Another fraudulent election in Haiti

Numbers swell 4 another long/hard day of pro-democracy protests in #Haiti's capital. Reports of other protests in Okay & Okay. pic.twitter.com/okKXdng6Be

— Kevin Pina (@AcrossMediums) November 30, 2016

Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio Executive Producer Dennis Bernstein discusses Haiti's November 20, 2016 elections and allegations of election fraud with Senior Producer Kevin Pina and Radio Soleil Director Rico Dupuy.

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FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS IN HAITI!

PRESS RELEASE…PRESS RELEASE…PRESS RELEASE…PRESS RELEASE…

From: Haiti Action Committee

Contact: David Welsh, (510) 847-8657


FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS IN HAITI!   ONE PERSON ONE VOTE.
NO TO STOLEN ELECTIONS IN HAITI.

Haiti’s Presidential election, postponed from the scheduled date of Oct. 9th due to Hurricane Mathew, is now scheduled for November 20th, 2016.  There can be no recovery unless there is a government in place that truly represents the people.  The lack of such a government is why there was no recovery from the 2010 earthquake and why there must now be free and fair elections in which the people's voice is heard. If hurricane relief is separated from that, recovery will fail.

The Haitian grassroots have worked very hard for over a year, risking their lives to demand free and fair elections. As a result of their pressure, the 2015 electoral results were declared fraudulent. But  there is concern that those who do not want to see free and fair elections are putting in place an apparatus of violence and intimidation, denying voters their electoral cards, and instituting sudden changes of polling stations to suppress the popular vote, steal ballots, change the vote count, and influence “election observers”.

The grassroots majority is demanding:

1) Free and fair elections.

2) No US/Canada/France/UN interference in the right of           Haitians – one person one vote

3) Stop US financing and other support for the terror campaign by a minority elite against the impoverished majority who are fighting for democracy in Haiti.
     
4) The new Haitian President must be installed by Feb 7th, 2017, in keeping with the Haitian Constitution.
     
5) Fair and unbiased reporting by the international press.

Fanmi Lavalas, the political party and movement headed by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is running a presidential candidate for the first time since the US-backed coup removed President Aristide from power in 2004 and excluded Lavalas from elections. Dr. Maryse Narcisse has been endorsed by President Aristide and they are campaigning together across the country, meeting huge enthusiastic crowds.  Dr. Narcisse could become the first woman elected president of Haiti and the first since President Aristide to be chosen by and speak for the impoverished majority.  She has traveled as part of Karavan Solidarite Fanmi Lavalas to areas hardest hit  by the hurricane, assessing damage and bringing food, medical care, building supplies, drinking water and water treatment to prevent cholera, which was brought to Haiti by UN forces and has been spread by flood waters.

The Haitian people, who mobilized for months last year, risking their lives to overturn rigged election results, succeeded in winning this new election round.  They are determined that their votes will count this time and that every vote will be counted.  After the vote, they will mobilize again to defend their ballot from interference.

With the election rescheduled, people are protesting the end-of-January date for a run-off election.  They say it would not allow sufficient time to install the new President by the Feb 7th date set by the Haitian Constitution, and they are demanding that the Feb 7th Constitutional deadline be met. The electoral council (CEP) is charged with organizing the elections, but they have a history of overseeing the massive fraud that has marred recent elections.  There is also concern that if the CEP results are, once again, fraudulent, teams of “observers” headed by the OAS and other international bodies and their local counterparts will declare the results “legitimate” despite evidence pointing to the opposite.

The information below is gathered from people on the ground in Haiti:

1) The CEP is headed by Leopold Berlanger, a leading figure of the 2004 US-backed coup against democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide.

2) The main 2004 coup leader and wealthy sweatshop owner, Andy Apaid, plays a central role as lead consultant in the CEP tabulation center where the votes will be counted and the results published.

3) The CEP under Berlanger's leadership has not implemented a number of recommendations of the Electoral Verification Commission, which was established in response to the massive fraud in last year’s elections. The CEP has allowed fraudulent parliamentary results to stand, favoring supporters of outgoing President Michel Martelly who was imposed by the US.

4) The CEP insists on quarantining a candidate's votes from a precinct where this candidate obtains 200+ out of a total of 550 ballots. Under the pretext of preventing fraud, perfectly valid ballots are eliminated from the count because a popular candidate is receiving “too many” votes. Officials of Fanmi Lavalas have been protesting this measure as it arbitrarily discards valid ballots in precincts that have large turnouts in favor of their candidates.  Quarantined or provisional ballots end up not being counted and are likely to be destroyed.

