[News] For US in Haiti, black votes don’t matter

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/1/for-us-in-haiti-black-votes-dont-matter.html* 



  OPINION: For US in Haiti, black votes don’t matter

Mark Weisbrot January 29, 2016

Journalists are taught in school to avoid euphemisms. When someone dies, 
they write that she “died” instead of “passed away.” But one euphemism 
that has become a fixture in U.S. news reporting is “the international 
community.” This is generally a substitute for the U.S. government, with 
or without some input from some of its allies.

Perhaps this is nowhere more true than in Haiti, where Washington has 
long exercised a veto over the country’s most important decisions. But 
last week the “international community” suffered a rare defeat when 
Haitians rejected 
<https://medium.com/@JakobJohnston/with-haiti-elections-cancelled-negotiations-begin-for-what-comes-next-a8f0f63a923a#.vr85a9wze> 
Washington’s plans for a deeply flawed presidential runoff election to 
take place on Sunday, Jan. 24.

How did this happen? Basically, Haitians managed to put Washington in 
the situation of having to maintain that a runoff election with only one 
candidate, businessman Jovenel Moïse, would be legitimate, or postpone 
the election. As late as last Thursday, just three days before the 
election, U.S. officials were insisting that they would go forward even 
if the second candidate, engineer Jude Célestin, refused to participate. 
But he stuck to his boycott, and they backed down.

Célestin was also the candidate who finished second in the first round 
of Haiti’s 2010 presidential elections. But the “international 
community” had a different choice, and brought in an “expert” mission 
under the auspices of the Organization of American States to examine the 
results. Without a recount or even a statistical test of a ballot 
sample, it reversed <http://cepr.net/publications/reports/oas-in-haiti> 
the first-round results, eliminating Célestin and putting musician and 
businessman Michel Martelly into the runoff. Martelly went on to win the 
election and become president. Approaching the end of his five-year 
term, he is supporting Moïse as his replacement.

In last week’s events, it was not just the work of one person that 
forced Washington to back down. There were serious street 
demonstrations, condemnations from human rights organizations, religious 
leaders, business groups and the refusal of seven other presidential 
candidates from the first round to accept another episode of 
illegitimate elections. They had plenty of arguments and evidence on 
their side. In the first round of the presidential election, held on 
Oct. 25, local observers found massive irregularities and evidence of 
fraud. More than 900,000 observer credentials were 
<http://cepr.net/blogs/haiti-relief-and-reconstruction-watch/presidential-elections-in-haiti-the-most-votes-money-can-buy> 
distributed to political party representatives — effectively allowing 
them to vote multiple times. International reporters witnessed these 
passes being sold on the black market. In an election where only about 
1.6 million people (26 percent of the electorate) voted, the legitimacy 
of the vote became doubtful.

It was even tougher to accept the election results after a commission 
appointed by Martelly found 
<https://medium.com/@JakobJohnston/haitielection2015.blogspot.com/2016/01/evaluation-commissions-ambiguous-report.html> 
that only 8 percent of tally sheets that they examined were free from 
irregularities. The opposition did not all have the same demands but 
they wanted a new electoral council to lead the process and some reforms 
to make sure that the second round would be credible. Many observers 
have also demanded a serious examination of the first-round ballots to 
see if there was any basis for accepting the results.

No date for new elections has yet been set, and it remains 
<https://medium.com/@JakobJohnston/with-haiti-elections-cancelled-negotiations-begin-for-what-comes-next-a8f0f63a923a#.ckodpas7y> 
to be seen what will happen when Martelly’s term expires on Feb. 7.

The current fight for legitimate elections in Haiti is another episode 
of a long struggle for democracy that goes back to the U.S.-backed 
dictatorships of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier (1957-1986) and the 
overthrow of the country’s first democratically elected president, 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991 and again in 2004 (with decisive support 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/13/america-subversion-haiti-democracy> 
from Washington). And even further back, it is rooted in Haiti’s many 
conflicts with “the international community” since the country’s 
founding in 1804 from a slave rebellion, including its occupation by 
U.S. Marines from 1915 to 1934.

Today’s electoral turmoil shows how much continuity there is with this 
awful history. In a sense, the country remains occupied today by United 
Nations troops who were brought in not to help with reconstruction after 
the 2010 earthquake — as many people mistakenly believe — but six years 
earlier, to “keep order” after the constitutional government was 
overthrown, its officials jailed or forced into exile, and thousands 
<http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2806%2969211-8/abstract> 
of supporters killed.

It would be remiss not to mention the institutional racism that allows 
for such continuity. This is most painfully obvious in the response of 
“the international community” to a problem that they themselves created 
just five years ago: the cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 10,000 
Haitians and infected hundreds of thousands more. Cholera had not been 
present in Haiti until some UN troops — not “aid workers” as some people 
<http://www.newser.com/story/143127/how-the-un-infected-haiti-with-cholera-and-failed-to-fix-it.html> 
alleged <http://www.gvsu.edu/haitiwater/cholera-epidemic-18.htm> — 
dumped 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/12/united-nations-haiti-cholera-epidemic> 
their human feces into the country’s water supply in 2010. Yet they 
refuse to come up with the money that would be necessary to provide 
clean water and resolve the problem, even though they have spent much 
more than this on maintaining their military presence in the country.

It is hard to see such twisted priorities as other than a statement that 
“Black lives don’t matter.” As with the elections, and USAID 
reconstruction funds of which only 1.6 percent 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-haiti-aid-idUSKCN0UY28U> went to 
Haitian organizations and companies, it seems that even in dealing with 
a deadly disease caused by these foreign governments’ own gross 
negligence, power and control over the country are the first priorities.

-- 
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