Recruits in Haiti’s self-declared army, which is seeking to manipulate the situation whereby the UN stabilisation mission in the country is viewed by many as an occupying force installed to entrench the 2004 coup against Aristide.

Armed group is waging a brazen campaign aimed at stoking public anger at the continued presence of the 10,000-strong UN mission in Haiti and inviting violent conflict with authorities, write MICHAEL NORBY and BRIAN FITZPATRICK in Port-au-Prince

In the overgrown parade grounds of a long-abandoned military base outside Port-au-Prince, the most recent player in the surreal battle for the hearts and minds of the Haitian people delivers a chilling message.

Flanked by 150 uniformed men, Larose Aubin seems ready to plunge the battered nation into utter chaos.

Aubin, an animated former army sergeant, speaks for a group of one-time soldiers and younger recruits calling for the immediate return of the Haitian Armed Forces (FAd’H), 17 years after the notoriously brutal military was scrapped.

The rogue movement began in earnest after the May 2011 inauguration of president Michel Martelly, who had made the army’s return a pillar of his election campaign.

When it became clear, however, that remobilisation would take several years and that the majority would not be included, the disgruntled group seized old army installations across the country and issued demands. Mocking government attempts to pay them off, they say the time for talk is over.

“We’re not joking around,” says Aubin. “We’re going to come with force and with the population, and we’ll get what we’re looking for. Even if we lose our lives, we will fight. They can’t kill us all.”

Well-armed and highly visible as they patrol the nation’s cities in military fatigues, the 3,000– strong group claims to be ready to bring peace and security to Haiti; a new army that should not be feared. However, the rhetoric of another former sergeant, Yves Jeudy, tells a different story, as he earmarks the upcoming Haitian Flag Day holiday as a deadline.

“After May 18th, if the government hasn’t done anything, they will see what happens,” he declares. “We’re not going back and they need to give us an answer quick.”

This final challenge comes after a brazen campaign aimed at stoking public anger at the continued presence of the 10,000-strong United Nations stabilisation mission in Haiti, which was put in place after the overthrow of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

On April 19th, the group amplified its intentions as 50 men – some armed with grenades – arrived at parliament and disrupted a legislative session to ratify prime minister Laurent Lamothe.

No confrontation occurred but the inaction of the UN mission and the Haitian national police (PNH) was a major embarrassment. The ragtag army took full advantage of the impunity, and has now used the resulting traction and sense of legitimacy to invite a violent confrontation with authorities.

This cavalier approach is deliberate and seeks to manipulate the situation whereby the UN mission is viewed by many as an occupying force installed to entrench the 2004 coup against Aristide.

Shortly after their arrival, anger at the peacekeepers began to grow after violent incursions into the Port-au-Prince slums of Cité Soleil and Bel-Air, which resulted in numerous civilian casualties. Instances of abuse and extreme negligence have compounded matters. In March, for example, two Pakistani peacekeepers were convicted of the January 20th rape of a 14-year-old boy in the town of Gonaïves, and several similar claims have emerged.

IN OCTOBER 2010, Haiti suffered its first ever cholera outbreak. Since then 7,000 people have died and over half a million have become ill. Overwhelming evidence suggests that troops from Nepal brought the disease to Haiti, but the UN mission has yet to officially accept responsibility.

Against this backdrop, it’s understandable that some would favour the reinstatement of the dreaded army over “foreigners“, as Aubin claims they do. Wary that this hostility could ignite a public backlash, it’s likewise easy to see why the UN mission is reluctant to deploy chapter seven of the UN charter, which allows military action when peace is threatened.

Finally testing the waters last Sunday, however, a joint Haitian police/UN operation saw checkpoints set up in Port-au– Prince and other towns, and two armed men in military uniforms were arrested. These were the first detentions since the armed gangs began patrolling cities. The move was a subtle response, aimed at both sending a message to the army camps and gauging the public’s reaction, yet it signals the opening of a potentially dangerous new chapter.

“Our goal remains to support the PNH to disarm those in possession of illegal firearms,” said UN mission spokesman Lt Cmdr Jim Hoeft, offering an ambiguous explanation of the arrests.

Though Hoeft declined to discuss exactly when a decision was made to begin flexing muscles, he did say that UN troops were “always ready for actions like these” and that “some operations are predetermined, some are based on operational observations”.

