Haiti: Forever a Basket Case
by Ian Mosley
The African nation of Zimbabwe is arguably the worst international basket case on the earth today, but the smelly little Caribbean “republic” of Haiti runs Zimbabwe a close second in terms of chaos and incompetence. Haiti recently completed a UN-sponsored election, the first in six years, which seems to have accomplished precisely nothing except gobble up more millions of dollars in foreign aid.
The latest round of murderous violence in the filthiest city in the world, Haiti’s capital Port-Au-Prince, broke out several days ago in support of presidential favorite Rene Preval as a “slow vote count” indicated he was falling just short of the 50% necessary to win, out of a field of over thirty candidates. (For “slow vote count” read near-total fraud carried out by assorted thugs, combined with sheer ineptitude and stupidity in the attempts to count the votes, complicated by the fact that the majority of Haiti’s election officials are illiterate, just like the majority of the population.) In the ghastly seaside slum of Cite Soleil, an open-air sewer and another Preval stronghold, about 1,000 demonstrators wearing Preval T-shirts and blowing horns prepared to march to the electoral council’s offices and burn them down, an old Haitian post-electoral tradition (given the increasing corruption of our political system, perhaps we should consider copying that ritual). In the Port-au-Prince area of Delmas, some 6,000 protesters boisterously marched down a main street, singing “Our hearts beat for Preval!”
There now must be a run-off, which in Haiti means running off torrential flows of blood from dead natives into the gutters of Port-au-Prince. Preval supporters in Port-au-Prince and the town of Marmelade threatened that their demonstrations could turn violent if Preval is not declared the first-round winner, accusing the electoral council of manipulating the count. This nonsense happens at every “election” and had been going on now in Haiti for almost two hundred years. Why the whole island isn’t cordoned off and the natives allowed to kill each other off until no one remains is one of the greatest mysteries of international diplomacy. US Marines have repeatedly tried to “restore” order on Haiti, but some places have never had order and never will.
Preval, a former HNIC and “champion of the poor” whose term in office was distinguished by a shameless association with Communist Cuba, mindless mob violence and the complete destruction of whatever was left of Haiti’s economy, was leading a field of 33 candidates with 49.1 percent of the vote, five days after Haitians swarmed the polls to elect a new president. Officials say 75 percent of the ballots from Tuesday’s elections have been counted. Jacques Bernard, the council’s director general, said Saturday the ballots were voided because they were blank or not clearly marked. Monsieur Bernard did not say how many of his election officials know how to count above ten without taking off their shoes. (If they have any shoes.)
This fellow, Preval is a protege of former HNIC Bertrand Aristide, who was forcibly restored to power by Bill Clinton in 1994 on the back of U. S. Marine bayonets, but whose rule turned out to be such a complete disaster that even the multi-national corporations who run the Caribbean republics couldn’t bear him. Two years ago, Dubya and Deadeye Dick Cheney threw him out of the country. Aristide is now sulking in South Africa giving press interviews in which he seems to be either drunk or suffering from tertiary syphilitic senility, while his boy Preval does his dirty work trying to bring him back home so Aristide can wreak a vengeance on his enemies so bloody he’ll make Idi Amin look like Mother Theresa.
The runner up in the “election” appears to be Leslie Manigat, also a former HNIC, with 11.7 percent of the vote. Manigat is more or less the candidate of the mulattos and former supporters of the blood and voodoo-soaked Duvalier dictatorship, back in the good old days with Ton-Ton Macoutes and voodoo orgies with slaughtered chickens. Back then, the disease AIDS became a massive plague on Haiti thanks to a lack of any sexual control or common sense.
One website describes Haiti as follows: “In 1791, an insurrection erupted among the slave population of 480,000, resulting in a declaration of independence… The revolution wrecked Haiti’s economy. Years of strife between the light-skinned mulattos who dominated the economy and the majority black population… After a succession of dictatorships a bankrupt Haiti accepted a U.S. customs receivership from 1905 to 1941. Occupation by U.S. Marines from 1915 to 1934 brought stability. Haiti’s high population growth made it the most densely populated nation in the hemisphere… U.S. soldiers and UN peacekeepers left in 2000. Haiti’s government, however, remained ineffectual and its economy was in ruins. Haiti has the highest rates of AIDS, malnutrition, and infant mortality in the region.”