Haiti Election Bloodbath Goes to Round Two
by Ian Mosley
Anyone who thinks introducing democracy around the world is a good idea should take a good look at Haiti. This time it’s legislative elections that will determine if Rene Preval has enough support to govern the the open-air sewer which is his country. The parliamentary run-off election will determine whether Preval will have an ally in the Caribbean country’s next prime minister, who will be picked by parliament.
Preval is an alleged champion of the poor, a designation which is meaningless in a country where the staple fare for most Haitians is barbecued rat. He “won” a February 7 presidential election which was riddled by fraud, chaos, gunplay in the streets and at the polling stations, and large mountains of burning ballots being discovered on the Port Au Prince city trash dump. The head of the election commission fled to Florida in fear of his life from rampaging armed gangs. Haiti has been in complete free fall since former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide angered the neo-cons in Washington, who had him kidnapped and tossed on a plane to be exiled in South Africa.
The streets of Port Au Prince and other Haitian cities have since become shooting galleries as rival gun-toters from Preval’s Lespwa party clash with thugs from the ousted Aristide’s Lavalas party and assorted other private militias, renegade police, and just plain criminals. Violence has been reported in several towns, including the burning on Monday of a police station in Maissade, in the Central Plateau, which will probably cut down the local crime rate since the police are a large part of the problem. Living in Haiti is roughly similar to life in south central L. A. if the area were cordoned off and the inhabitants forced to cook rat for dinner.
Two candidates from rival parties also won first-round victories in races for the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of parliament. That leaves 97 seats in the Chamber and all 30 Senate seats up for grabs in the April 21 runoff. No one party has enough candidates in the runoff to win the required majority. U. N. peacekeepers are still wandering around down there in a daze, but world attention is on Iraq and whether the loon in the White House is going to nuke Iran, so no one really gives a damn about Haiti any more–it’s so 90s and Bill Clinton-era–and the U. N. seems to have given the whole thing up as a bad job.