The mood of the people will most likely dictate the strategy of both sides as the situation begins to boil. With atrocious social conditions prevalent and the country’s fledgling democracy apparently bludgeoned into submission, for some, what has been referred to as “option chaos” may look more and more appealing.

ONLY A year in office, Martelly has lurched from one crisis to the next. Lamothe was installed as prime minister last week, the president’s fourth choice for the job after lawmakers rejected two earlier nominees. Gary Conille was approved for the role in October, but resigned after just four months after his plan to audit reconstruction contracts drew the ire of the president.

Martelly’s election victory itself was soiled by the forced exclusion of Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, and a dismal turnout of just 24 per cent. The technicality used by Haiti’s electoral council to exclude the party was that it had submitted improper documents.

To put into perspective what this expulsion meant: In December 1990, Aristide was elected with 67 per cent of the vote under the banner of the Lavalas movement. In December 1995, another Lavalas candidate, René Préval, was elected with 88 per cent of the vote.

By then representing Fanmi Lavalas – which had emerged from a split in the movement – Aristide was re-elected in November 2000 with a 92 per cent total. Finally, in February 2006, Préval won 51 per cent of votes, also backed by Fanmi Lavalas.

In short, though it is accepted that each election result since 1990 has grown steadily more unreliable, the broader Lavalas movement has clearly served as the voice of the Haitian poor for over two decades. Now, in a country where 80 per cent of the population lives on $2 or less a day, it appears that this platform does not fit the post-earthquake landscape.

“The people no longer believe that Haiti will have the opportunity to have a democracy,“ said Brian Concannon, a human rights lawyer and director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.

“Their options are now local gangs, the UN, the return of the army, or some kind of clientelism relationship with the government. That’s what they think is realistic.“

In the face of criticism from western diplomats and with a dubious mandate, Martelly’s plans to create a 3,500-strong army has evoked memories of the Haitian Armed Forces and its dreaded Tonton Macoutes death squads, used by the decades-long Duvalier dictatorships to crush dissent.

In more recent times, Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti paramilitaries helped Gen Raoul Cédras’s military junta – which overthrew the first Aristide government – kill an estimated 3,000 people between 1991 and 1994.

MARTELLY CLAIMS the force is needed to deal with border security and help his struggling police, but critics say there are far more pressing issues facing the nation. Either way, the half-hearted attempts to disarm the “soldiers” has led to widespread speculation in Haiti, including theories that question the president’s true intentions. Others cite political opportunists or outside interests as possible benefactors of the impending chaos.

The group has new trucks and uniforms, and enough fuel and provisions to sustain a prolonged standoff; clearly someone of influence is pulling the strings.

Georges Michel, a member of the commission appointed by Martelly to blueprint the army’s return, says the possibility of this crisis materialising was forecast to the president in a January 1st report, and fears the consequences of inaction may be severe.

“The people are with them,“ he said of the holdouts. “This would be a major catastrophe for Martelly if he calls upon Minustah [UN mission] to crack down on them – they will be seen as heroes and Martelly as the villain.“

In Gonaïves, a three-hour drive north of Port-au-Prince, witnesses to the brutality of the Haitian military are not so sympathetic. We’re in the seaside slum of Raboteau where, at around 4am on April 22nd, 1994, over 100 FAd’H soldiers and their Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti paramilitary henchmen attacked unsuspecting residents, leaving an estimated 26 to 50 people dead.

From the edge of the village, we walk past the stagnant orange-tinged salt mines to the shoreline — the same 300-yard route many of the victims thought would take them to safety exactly 18 years ago. The horror is fresh in the memories of the 12 survivors who accompany us; their stories a chilling reminder of an obscene barbarism.

“The victims were men and women, girls and boys,” recalls Henry-Claude Elismé. “Some of the dead were eaten by pigs and wild dogs. We don’t really know how many died in total because the army stayed for days, digging holes, dumping bodies on top of each other.”

RABOTEAU, SEEN as a pro-democracy safe haven, was punished for its opposition to the Cédras junta, which was barely clinging to power in the face of international isolation. Troops burst into houses as people slept, beating and torturing some and gunning down anyone who ran.

