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EDITORIAL
Yankee
government orders
second round. UN blue helmets
repress the Haitian people
AFTER
two years of foreign occupation after the coup
d’état against Jean Bertrand Aristide orchestrated
by Washington with French collaboration,
long-suffering Haiti held elections one week ago to
proclaim a new president.
There was a good turnout for the
elections in spite of some acts of violence and
delays in the polling stations in the poorest
districts. More than 60% of registered Haitians cast
their vote in the hope of change in a country where
constant U.S. invasions and successive dictatorships
have cut it off from two centuries of development.
More than 80% of the eight
million Haitians live in poverty and a similar
percentage are unemployed, the illiteracy rate is
extremely high, the life expectancy rate is no more
than 50 years and diseases such as AIDS are rapidly
expanding.
The recent elections in Haiti
were acknowledged by the international community as
a positive step toward stability and peace in that
nation. From the first minute, surveys at the
polling station gave the victory to former president
René Préval.
The initial results announced by
the electoral authorities showed Préval with a
comfortable advantage of 61% of votes cast, many
more than those needed to win the elections in the
first round. The Haitian press and the international
media reflected his ample victory.
However, as days passed, the
Haitian elections, postponed for months with U.S.
consent, have fallen under the mantle of
manipulation and suspicion. Seven days after the
vote, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has
not concluded its work, in spite of being supposed
to announce the results 72 hours after the polls
closed.
Surprisingly, on Sunday, the
Council president announced to the media that the
votes for Préval had dropped to 49%, while the web
page of that institution reflected 52% in his favor.
Yesterday, Monday, the Electoral Council stated that
with 90% of the votes counted, the former premier
and candidate for the Espoir (Hope) Party now had
48.7% of the vote.
The manipulation of the results
has been evident and shameless. Two of the members
of the Electoral Council have exposed tampering with
the vote count. Pierre Richard Duchemin,
representative of the Episcopal Conference of the
Catholic Church on the commission body, informed a
Haitian radio station that “there has been an insane
manipulation of the data, there is no transparency.”
Another member of the board,
Patrick Requière, publicly criticized Jacques
Bernard, CEP general director, for not consulting
with the other members of that agency or of
disclosing where he was obtaining the results that
he has announced to the press.
This Monday, the presidential
candidate Jeune Jean Chavannes, fourth to date in
the polls, acknowledged Préval’s win and stated that
the situation created is the result of a conspiracy
mounted in pursuit of social chaos. Chavannes called
for guaranteeing national sovereignty and not
bending to base interests as certain people want.
Everyone is pointing to something
that is absolutely clear and has been leaked through
various channels: Mr. Bernard, general director of
the Council, is fulfilling the U.S. mandate of
forcing a second round. A number of analysts have
taken it on themselves in the last few days to
recall that Préval is not the favorite of the White
House given his former links with the deposed
President Jean Aristide, removed from power by force
by U.S. troops and sent into enforced exile.
In January, The New York Times
published a thorough investigation that demonstrates
the efforts of the Republican International
Institute, closely linked to the Bush
administration, and various State Department
officials to destabilize Aristide’s government and
expel him from the country.
In the face of the evident
attempt to steal away his victory from René Préval,
a man of much prestige who has taken great pains to
serve the people, his followers – most of them from
the poorest barrios of the capital – have taken to
the streets in the last three days demanding respect
for their vote. Thousands of demonstrators protested
yesterday outside the headquarters of the Electoral
Council and the government chanting the slogans:
“Préval is president” and “Thief, you don’t know how
to count,” in a clear reference to the action of the
general director of the electoral body. The
protesters accused the CEP of manipulating the votes
and expressed their opposition to a second round,
shouting “We’re not voting twice.”
The demonstrations on Monday were
repressed by the UN blue helmets stationed in the
country, provoking various injuries and at least one
death. Violence has returned to that impoverished
country after various days of post-electoral calm
and new confrontations are predicted if attempts
continue to falsify the election results.
Meanwhile, from Washington and
with total cynicism, a State Department spokesperson
stated after a meeting between Bush, Condoleezza
Rice and the UN secretary general that whenever a
vote count is challenged it is important for the
parties to come together and cooperate over and
above allegiances in the interest of the country.
Nobody knows exactly to which elections Sean
McCormack was referring, as in the Haitian case the
second candidate in the elections did not even gain
12% of the vote.
What is happening in Haiti comes
as no surprise. It is not the first time that the
United States has intervened at its whim in the
destiny of that nation, nor the first time that it
is barefacedly manipulating the electoral results in
another country to its own advantage.
The international community must
demand respect for the majority will of the Haitian
people expressed at the polling stations and that
that suffering nation is not led into a worse period
of chaos and violence as a consequence of the malign
interests of the United States and specific Haitian
power groups.
The world cannot allow the imperial power to guide
the reins of the entire planet. The Haitian people,
patient but selfless and heroic, will fight for
their rights, let nobody be in any doubt as to that.
Full responsibility for any such an outcome will
fall on the U.S. government and the occupying forces
that do not hesitate to fire on the people.
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