5) A leading figure of the 2004 coup, Rosny Desroches, is in charge of the officially-designated election observer teams of 1,500 individuals.  The media reports that funding for the observer teams came through the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in collaboration with International Foundation for Electoral Services (IFES).  While the International Republican Institute (IRI) does not have offices in Haiti, it operates from the Dominican Republic through a number of existing organizations in Haiti.  Both NDI and IRI are part of the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy; the IRI was implicated in the 2004 coup and are known for funding interference, destabilization and other efforts to influence elections to impose US foreign and economic policies, including regime change.

6) It has been reported that the National Organization for the Advancement of Haitians (NOAH) is organizing an election observer team of 200 people.  NOAH has worked closely with the Organization of American States (OAS) and the US State Department, both of which have been ardent supporters of fraudulent elections in Haiti.

7) The OAS, which is sending a team of observers for the November 20th election, has been thoroughly discredited in Haiti for its recent support of the massive fraud orchestrated by the CEP in 2015.   The OAS record of support for fraudulent elections in Haiti includes its intrusive role in the 2010-11 elections that resulted in Martelly being imposed as president.

The people of Haiti continue to mobilize for elections that are truly free and fair, free from ballot dumping and other blatant fraud which characterized the 2015 elections. The Haitian people are demanding:  One person, one vote.  Tout moun se moun.  Every person counts.

sent by Haiti Action Committee
www.haitisolidarity.net and on FACEBOOK
@HaitiAction1

HIP Flashback: Mud Cookie Economics in Haiti

A girl eats a mud cookie in Cite Soleil to stave off hunger. The recipe on the ground is one part dirt, one part shortening and half a cup of water. The recipe internationally is one part charity, one part neo-liberal Reaganomics and one part dependence. all photos: ©2008 Jean Ristil

Originally published February 2008

By Kevin Pina

Poor Haiti, the nation they would have us believe is close to a failed state, needs our help once again.

A recent AP article shook charitable institutions to their core by revealing that Haitians are eating cookies made of mud to fill their bellies. After more than an estimated 2 billion dollars of international aid to date, not including all the spiritually challenged Jesus folk who invested a lot more, Haitians still have to live off mud cookies made of dirt to survive. What a realization!

Now comes the deluge of charities trying to do for the Haitian people what they presumably cannot do for themselves while never asking what happened to all that aid money. Some do it for humanity while others do it for Jesus and all the while it builds more dependency not less in Haiti.

Helping Haitians for the Christians is a helpless exercise as they use the poor to reassure themselves of their own relationship to HIM. For the humanitarians it’s to stave off a sense of helplessness as children with bloated bellies and blondish hair go to bed hungry for more than food each night. Their parents need work for real wages and yet their benefactors just don’t seem to get it.

I suppose knowing that Haitians are dependent on you is reassuring and adds purpose to otherwise dull lives in the first world. It certainly seems preferable to accepting that only political independence that allows resistance to Haiti’s wealthy few and forces them to share the spoils is the only answer to poverty. What a terrifying thought. And Jesus was killed for less.

Two Haitian women sifting the clay for té

Haitians have always been told that the reason they go to bed hungry is their own fault. No matter how many embargoes have been imposed, since 1804 and continuing through to 2001, it remains THEIR fault. Despite all the poverty and blame they still manage to cling to an indomitable faith that tomorrow will be better for their children. Resiliency is a fundamental part of the Haitian character to be admired.

Should we expect less from a proud nation of former slaves that defeated Napoleon’s armies only to be forced backward by their slave-holding neighbor to the north? Remember that when Haiti won its independence, as the world’s first black republic, the US was still a country whose development depended upon human chattel kidnapped from Africa.

Té drying on the rooftop of Haiti's old prison for political prisoners during the Duvalier regime

Haitians wear their history on their chests like many of their would-be saviors wear bleeding hearts on their sleeves. The real irony is that while Haitians suffer from the malady of having had their house turned upside down by a coup financed by foreigners in 2004, those same foreigners blame them for not being able to manage their own affairs. It is the perfect self-fulfilling prophecy and a boon to the fundraisers of charitable institutions all over the world.

Haiti has become the holy grail of fundraising for fashionable charitable causes in the so-called third world. Yet Haiti has shown that you can throw as many fundraisers with dog food, marathons and bake sales as possible and nothing will change if the root causes of poverty remain untouched.

Just ask Wyclef Jean and his Yele Haiti Foundation what happened to all the US government funding they received and whether it has stemmed the onslaught of poverty in Haiti. The latter got millions from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to create jobs for Haitians sweeping streets and performing menial jobs throughout the capital. It was the perfect US government-financed charity despite the cover of Wyclef’s high profile Hollywood friends who kicked in a little here and there to make it look good. And yet those pesky poor in Cite Soleil are still eating mud cookies. Has anyone, especially Wyclef, really bothered to ask why? I wonder when was the last time Wyclef or someone like George Clooney ate a mud cookie to keep their belly from grumbling?