Those who survived the blind sprint to the sea leapt into fishing boats for the safety of the ocean, only to be slaughtered by troops positioned in 13 small boats just offshore. They then used the next several days to cover their tracks.

The Cédras regime fell soon after, as did the FAd’H, which Aristide disbanded upon being reinstated after US intervention. In Raboteau, at least, the victims of one of the final atrocities of the army are under no illusions about what a new force would mean.

In Port-au-Prince, where 420,000 people made homeless by the 2010 earthquake still live in horrendous tent cities, impatience is growing. Cholera cases have tripled since the rainy season began a month ago, and access to fresh water or healthcare is sparse. Much of the capital remains a trash-filled wasteland of broken buildings where malnutrition kills and violence is spiralling out of control.

Irwin Stotzky, author of Silencing the Guns in Haiti, served as an adviser to presidents Aristide and Préval and investigated the human rights abuses of the Cédras regime. He says the thought of throwing 3,500 armed men at this problem is obscene.

“The idea that they need an army in the middle of all this is ridiculous,“ he says. “What they need is an educational system, a governmental structure, food, housing.

“Who are they going to fight?“ he asks. “The Haitian army has never fought anybody but Haitians.”

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First published by: San Francisco Bay View

July 10, 2011-In 2004, I was in Haiti living under the injustice Bernard Gousse inflicted on his own people while serving the Haitian elite and the “International Community”. Like many of Gousse’s victims, I was driven into hiding — in my case it came after the arrest of the late Father Gerard Jean-Justice, a prominent Lavalas leader and human rights activist. Under the dictatorship of Gerard Latortue, Gousse ran the Ministry of Justice — an injustice machine that filled Haitian jails with political prisoners, usually targeting the most vulnerable.

Here are seven reasons why Gousse shouldn’t be Haiti’s next Prime Minister

1) Gousse became the Minister of Justice after the 2004 coup against Haiti’s democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Gousse was considered as one of the most powerful men in the U.S-backed regime that ruled from 2004 to 2006. In the 1990s Gousse served in the military dictatorship of Raul Cedras; a regime that used the FRAPH death squads and brutal FAd’H forces to murder people in the slums and countryside.

2) Among the people illegally jailed by Gousse were Fanmi Lavalas officials under Aristide such as former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, the former Minister of Interior Joselene Joceleme Privet and former legislator Amanus Maette. The allegations against all of them were shown to be completely baseless. In the case of Neptune, the illegality was so egregious that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ordered the Haitian government to pay Yvon Neptune reparations.

3) With Gousse’s enthusiastic support, the Haitian National Police, backed by UN troops, launched murderous raids on communities were support for Aristide was very strong such as Cite Soleil.

4) Since 2009, a Miami-based Haitian human rights group, Veye-Yo founded by the late Father Jean-Juste, has called for the arrest of Bernard Gousse.

5) Gousse’s crimes occasionally attracted some notice in the corporate press. Below are some examples “Once again, one man has become the center of a political storm that threatens to foil this country’s uphill struggle for stability,” (New York Times article written by Ginger Thompson June 16, 2005). “Gousse also has been accused of ignoring alleged atrocities by police against pro-Aristide slum dwellers.” (Associated Press’s Stevenson Jacob wrote in his June 16, 2005 article) However, his crimes are best documented in a very detailed report by Thomas Griffin of the University of Miami School of Law (Haiti Human Rights Investigation: November 11–21, 2004 _http://www.ijdh.org/CSHRhaitireport.pdf_ (http://www.ijdh.org/CSHRhaitireport.pdf) )

6) The scale of the crimes committed by the Latortue dictatorship — in which Bernard Gousse played a major role — were revealed by a scientific study published by the Lancet Medical Journal in 2006. The study estimated 4000 political killings perpetrated by Latortue’s securities forces and its armed allies.

7) There can be no true reconciliation without justice. The choice of Bernard Gousse is a clear signal that the rights of the Haitian people will continue to violated under the Martelly administration. If Haiti’s current President Michel Martelly is not a US puppet, he should arrest Gousse rather than appoint him as the head of his government.

Anyone who has followed the situation in Haiti can see that Haitian people — in fact, anyone — deserves better than Bernard Gousse.

