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After Parliament’s rejection
of two prime ministers nominated by President Joseph Michel
Martelly, various sectors in Haiti and the so-called "friends of
Haiti" began to express their concern about the president’s
inability to appoint a successor to the currently resigned Prime
Minister, Jean Max Bellerive. Martelly’s outright refusal to
negotiate and divvy up government posts with the Parliament’s
majority political platform led the country into a political
stalemate for more than three months. President Martelly and his
team apparently did not understand the principles of
power-sharing, and this has opened the door yet again to the
meddling of imperialist and neo-colonial foreign powers.
So, on the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 24,
six senators from the Senate’s “Group of 16,” controlled
by former President René Préval’s Inite party, met with U.S.
diplomats led by U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten. After
that meeting, the Senators would not utter a word to the press.
They were apparently holding state secrets to which the Haitian
people had no right.
However, two senators who did not
participate in the meeting, Wenceslass Lambert (South East) and
Jean Hector Anacacis (West) made some remarks. According to
Senator from the Southeast, the U.S. officials wanted to convey
the White House’s concerns about the political crisis that has
been growing in Haiti for months. In other words, they wanted to
know what was blocking the ratification of a Prime Minister.
Lambert said that the Senate’s majority was
willing to advance the ratification process, once all the
political conditions are met. He invited the President to
designate a non-confrontational figure, open to dialogue, to
lead the next government: “The president gets trapped on a
slippery slope, believing that he can circumvent Parliament,”
Lambert said. “He has his constitutional powers, and we
have ours. He must respect his limits. And we will never allow
him to name by himself all the 42 heads of Haiti’s diplomatic
missions abroad, and he will never appoint alone all the 36
director generals and 18 ministerial posts while the platform on
which the president has been elected has only three deputies out
of 99.”
According to Anacasis, the ratification of
the next head of government was the main topic on the agenda of
the discussion with the U.S. Ambassador. He said the
parliamentarians expressed their willingness to help to unblock
the situation as soon as Michel Martelly recognizes that he
cannot go it alone and accepts to share power.
Civil society organizations close to
President Martelly have expressed their deep concern about the
current political, economic and social crisis eating away at
Haiti’s republican institutions due to a lack of leadership and
poor governance by the country’s current leaders.
"One hundred days after the installation
of a new President, the Executive and the Legislature have
failed to reach a political compromise to set up a government
and begin to provide a solution to serious social and economic
problems facing the country: stagnation, reconstruction,
resettlement of people living in tents, increased insecurity,
the population’s vulnerability to threats from natural
disasters, enhanced economic decline, persistence of extreme
poverty, the inability of the vast majority of parents to cope
with the demands of school,” wrote 14 organizations
including Rosny Desroches’ Civil Society Initiative (ISC), the
late Jean-Claude Bajeux’s Ecumenical Center for Human Rights (CEDH),
and Citizens Action (AC). “So far, no clear and transparent
mechanism has been presented to the public on how there is going
to be free and compulsory schooling. The President of the
Republic is supposed to guarantee the proper functioning of
institutions under the Constitution, instead of spreading
himself thin by traveling to chase hypothetical benefits; he
should focus primarily on negotiations with the Parliament to
choose a Prime Minister and dialogue with the economic and
social forces of the country, to promote growth, create trust
and implement effective and harmonious actions on major issues
of the nation. What the country expects as a priority from the
Head of State is the formation of a government, the promulgation
of the amended Constitution, the installation of the High
Council of the Judiciary and the Permanent Electoral Council,
the appointment of judges missing from the Supreme Court, the
elections in November to renew a third of the Senate and to
elect local authorities. Most of these tasks could be carried
out even in the absence of a government. That's where we judge
its performance. From this point of view, the first 100 days are
far from being a success. The president must prevent the country
from sliding into an institutional and political crisis, which
would be sure to aggravate the already precarious social and
economic situation.”
Meanwhile, Haitian popular organizations
are demanding through the various forms of protest the departure
of the UN occupation forces, not only because they have defiled
the Haitian people’s national sovereignty, but because they have
interfered in Haiti’s internal affairs, they have committed
multiple criminal and immoral actions, and they are the true
propagators of the cholera epidemic that has already killed more
than 6,000 Haitians. These organizations also demand resolution
of the crisis at the largest hospital in the country, the State
University Hospital of Haiti (HUEH), commonly known as the
General Hospital, the publication of the law on school fees to
help parents during the school year, the construction of decent
housing for victims of the January 12, 2010 earthquake who are
threatened with forced evictions and more.
The political party, the Organization of
Struggling People (OPL), which is a member of the Alternative
platform and an ally of President Martelly, encourages him to
recognize Parliament’s sovereignty and to take the lead in
dialogue and compromise. On Aug. 23, the OPL’s coordinator
Edgard Leblanc Fils said: "The current political situation is
bordering on despair, with the decay of the state and society’s
institutions, making it impossible to make economic and
financial plans. "
On Friday, Aug. 26, 2011, following
meetings with different Haitian sectors and with diplomats,
three of the “Group of 16" senators – Wenceslass Lambert,
Evalière Beauplan, and Simon Desras – met with the press to
share the recommendations of the Senate’s majority. After
denouncing Martelly’s abuses of power, they presented a plan to
end the crisis, in which they have predicated ratification on a
set of recommendations, including: the enactment of the amended
and corrected by the Constitution, formation of the Permanent
Electoral Council (CEP), the Constitutional Council, the
appointment of judges of the Supreme Court, the formation of the
Supreme Council of the judiciary, the continuation of the
Interim Commission for Haiti’s Recovery (IHRC), and the revision
of the mandate of the UN Mission for Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH).
Finally,
faced with the failure of Haiti’s political actors, they became
agents of the international community by agreeing on the choice
of a prime minister, whom the foreigners are imposing. It is
Garry Conille, the son of Serge Conille, a former Minister under
the Duvalier dictatorship and a confederate of Tonton Macoute
chief Roger Lafontant. It seems that Garry Conille is a perfect
technocrat who is versed in working as a servant of the empire
through the bureaucracies of the United Nations. He is currently
the chief of staff to Bill Clinton, the UN Special Envoy of the
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, co-chair of the IHRC, and the
former president of the United States. That is an item in Garry
Conille’s curriculum vitae that does not bode well. |