Haitian boy watches baby sister while mom works

The truth is that misery and poverty outpace official aid and charitable giving in Haiti. The non-governmental agencies invited to help by the UN continue to toil despite statistics that show they receive 45% of foreign aid to Haiti and 15% of that returns to their respective donor countries. To top it off add the ‘hazard pay’ and expense accounts that make the average salary of the head of an NGO in Haiti $60,000 per year compared to the average citizen who earns less than $250 annually. Nothing like setting the right example for people forced to eat dirt as you drive to your office in an air-conditioned SUV.

I know of a small progressive NGO in Haiti that promises to recycle human waste from the poor to use as agricultural fertilizer. What a great idea except that if Haitians aren’t eating anything more than dirt there can’t be much value to the end product. I don’t want to pick on them but the project serves as a metaphor for how the ‘international community’ is more concerned with what exits Haitian extremities than what enters their bodies for sustenance.

The truth is that while the poor suffer through the current nation building exercise by the UN that forces them to resort to eating dirt, Haiti’s rich are getting richer. Ask the wealthy families like Bigio, Mev, Brandt and the rest of Haiti’s wealthy elite whether they have enough to eat. They were already fantastically wealthy by Haitian standards and have grown more so since Aristide’s ouster in 2004.

All of this has been imposed by the UN who have served as a proxy for the Bush administration’s concept of working with the private sector as the only avenue for helping the poor in Haiti. UN development experts ask us to believe that creating more business opportunities for Haiti’s wealthiest families will result in a demonstrable windfall for the poor. It’s the new neo-liberal agenda that incorporates the old Reaganomics trickle-down theory being instituted by the UN in Haiti. A new name for it might be appropriate in the Haitian context, Mud Cookie economics.

It’s becoming more than obvious by now that this approach isn’t working and what Haiti really needs is a level economic playing field to challenge the disparity between the haves and have-nots. The aforementioned wealthy families have proven over time to be unreliable providers and partners to Haiti’s poor majority. They are in fact predatory monopolists controlling markets and not free market capitalists competing on a level playing field in Haiti. No amount of investment by the international community or charity will alter that fact. This is the real message behind the recipe for mud cookies the poor are forced to eat in Cite Soleil today.

Behind the wall workers prepare té

In today’s Haiti it’s all about supporting business and the private sector while abandoning the rest of the population to be cared for by charities. That’s what Bush, the UN and the cadres of economic experts have left Haitians with after all is said and done. It clearly favors those who already have the capital to invest while increasing dependency on foreign largess for the rest. It seems clear enough that until the monopolist hold by a few families on the Haitian economy is addressed, we can expect to hear more about mud cookies in the future.

I wouldn’t hold my breath though; the last president to even dare to raise this question remains in exile. Aristide was ousted in 2004 and his movement that gave the poor a sense of controlling their own destiny was brutally savaged. Poverty without real sovereignty and the ability of Haitians to change this reality seems preferable to poverty with dignity for those who continue to benefit from it.

Kevin Pina is the founding editor of the Haiti Information Project (HIP)
The Haiti Information Project (HIP) is a non-profit alternative news service providing coverage and analysis of breaking developments in Haiti. Winner of the CENSORED 2008 REAL NEWS AWARD for Outstanding Investigative Journalism

HIP Flashback - Remembering Haiti's Father Jean-Marie Vincent

Remembering a Champion of the Poor in Haiti

Father Jean-Marie Vincent.
Photograph courtesy of the Fondation Jean-Marie Vincent

by Kevin Pina

Originally published  September 16th, 2009

The international community and the Rene Preval administration recently ignored the anniversary of the brutal assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent in Haiti once again contributing to the perception of two distinct Haitian realities. On one hand there exists the Haiti of the wealthy elite, the UN, foreign profiteers, NGOs, diplomats, and their clients in the Preval government. On the other hand there is the Haiti of the majority of the poor who are trapped in the grind of constant poverty with an experience, history and memory uniquely their own.

Haiti’s poor remembered the anniversary of the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent on August 28, 1994 in small solemn ceremonies at his grave site in Port au Prince and the small town of Jean Rabel in northwest Haiti where he founded a peasant rights organization Tet Kole Ti Peyizan. They remembered him for challenging Haiti’s wealthy elite by starting literacy projects and planning an alternative bank dedicated to the poor. They remembered his courage and the beatings he took at the hands of dictators for his incessant call that Haiti’s dispossessed had every right to take control of the destiny of the nation. While members of Haiti’s moneyed class looked down upon the poor illiterate souls they ruled through corruption and violence, Vincent made it clear that the poor were not victims and they harbored a strength and wisdom that the rich would never allow themselves to understand. Vincent once said, “While the rich are concerned with going to heaven the poor are concerned with feeding themselves. We must tend to the needs of the poor to feed themselves before we can talk about the spiritual salvation of those who can already eat.”

