Subject: the economist on haiti's election
Incompetence, and maybe worse, in Haiti
Feb 15th 2006
From The Economist Global Agenda
Haiti?s crucial election has descended into confusion and mistrust,
setting back hopes of a fresh start for the failed state of the
Americas
Get article background
FOR a week after the presidential election, René Préval closeted
himself at his farm in the north of Haiti. On Tuesday February
14th, at the urging of foreign diplomats, he flew in a United
Nations helicopter to Port-au-Prince, the capital, with a message
for his angry supporters. He charged that ?massive fraud and gross
errors had stained? the electoral process. ?The Haitian people are
frustrated,? he said. But he also called for restraint. ?I ask the
Haitian people to be mature, to be responsible, to be non-violent.?
That may be a lot to ask. The previous day much of Port-au-Prince
was brought to a halt by barricades of burning tyres and wrecked
cars erected by Mr Préval?s supporters. The election, organised by
an interim government but backed by a UN mission with 9,000 mainly
Latin American troops and police, was widely seen as a crucial step
towards normality. A week after the vote, the Provisional Electoral
Council had not finished tallying the results. It was not clear
when it would do so.
Mr Préval?s supporters were angry with electoral officials after
their man?s vote mysteriously dropped from 61% early in the count
to only 48.7% with 90% of the ballots counted. That was just shy of
the overall majority required to avoid a run-off ballot. The margin
of his lead over the other 33 candidates added to the suspicions of
foul play. Only one other candidate, Leslie Manigat, who like Mr
Préval is a former president, had reached double figures, with 11.8%.
The question hovering over Haiti is what lies behind the confusion
over the count: fraud, or just chaotic inexperience in a failed
state with an almost non-existent democratic tradition? Some
answers may come fairly soon. Mr Préval agreed to make his call for
restraint, and for his supporters to lift their barricades, only
after hours of talks with UN officials in which he insisted that he
would not accept the results without a thorough, internationally
verified review. In response, the government offered an inquiry,
but one restricted to its own officials, representatives of Mr
Préval?s party, and the electoral council.
The underlying problem is that the interim government, installed
after the violent overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide two years
ago, represents only one side of Haiti?s political divide. Its
backers are businessmen and traditional politicians. They see Mr
Préval as a puppet of Mr Aristide, who is in exile in South Africa,
and say they will do almost anything to prevent him from being
elected.
Mr Préval was a lieutenant of Mr Aristide for much of the 1990s,
but the two men are no longer on speaking terms. Mr Préval's
supporters hold his former ally partly responsible for the murder
of two of his best friends. Even so, Mr Préval, like Mr Aristide,
draws his support from the other Haiti, of the poorest slums in the
Americas where real power rests in the hands of youthful drug gangs.
Despite early chaos at some polling stations on election day, the
vote itself went fairly well. About 2.2m people, or 63% of
registered voters, turned out. The problems arose after the votes
had been counted at the polling stations. According to Gerard Le
Chevallier, who heads the UN election team in Haiti, many of the
tally sheets were incorrectly filled out by poll workers. As a
result, the electoral authority invalidated almost 150,000 votes,
many from the capital?s slums. In addition, tally sheets for some
8% of the ballots are said to have disappeared, some when party
activists attacked polling stations in the interior. Mr Préval?s
supporters claim to have found thousands of burned ballots still
smouldering on a rubbish dump in the capital.
The UN says it has found no evidence of fraud. But some other
election observers criticised a lack of openness by the electoral
council. Two of its nine members said they were excluded from its
deliberations. To make matters worse, the interim government
recently decided that complaints should be heard by the council,
rather than the supreme court, overruling the constitution. ?You
have to wonder about all this messing around with the tally
sheets,? said Mark Schneider, an observer from the International
Crisis Group, a Brussels-based NGO. ?This needs to be reviewed by
an independent panel of international experts.?
Indeed so. But whether that will happen was unclear. The secretary-
general of the Organisation of American States flew to Haiti to try
to resolve the dispute. If the election does go to a second round,
scheduled for March 19th, Mr Préval would probably win easily. Nine
of the losing candidates signed a pre-election pact to back whoever
came second. But that pact is fraying. In a statesmanlike gesture
worthy of imitation, Chavannes Jeune, who came fourth with 5.3%,
called on the others to step down for the good of the country.
This week Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, extended the
mission?s mandate for another six months. It may take much longer
to restore a minimum of trust to Haitian political life, let alone
reverse the country?s continuing descent into economic ruin.
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