By Brian Con­can­non, Jr. and Ira Kurzban

Late last month, Haiti’s gov­ern­ment took the unde­mo­c­ra­tic and dan­ger­ous step of exclud­ing 15 polit­i­cal par­ties, includ­ing Haiti’s most pop­u­lar party, Fanmi Lavalas, from par­lia­men­tary elec­tions sched­uled for Feb­ru­ary and March 2010. The deci­sion threat­ens not only Haiti’s democ­racy and sta­bil­ity, but bil­lions in for­eign invest­ments financed by tax­pay­ers in the United States and elsewhere.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion, along with the United Nations and the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States, needs to step up and head off this dis­as­ter by refus­ing to finance the elec­toral charade.

The February/March elec­tions are impor­tant because one-third of Haiti’s Sen­ate and the entire House of Deputies is at stake. Fanmi Lavalas’ par­tic­i­pa­tion is impor­tant because the party is by far Haiti’s most pop­u­lar. It has won every elec­tion it has con­tested, includ­ing 90 per­cent of the seats in the 2000 par­lia­men­tary elections.

Haiti’s Pro­vi­sional Elec­toral Coun­cil (PEC) claimed that a man­date sent by the party’s exiled leader, for­mer Pres­i­dent Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide, from South Africa, is not authen­tic. In fact, Fanmi Lavalas pre­sented an orig­i­nal man­date, authen­ti­cated by a Hait­ian notary that com­plies with Hait­ian law. Aris­tide sent a fax of the man­date directly to the PEC, and con­firmed its authen­tic­ity in a radio interview.

The PEC not only lacks a good rea­son for remov­ing Fanmi Lavalas from vot­ers’ bal­lots, it also lacks the con­sti­tu­tional legit­i­macy to do so. The Coun­cil is a Pro­vi­sional Coun­cil hand-picked by Haiti’s Pres­i­dent, René Pré­val, not the inde­pen­dent Per­ma­nent Coun­cil required by Haiti’s 1987 Constitution.

Cred­i­bil­ity in doubt

The PEC tried the same thing ear­lier this year, and got away with it. The Coun­cil dis­qual­i­fied Fanmi Lavalas and other par­ties from elec­tions held in April and June for 11 Sen­ate seats. When the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tions were first announced, the United States, the U.N. and the OAS denounced them as undemocratic.

The U.S. Embassy warned that the exclu­sion would “inevitably” raise ques­tions about the election’s credibility.

But the PEC called the inter­na­tional community’s bluff and kept the excluded par­ties out. The inter­na­tional com­mu­nity blinked by not only accept­ing the flawed elec­tions, but pay­ing for them, too: Inter­na­tional donors sup­plied $12.5 mil­lion, 72 per­cent of the election’s cost.

Elec­tion boycotted

Hait­ian vot­ers, know­ing a fraud when they see one, boy­cotted. The PEC’s offi­cial par­tic­i­pa­tion rate of 11 per­cent for the April elec­tions was low enough, but most observers put the real fig­ure at 3 per­cent to 5 percent.

By drop­ping their prin­ci­pled objec­tions to the April election’s flaws, the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity gave the PEC a green light to keep exclud­ing the government’s polit­i­cal rivals. This light is still green: the United States, OAS and U.N. let last week’s exclu­sion pass with­out pub­lic crit­i­cism or any threat to with­hold the $18 mil­lion promised for the Feb­ru­ary voting.

All three have invested bil­lions of dol­lars in Haiti over the last few years. The U.N. peace­keep­ing mis­sion in Haiti costs $600 mil­lion a year, and the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment con­tributed $287 mil­lion this year to Haiti. U.N. Spe­cial Envoy to Haiti Bill Clin­ton is work­ing hard to con­vince pri­vate investors that Haiti is a good place to do business.

All these invest­ments may be wiped out by the PEC’s exclu­sion plan. Expe­ri­ence in Haiti and else­where demon­strates that pre­vent­ing cit­i­zens from chal­leng­ing gov­ern­ment poli­cies through the bal­lot box inevitably will lead to chal­lenges out­side the bal­lot box.

If the Coun­cil does not change course, Pres­i­dent Préval’s allies may con­trol Par­lia­ment, but Haiti’s streets will be filled with angry pro­tes­tors con­fronting U.N. troops and blam­ing the United States for sup­port­ing yet another unde­mo­c­ra­tic regime. Social unrest will stall devel­op­ment projects and scare investors.

Amer­i­cans and Haitians deserve a bet­ter return on their money spent to sta­bi­lize and develop Haiti. The Obama admin­is­tra­tion can guar­an­tee a bet­ter return by imme­di­ately cut­ting off all fund­ing for the elec­toral cha­rade and insist­ing that it will nei­ther finance, nor rec­og­nize, elec­tions that are not fair and inclusive.

Brian Con­can­non Jr. served as an OAS elec­tion observer and U.N. human rights offi­cer in Haiti and cur­rently directs the Insti­tute for Jus­tice & Democ­racy in Haiti. Ira Kurzban was U.S. legal coun­sel for the Hait­ian gov­ern­ments under pres­i­dents Pré­val and Aris­tide from 1991–2004.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2009/12/11/1376563/dont-honor-tainted-election.html#ixzz0roSLqbNw