypothetical scenario under which the US Federal Election Commission "disqualified the Democratic and Republican parties from the 2012 presidential election and declared that only candidates of minor parties could run."

The former volunteers' petition is the latest articulation of a growing wave of high-profile criticism over US funding for the compromised elections in Haiti. In a June report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator Lugar urged that political parties like FL not be "excluded from the elections because of perceived technicalities." As was reported on October 8, 45 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary Clinton that was similar to the RPCV petition. It warned that "allowing flawed elections now will come back to haunt the international community later ... Haiti's next government will be called upon to make difficult decisions ... such as land reform and allocation of reconstruction projects ... Conferring these decisions on a government perceived as illegitimate is a recipe for disaster."

Having been a regular reader of the Catholic Worker for decades I have long been aware of Aristide and the measure of his popularity among the people of Haiti. I knew his name and followed his development even before he became president about twenty years ago. My impression is that he was a true revolutionary whose concern for the legions of Haiti's poor is deep and genuine. Embracing liberation theology, this Salesian priest became such a thorn in the side of the Vatican that he left the church rather than turn his back on those whose efforts eventually ended the tyranny of Baby Doc Duvalier.

But having lived and grown up in the American South I am also keenly aware how easily political leaders, even (or especially) preacher-types can lead masses of followers down destructive trails which lead more to rewards for the leader than his followers. In the case of Aristide I have read and heard conflicting reports and am not in any position to decide which to believe.

This time last year I might have ignored a report such as the one above. But events and reports since the Earthquake, including a recent report suggesting that NGO's in Haiti may be exagerating the cholera crisis because tragedies are sometimes used to prime the donations pump.  The link is now gone but I remember the content clearly.

This much is clear. Elected US representatives including Senator Richard Lugar, Reps. Charles Rangell and Maxine Waters have been in contact with Aristide and for reasons I cannot know have neither advanced nor spoken out clearly against him. At the time of the earthquake I expected his name to at least be mentioned, but despite a public statement from him expressing his desire to return to this tragedy-stricken little country, his name, for reasons I find mystifying, has not been mentioned.

This comment left at Mediahacker, the blog home of Ansel Herz, a young independent journalist living in Haiti, may point to an answer to my question about Aristide. The post headline reads "The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund is Lying to You."

There always have been some sort of a collusion between the business class in Haiti and the international ruling elite to which Bush and Clinton belongs to.

The role of the Haitian business class is not about developing Haiti�s economy by making Haitian products. It is about making money by keeping Haiti as a client state of the US and other imperialists powers. American foreign policy and that of imperialists powers are about making money by opening markets for transnational corporations.

So it is no surprise that the money from the Bush and Clinton foundation is going to the Haitian business class who make its fortune by working as contractors for transnational corporations in Haiti and/or selling imported goods without any concerns of their impact on the Haitian economy and on ordinary Haitians.