In the other Haiti, the anniversary of Vincent’s assassination was overshadowed by all the hoopla of rehabilitating Reagan’s trickle-down economic theory in the form of bringing Haiti back into the camp of the neoliberal-sweatshop development model. The media-hype of a “new Haiti” being born from the promise of new sweatshops and a recent attempt to raise the minimum wage to a paltry $3.73 per day from a scandalous $1.75 per day, once again served to hide the simmering reality of the poor lurking beneath the surface in this island nation of 9 million inhabitants.

Father Jean-Marie Vincent fought against what has now become the reality of the US/UN sweatshop development model being imposed upon Haiti today. This solution to Haiti’s economic woes rewards the predatory and monopolistic wealthy elite at the expense of the masses of the poor in Haiti and has long been referred to as the “Plan Lanmò” or the Death Plan. Father Jean-Marie Vincent opposed this development model when Ronald Reagan first foisted it upon the Haitian masses in the 80s when it was called the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) and he would have certainly been vocal in opposing its recycling today. Pretending that 70% of Haiti’s population are not still considered peasants who live in the countryside and that attracting them to low paid jobs in the capital would not exacerbate the already meager human resources in Port au Prince was a major factor of his opposition to the sweatshop development model.

Fifteen years ago, Father Jean-Marie Vincent was felled in a hail of bullets in front of his rectory at Montfortain in the Port au Prince neighborhood of Christ-Roi. Witnesses described two vehicles carrying members of Haiti’s dreaded Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army who opened fire on his vehicle. He was reportedly still alive as the Haitian army purposely led the ambulance slowly to the hospital allowing him to bleed to death before he could reach doctors. His death was slow and torturous only fitting to the profile of the accused such as Capt. Jackson Joanis, Lt. Youri Latortue, and Sgt. Jodel Chamblain all leading members of the Anti-Gang Unit of the Haitian army at the time of his assassination in 1994.

Joanis and Chamblain were judged guilty in absentia in 1995 for the assassination of Antoine Izmery, an Aristide supporter and businessman condemned by his own class as a traitor. Izmery and Vincent were counted among the victims of the Cedras regime that the US State Department once described as “one of the world’s worst human rights violators.” Joanis and Chamblain were ultimately released under the Latortue regime installed by the Bush administration in 2004 after a sham trial that Amnesty International called an “insult to justice.” They were also absolved in the murder of Father Jean-Marie Vincent.

Youri Latortue, a blood relative and security chief for the US-installed Prime Minister Gerard Latortue in 2004, is now the powerful head of the Haitian parliament’s Justice and Security Commission. He was also accused of complicity in Vincent’s assassination. According to a report released by a delegation of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in 2004, “A former high-ranking police official from the USGPN (palace security), Edouard Guerriere…claims that Youri Latortue participated in the 1994 murder of catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as did eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he assisted in the 1993 murder of democracy activist Antoine Izmery. From 1991 to 1993, Latortue was an officer in FADH’s [Haitian army] Anti-Gang Unit, the army’s most notorious unit for human rights violations.”

The administration of former president Bill Clinton, who current serves as UN Special Envoy to Haiti while former First Lady Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State for the Obama administration, instructed the CIA and the State Department to conduct an independent investigation into the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent and supporters of president Aristide in 1994. Leon Panetta, who currently heads the CIA was Clinton’s Chief of Staff at the time the investigation was commissioned by the Office of the President. Their spokesman at the time, Roger Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs referred to their conclusions in a press conference on Sept. 13, 1994 when he stated unequivocally, “The gunman who killed Father Jean-Marie Vincent, an Aristide ally, on August 28 was connected to the [Cedras] regime.” Yet none of the details of the investigation have ever been made public to this day.

In the end, what is clear is that UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA chief Leon Panetta now hold the power under the Obama administration to provide the truth behind the assassination of Father Jean-Marie Vincent. They are now in a position to demand that the files of the CIA and the State Department be re-opened. Unfortunately, whether they have the political will to do so may be like much everything else going on in Haiti today. Justice is inconvenient in their “new Haiti” if it gets in the way of “the country moving forward.” Unfortunately for them, history has proven that it is a foundation of sand to build a new future based on lies and impunity in a country like Haiti whose people have shown time and time again they have a long memory.

While providing the truth about Vincent’s assassination may be inconvenient for those who believe they currently hold the destiny of Haiti in their hands, they should understand more than others that the poor will never forget the legacy of Father Jean-Marie Vincent. They will always remember his selfless example of courage and expressions of love for them because he lived, worked and died in their Haiti.