By Kevin Pina
The Haiti Information Project recently published a short article reporting that the Provisional Election Council (CEP) had allowed the Fanmi Lavalas party to register to run in elections scheduled for early 2010. According to reliable sources an original document requested by the CEP and signed by Aristide was delivered to the offices of the council shortly after 1:00 pm on November 23. There was no indication on the part of the CEP or the Fanmi Lavalas party that anything was amiss in the process and it appeared a fait accompli.
Three days later the CEP would publish the names of those political parties allowed to participate in the elections and the Fanmi Lavalas party did not appear on the list. The CEP now clings to the same flimsy excuses it used to exclude Lavalas in the Senatorial race. The party did not meet all the legal requirements to register followed by incoherent legal opinions masking their true political intent. We humbly apologize for the mistaken assumption in our reporting that the CEP was telling the truth and willing to play by the rules of the democratic game in Haiti. Apparently they have no shame.
This decision by the CEP is clearly another attempt to continue to punish Haiti’s poor majority, this time through exclusion, for their political choices and the probability of a Lavalas victory at the polls. Ninety percent of the electorate boycotted the last Senate race after Lavalas was excluded by the CEP. The highest figure for the turnout in the April election and June runoff combined was given by the UN who placed it at 11% . Many independent observers noted voter turnout well below that number throughout Haiti’s ten departments.
More importantly, this can only fan the flames for another boycott campaign and gives the impression of duplicity on the part of US foreign policy and the international community. One wonders what the response would be if the same were to happen in Venezuela or Zimbabwe. Reuters recently wrote that Fanmi Lavalas is “still considered the most popular political force in the impoverished Caribbean nation of 9 million people.” How can the US and the international community continue to sponsor and fund an electoral process that is built upon exclusion of the most popular political force in Haiti? It’s appears that democratic values as projected by the US State Department and its allies must be strictly upheld and enforced where the ruling party does not suit US objectives and they are otherwise ignored and given a pass when it does. The recent example of US and UN rapprochement over electoral fraud in Afghanistan comes to mind as an example of the latter.
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