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The United States and other international
donors decided to support Haiti’s recent presidential and
parliamentary elections despite believing that the country’s
Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), “almost certainly in
conjunction with President Préval,” had unwisely and
unjustly excluded the country’s largest party, the Lavalas
Family, according to
a secret U.S. Embassy cable dated Dec. 4,
2009 provided by WikiLeaks to Haïti Liberté.
The meeting of representatives
from the European Union and United Nations with ambassadors from
Brazil, Canada, Spain and the U.S., decided to knowingly move
ahead with the flawed polling because “the international
community has too much invested in Haiti's democracy to walk
away from the upcoming elections, despite its [sic]
imperfections,” in the words of the EU representative,
according to U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten’s cable.
The Lavalas Family (FL) is the
party of then-exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
who was kidnapped by a U.S. Navy Seal team on Feb. 29, 2004 and
flown to Africa as part of a coup d’état that was supported by
France, Canada, and the U.S..
This history made Canadian
Ambassador Gilles Rivard worry at the Dec. 1, 2009 donor meeting
that “support for the elections as they now stand would be
interpreted by many in Haiti as support for Préval and the CEP's
decision against Lavalas.” He said that the CEP had reneged
on a pledge to “reconsider their exclusion of Lavalas.”
“If this is the kind of
partnership we have with the CEP going into the elections, what
kind of transparency can we expect from them as the process
unfolds?” Rivard asked.
The donors were concerned only
about appearances in the case of the Lavalas exclusion, the
cable makes clear. But they were mostly worried about
strengthening “the opposition” (code for “right-wing”)
which, for them, Préval had “emasculated.” The EU and
Canada therefore proposed that donors “help level the playing
field” by doing things like “purchase radio air time for
opposition politicians to plug their candidacies.”
Otherwise, the right-wing “will cease to be much of a
meaningful force in the next government.”
Such plans to brazenly meddle
and play favorites in Haiti’s sovereign electoral process
presaged how Washington would forcefully intervene in the
elections when they finally did take place on November 28, 2010,
followed by run-offs on March 20, 2011.
Those interventions – primarily
by the Organization of American States (OAS) or what Cuba calls
Washington’s “Ministry of Colonial Affairs” – assured the
victory of pro-U.S. coup-cheerleader Michel “Sweet Micky”
Martelly, 50, a former lewd konpa musician, despite a
dramatically flawed, and often illegal, electoral process as
well as an anemic voter turn-out.
Less than 23 percent of Haiti's
registered voters had their vote counted in either of the two
rounds, the lowest electoral participation rate in the
hemisphere since 1945, according to the Washington-based Center
for Economic and Policy Research.
Furthermore, the second round
was illegal because the eight-member CEP could never muster the
five votes necessary to ratify the first round results which
Washington and the OAS imposed.
The December 2009 donor meeting
took place just over a month before the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake
which would derail the elections originally planned for Feb. 28,
2010. When the polling was rescheduled, there was even more at
stake, primarily how $10 billion of pledged earthquake aid would
be spent and the future of the 11,500-strong UN military force
that has occupied Haiti since the 2004 coup d’etat. The U.S. has
been the most adamant in making a show election to keep a
democratic face on the highly unpopular and costly military
occupation, which now costs close to $1.5 billion annually.
Ambassador Merten urged a
minimal donor reaction to the FL’s exclusion, saying they should
just “hold a joint press conference to announce donor support
for the elections and to call publicly for transparency”
because ““without donor support, the electoral timetable
risks slipping dangerously, threatening a timely presidential
succession..”
His cable was classified “Confidential”
and “NOFORN,” meaning “Not for release to foreign
nationals.”
Merten had opposed FL’s
exclusion because, he wrote, the party would come out looking “like
a martyr and Haitians will believe (correctly) that Préval is
manipulating the election.”
The banning of the FL from the
election “for not turning in the proper documentation”
set the stage for Martelly to go up against another
neo-Duvalierist candidate, Mirlande Manigat.
The election’s low turn out has
been ascribed to the futility of choosing between two
unappealing candidates, a grassroots boycott campaign, and,
primarily, popular dismay over the FL’s exclusion, the very
issue that gave rise to the December 2009 meeting.
Former President Aristide, who returned to Haiti
from exile on Mar. 18, two days before the second round, drove
the point home when he declared on his arrival: “The problem
is exclusion, the solution is inclusion.”
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