Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

HAITI: Preparations for Elections Far Behind Schedule

Darío Montero

PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 30 2005 (IPS) - “We are not on schedule,” a member of Haiti’s interim government told IPS, referring to the delay in the preparations for the October and November elections, a key step towards the gargantuan task of rebuilding Haiti’s institutions.

The national director of fisheries in Haiti, Robert Badieu, said he did not believe the timeframe set by the provisional electoral council for the Oct. 9 municipal elections and the Nov. 13 legislative and presidential elections would be met.

To elect the new government – comprising the 129 members of the legislature and some 7,000 local and regional posts in the nine departments (provinces) into which Haiti is divided – around four million voters, nearly half of the population, must be registered within the next few months, using what government authorities tout as the country’s “first fraud-proof” election system. But the efforts are way behind schedule.

However, the sense of discouragement among local political leaders stands in contrast to the mild optimism expressed by several military chiefs of the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), with regard to progress made in getting the violence under control.

The main problem is not organised armed political groups, but the hundreds of gangs that are mainly active in three Port-au-Prince neighbourhoods, and, to a lesser extent, in Gonaives, to the north, where the Argentine battalion is stationed, they explained.

Philippe Mathieu, minister of agriculture, natural resources and rural development, told IPS that the gang violence is similar to the urban violence seen in many of Latin America’s big cities, like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil or Bogota, Colombia.

Nevertheless, Lieutenant-Colonel Julio Correa, liaison officer between the Uruguayan battalion and the MINUSTAH leadership, told IPS that “I have been in Port-au-Prince for 11 months, and I haven’t had any problems, even though I’m out on the streets all day long.”

But, he added, “there are serious problems” in the giant Cité Soleil slum near the bay, where Uruguayan troops accompanying the Jordan Battalion in the area were once caught up in a gunfight.

The same is true of Gonaives, an area fraught with political violence, where the revolt began against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was toppled on Feb. 29, 2004.

“The situation is always tense, that’s why there is a U.N. peacekeeping mission here. But the worst incidents occurred in December, January and February,” when there were “clashes with peacekeeping forces, and a few troops were killed,” said Correa.

But the omnipresent security guards armed with shotguns and rifles and the shots heard in the middle of the day near the government headquarters by a group of Uruguayan journalists visiting Haiti since Saturday clearly indicated that peace is a long way off.

In the meantime, there were no signs of the local police.

The sounds of gunfire came from the poor Port-au-Prince neighbourhood of Bel Air where the Brazilian battalion is posted.

Bel Air, Cité Soleil and Carrefour – which is guarded by the Sri Lanka battalion – make up a sprawling slum district on the hillside lining the west coast of the capital.

The three neighbourhoods surround the main port in this Caribbean island nation, the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

Gangs rule along this coastal strip, many of them claiming to be followers of the Lavalas Family, Aristide’s party. Around 400 people have been killed in clashes between gangs and the Haitian police since September.

This section of the coast is also said to be a drug trafficking transit area.

The caretaker government claims a mere three percent of eligible voters took part in the elections in which Aristide initially came to power.

Aristide, a former Catholic priest, was first elected president in December 1990 in the first free elections held after decades of dictatorship and terror. He governed from February to September 1991, when he was overthrown by the military in a coup d’etat.

He was returned to power in October 1994 by a U.S.-led multinational force, and was reelected in 2000. According to local authorities, turnout in that year’s elections reached 62 percent, although diplomats and the local and foreign media estimated that only 20 to 30 percent of voters came out for the 2000 elections.

Aristide reported that he was forced to leave his post and the country by the U.S. marines, who put him on a flight to the Central African Republic.

Although the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) demanded an independent investigation, none was carried out. Shortly after Aristide’s departure, a multinational force led by the United States and France occupied the country.

The current efforts to restore order are taking place in a country where 50 percent of the population is illiterate and 180 armed gangs operate, including former members of the army dissolved by Aristide in the mid-1990s.

Meanwhile, 87 political parties are grouped in two fragile coalitions, the Democratic Convergence and the Democratic Platform.

The Lavalas Family, the strongest party, is not taking part in the elections.

When reporters asked the interim authorities about the former president, who is in exile in South Africa, they either do not mention, or say that they do not recall, how his government collapsed.

But several former members of the Aristide administration are in prison, like ex-prime minister Yvon Neptune – who declared a hunger strike a month ago demanding that he either be tried or freed – or are persecuted.

The doubts about the elections arise from the slow pace of the voter registration process, and especially the difficulties in getting the high levels of violence under control.

To these problems was added the recent U.S. decision to order the departure of the families of U.S. diplomats in Haiti and non-essential embassy staff, because of recent violence in the capital.

The interim government of Boniface Alexandre was not pleased when U.S. officials informed them of the decision last Thursday.

Sources with the U.N. civilian staff expressed surprise over Washington’s decision, saying the security situation had not changed over the past few weeks, and that the violence was under better control than at the beginning of the year.

No other embassy in Haiti followed suit, the sources told IPS.

But the biggest doubt over the viability of the elections arises from the absence of the state, which becomes painfully obvious with a short tour of the narrow streets of Port-au-Prince, home to half of Haiti’s 8.5 million people, 80 percent of whom are poor.

The police are barely getting organised, with MINUSTAH’s help, and there is an auxiliary force, dubbed the “men in black” for their black uniforms, who are armed with weapons that they have been able to confiscate, from simple shotguns to sophisticated weapons of war.

Municipal buildings are, like most of the city, barely standing, amidst the mountains of garbage piling up on busy streets.

In this no-man’s land, authority is exercised by the armed private guards keeping watch outside supermarkets and hotels, high walls concealing opulent homes, and sports utility vehicles, which are necessary for climbing steep hillsides of up to 1,000 metres in height, to reach the inaccessible mansions of the local economic elites. And, of course, the white vehicles and blue helmets of the heavily armed, mainly Latin American MINUSTAH forces.