Read orig­i­nal post: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/weblogs/wadner_pierre/4063

July 3, 2011– On 24March the Portuguese prime minister, Jose Socrates, resigned after all the opposition parties rejected his austerity plan, which included slashing pensions by more than €1,500 a month and more cuts in tax benefits. His government’s collapse triggered an election, which could not take place for another two months. During the interim Socrates stayed on as acting prime minister and reached an agreement with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund for a €78bn bailout. The terms? Almost exactly the same as those proposed by him and rejected by the Portuguese parliament six weeks earlier.

When the elections finally took place the political class could sense a certain degree of cynicism. The Portuguese president, Anibal Cavaco Silva, warned voters they could not complain about what politicians did “at a time of sacrifice and serious doubts about our future” if they did not take part. But the future had already been decided. With major economic decisions rejected and then imposed by powers beyond their control, there was precious little to vote on. At 58%, turnout was the lowest since Portugal became a democracy. “[When people] see the prime minister go to Brussels to announce austerity measures, they understand that the government itself decides very little,” the political analyst Marina Costa Lobo told Agence France Press.

The basic assumption about electoral politics in a democracy is that the process connects popular will to political power. In the absence of that fundamental assurance, disaffection and the cynicism that comes with it are almost inevitable. Elections become discussions not about who or what will or could change, but just who will win, and politicians become performers, embraced for their ability to articulate the concerns of the electorate without any real sense that they might meaningfully address them. In the gap between democratic aspirations and the stasis of the political class, legitimate resentments fester. Where solutions are needed, scapegoats are offered. With a handful of exceptions (including the US) voter turnout is falling across the globe while confidence in electoral politics is fading. According to a Gallup poll from 2002, majorities on every continent believe governments do not represent the will of the people.

This is not a new dilemma. The question of how to render democratic engagement viable at the national level within the context of neoliberal globalisation has been a key question for some time. “By many measures, corporations are more central players in global affairs than nations,” writes Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs McWorld. “We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as postnational, transnational or even anti-national. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space.”

But the nature of the economic crisis has intensified the implosion of democratic legitimacy within nation states and made the consequent contradictions particularly acute. When the Greeks default and how (few believe they won’t) is a matter for the EU, the IMF, the bond markets. The Greeks will find out with the rest of us.

In this context the huge demonstrations on the streets of Athens and elsewhere, while encouraging to the left on an emotional level, seem more like expressions of impotent rage than a strategic intervention. It is telling that the youth protest movement that has emerged around Europe is called the indignant ones. They’re angry. But there is little sense that they see the polling booths as a means to get even, or that some other route has emerged that might also be effective. This comes more by way of critique than criticism. For now anger may be all that is available.

“The big question is whether any political force is capable of stemming the tides of globalisation – of capital, trade, finance, industry, criminality, drugs and weapon trafficking, terrorism, and the migration of the victims of all these forces,” writes the eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has spearheaded much of the thinking in this area. “While having at their disposal solely the means of a single state.”

This global south, saddled with colonial legacies, overbearing neighbours, interfering sponsors, is no stranger to these democratic deficits. In June 2009 the Haitian parliament unanimously passed a law that would raise the minimum wage to $5 a day. Given Haiti’s endemic poverty and brittle democratic culture, the fact that an elected parliament could pass a law that would earn such popular support was encouraging.

The US thought otherwise. According to WikiLeaks, the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy, David Lindwall, insisted the law (which would have paid Haitians less per day than the US minimum wage per hour) “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at “the unemployed and underpaid masses” (as though this were a bad thing).

A series of articles based on the WikiLeaks cables by a Haitian paper, Haiti Liberté, in collaboration with the US magazine the Nation , revealed how the US then lobbied alongside factory owners, including contractors for some of the priciest jeans and underwear in the west, to force the 38p an hour rate in the poorest nation in the western hemisphere even lower.

They pressured the former Haitian president, René Préval, to undermine the popular democratic will in the interests of greater profits for garment manufacturers until he created two-tier minimum wage with workers in the textile industry getting just £1.86 a day.

Two years later, during presidential elections, the US was back, interfering even as it preached democracy and good governance. The country’s main party, Fanmi Lavalas, was excluded and turnout was only 24%. The former singer Michel Martelly – who has previously allied himself with coup leaders and a convicted human rights abuser – was elected with the help of a Spanish marketing company.

