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At 10 p.m. on Tuesday night, the Haitian Senate voted not to
ratify former de facto Justice Minister Bernard Honorat
Gousse to be President Michel Martelly’s Prime Minister.
The vote came after hours of rancorous,
sometime chaotic, debate, and two brief closed sessions
requested by Senators Youri Latortue and André Riché, both
Gousse/Martelly supporters.
In June, Haitian deputies rejected
Martelly’s first nominee, businessman Daniel-Gérard Rouzier,
making this the new president’s second political defeat since he
came to office on May 14.
This evening’s debate reached a stalemate
around the “technical” stage of the Prime Minister’s
review. A nine-member Senate commission submitted a report on
whether Gousse was qualified to fill the post, according to six
criteria from the Constitution’s Article 157. The commission
reviewed whether Gousse was: Haitian-born, never having
renounced his nationality; 30 years old or more; unconvicted of
any crimes; an owner of property in Haiti and practicing a
profession there; a resident of Haiti for the last five
consecutive years; and “relieved of his responsibilities if
he has been handling public funds,” as the Constitution
stipulates.
The commission determined that there was “controversy”
around the final criteria. They found that it was not the
Parliament but Prime Minister Gérard Latortue’s de facto
government (installed after the 2004 coup against former
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide) which “discharged”
Gousse from his Justice Ministry in 2005, that is, which
certified that he did not engage in corruption or other illegal
activities. But as Senator Jean Baptiste Bien-Aimé, a commission
member, argued in the session, “the executive branch cannot
discharge someone from the executive branch.”
For that reason, the commission
effectively kicked the final determination on Gousse’s
eligibility back to the full 30-seat Senate for a general vote.
Senators allied to Martelly and Gousse
insisted that the commission had to give a yes-or-no verdict on
Gousse’s qualifications. Sen. Latortue, who was Gousse’s most
vocal partisan during the debate, asked the report to be sent
back to the commission.
Pro-Gousse senators also argued that former
Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was ratified on the basis
of an “executive discharge” in June 2006 under President
René Préval. Some anti-Gousse senators said that ratification
was unjustified; others argued that Alexis’ circumstances were
different.
An absolute majority of 16 senators from
Préval’s Unity party had formed a block vowing to vote down
Gousse’s nomination. As Unity’s leader, former Senate president
Joseph Lambert said, “the vote on Mr. Gousse must be and
should be political.” He compared Gousse’s nomination to the
hypothetical nomination of Roger Lafontant, a former Tonton
Macoute chief and leader of a failed January 1991 coup. “A
majority of senators would vote against that too, for political
reasons,” he said.
Latortue and Riché were joined by Senators
Anick Joseph, Steven Benoit, and Mélius Hyppolite, among others,
in condemning the commission and the Group of 16 for introducing
political considerations into the “technical” stage of
the ratification process.
But Sen. Moise Jean-Charles took the podium
to say that the hours of debate were nothing but “theater”
because Gousse’s defeat was already guaranteed. Jean-Charles
also asserted that Gousse had at one point even withdrawn his
candidacy, knowing it was doomed. The charge prompted Latortue
to call for the second closed-door session.
If Gousse had been cleared through the
technical stage, he would have then had an opportunity to
present to the Parliament and the nation his “general policy”
declaration. That would have been followed by a debate and a
vote, in which he would have also been rejected.
But the whole struggle this Tuesday was
between those who wanted Gousse to have his moment in the
spotlight and those who did not. The Group of 16 had written an
open letter to President Martelly asking for him to withdraw the
nomination, saying that Gousse was unacceptable for the “repression,
arbitrary arrests and killings in the neighborhoods of
Port-au-Prince” that were carried out under his auspices in
2004 and 2005. Some 4,000 people died from putsch-related
violence during the 2004-2006 coup d’état, according to a study
in the British medical journal The Lancet.
On the day of the debate, lawyer Mario
Joseph of the Collective of Progressive Haitian Jurists (CJPH)
wrote to the senators asking them “to reject Mr. Bernard
Gousse as the Prime Minister-designate, to condemn the coup of
Feb. 29, 2004, and to make him make amends for his involvement
in the wrongs committed against the Haitian people during his
time heading the Justice Ministry.”
The pro-Gousse senators accused the Group
of 16 of intransigence, illegal procedures, and holding Haiti
hostage to their political agenda. Lambert responded that it was
Martelly who was being intransigent and illegal, because the
Haitian Constitution instructs the President to select a Prime
Minister nominee “in consultation” with the Presidents of
both parliamentary houses. Martelly has unilaterally nominated
both Rouzier and Gousse.
Rouzier was also rejected in the “technical”
stage. The principal reason was because his Haitian passport had
no U.S. visa markings in it, despite the fact that he owns a
home in Florida, where his wife mostly lives, and frequently
travels there. This led the deputies to suspect that he, as was
rumored, may have obtained U.S. citizenship, thereby
disqualifying him for the post.
The pro-Gousse/Martelly senators attempted
to hobble the vote, neither voting for Gousse nor abstaining.
Toward the end, Sen. Hyppolite bitterly
accused the Group of 16 of rushing to a vote before Gousse could
present his general policy declaration, because “they don’t
have the courage to defend their position before us, their
fellow senators, or before the population.”
But Sen. Evalière Beauplan made several
passionate interventions saying that the pro-Gousse faction was
dragging the Senate through an unnecessary debate although it
knew that he and his colleagues were “unshakable” in
their resolve to vote Gousse down.
“I
would vote against Gousse even if all the 29 other Senators
voted for him,” Beauplan said, “because in 2004, he made
me have to flee into exile.” |