Martelly’s “victory” crudely illustrates the broader nature of electoral politics in a period in which the outcome has little relationship to who wields power. For without that basic connection two key questions arise. Why vote if real power resides beyond democratic control? And why stand if you won’t be able to do anything? The first is answered in the low turnouts. But the second answer comes by way of the transformation of a singer into a politician by way of marketing.

Given their inability to deliver a great deal politicians have to provide some other justification for their existence, and entertainment is often a proxy. Take Sarah Palin, who moved effortlessly from vice-presidential candidate and Alaska governor to reality show star and media pundit. She clearly has no more interest in holding political office – there is more money, status and power being a media personality. But in order to sustain her brand she must keep up the speculation that she might return to the fray. So she rides around the early nominating states, mixing it up but remaining coy. Electoral politics is part of the act.

This is not to say that voting is necessarily a waste of time or that all politicians are performers. The outcomes of national elections can be relevant but the parameters for that relevance are narrowing to within fairly slim margins. National electorates may chose the protagonists. But increasingly it is global economics that shapes the narrative.

See original post: http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sardQeajgnPPSE1-LHTwbaQ/view.m?id=15&gid=commentisfree/2011/jul/03/haitians-singing-president-democratic-legitimacy&cat=commentisfree

The United States, the European Union and the United Nations decided to support Haiti’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections despite believing that the country’s electoral body, “almost certainly in conjunction with President Preval,” had “emasculated the opposition” by unwisely and unjustly excluding the country’s largest party, according to a secret US Embassy cable.

The cable was obtained by WikilLeaks and made available to the Haitian newspaper Haïti Liberté, which is collaborating with The Nation on a series of reports on US and UN policy toward the country.

At a December 1, 2009, meeting, a group of international election donors, including ambassadors from Brazil, Canada, Spain and the United States, concluded that “the international community has too much invested in Haiti’s democracy to walk away from the upcoming elections, despite its imperfections,” in the words of the EU representative, according to US Ambassador Kenneth Merten’s December 2009 cable.

Haiti’s electoral body, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), banned the Fanmi Lavalas (FL) from participating in the polls on a technicality. The FL is the party of then-exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown on February 29, 2004, and flown to Africa as part of a coup d’état that was supported by France, Canada, and the United States.

This history made Canadian Ambassador Gilles Rivard worry at the December donor meeting that “support for the elections as they now stand would be interpreted by many in Haiti as support for Preval 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.

Despite the Lavalas exclusion, the European Union and Canada proposed that donors “help level the playing field”—they could, for instance, “purchase radio air time for opposition politicians to plug their candidacies.” They were presumably referring to “opposition candidates” who would come from parties other than the FL.

That plan was nixed by the United Nations, but when the elections finally did take place on November 28, 2010, followed by a runoff on March 20, 2011, Washington and the international donor community played an influential role in determining their outcome.

When the first-round results were disputed, international donors arranged for an evaluation by the Organization of American States, which pronounced that pro-coup candidate Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, 50, a former konpa musician, should face another neo-Duvalierist candidate, Mirlande Manigat, in the final round. Martelly emerged as the victor in the runoff.

Less than 23 percent of Haiti’s registered voters had their vote counted in either of the two presidential 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.

The December 2009 election donor meeting took place just over a month before the January 12, 2010, earthquake, which derailed the elections originally planned for February 28, 2010.

When the polling was rescheduled, there was even more at stake, primarily how billions of dollars in 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.

According to the December 4, 2009, cable, US officials pushed hard for the election.

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.”

The US State Department declined to comment on the disclosures in this article, citing a policy against commenting on releases of documents that purport to contain classified information.

Merten explained in the cable that he had opposed FL’s exclusion because the party would come out looking “like a martyr and Haitians will believe (correctly) that Preval is manipulating the election.”

The election’s low turnout has been ascribed to Haitians’ sense of futility in the choice between two unappealing candidates, to a grassroots boycott campaign and, primarily, to 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 March 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.”

See original article: http://www.thenation.com/article/161216/wikileaks-haiti-cable-depicts-fraudulent-haiti-election

See IJDH’s take on the elections:

IJDH Director, Brian Concannon Discusses Haiti’s Election Results on Uprising Radio (April 25)

Nicole Phillips on KPFA Radio discusses March 20 Fraudulent Elections (March 21)