Making War to Keep Peace (22 page)

During Préval's 1996 term, the Haitian Senate passed privatization and administrative reforms. One result of these reforms was that $226 million was released through the IMF. On the other hand, Haiti's failure to form a new government cost the country $162 million from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). The reforms displeased Aristide, who reacted by forming a new party, the Lavalas Family (Fanmi Lavalas).

THE ELECTIONS OF 2000

International observers agreed on the importance of the elections of May 21, 2000, to Haiti's future. Préval had dismissed parliament in January 1999 and governed by decree—that is, unconstitutionally. A dispute concerning the composition of parliament dragged on, intensifying after
Préval signed a law annulling the 1997 elections. Hundreds of millions of dollars in economic assistance from international agencies and other governments were held up pending the legislative, municipal, and local elections of 2000. Aristide had given Clinton personal assurances that the elections would be free and fair and would meet international standards.

But they did not. Irregularities and danger signals accumulated in the weeks before the elections, which were postponed three times, confusing parties, candidates, and voters and almost surely lowering the turnout. The most serious “irregularities” were violence and murders. Haitians and international observers alike were shocked by the April 3 assassination in broad daylight of Jean Dominique, journalist and director of Radio Haiti Inter.
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That no progress was made in finding his killer dramatized the lack of personal security that existed. The OAS recorded seventy acts of violence, leading to the deaths of seven political party candidates and activists.
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As the OAS Electoral Observation Mission reported, procedures broke down shortly after the vote:

The most serious problems involved illegal counting for the senatorial races. Haiti's constitution and electoral law explicitly state that a senatorial candidate must receive an absolute majority to be elected on the first ballot. Otherwise, a second-round election must be held. In late May, the CEP issued preliminary results: Of the seventeen winners declared in the first round, sixteen were Lavalas candidates. Election observers testified that the vote-counting stacked the outcome in favor of Lavalas candidates. The OAS Mission calculated that if the votes had been counted accurately, ten of the sixteen races would have required a second round.

The situation had serious consequences. Most of the opposition members of the CEP resigned at the request of their parties, and the
president of the council fled the country rather than certify the false calculations. The CEP refused to correct the counts. By July, the OAS Mission had determined that “the results are biased and had a major impact on the number of senatorial candidates elected in the first round, and thus cannot be the basis for a credible and fair electoral process.”
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In a July 13 report, the mission concluded that “the highest electoral authority of the country violated its own Constitution and electoral law.”
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The United States, Canada, France, the UN Security Council, and the OAS appealed to the government of Haiti to correct the fraudulent results of the May 21 elections, but to no avail. Haitian authorities would not budge. As a result, the runoff elections on July 9 were not observed by international monitors and were considered to be as flawed as the originals. The opposition then boycotted the presidential election in November 2000, with the result that voter turnout was under 10 percent and Aristide won with 92 percent of the votes.

In some ways, Aristide's second run for president was different from his first. No longer “Father” Aristide, he was married and had two daughters. No longer poor, he lived with his family in a large house in an expensive neighborhood. To be sure, he won the election, but it is difficult to interpret the results. Aristide had no real opposition—most other candidates had withdrawn—and there were very few foreign observers. The OAS and the United Nations declined to send observers, as did France, the European Union, Canada, and the United States—all “special friends” of Haiti. Anticipating violence, American Airlines and Air France canceled all flights to Haiti on the day of the election.

By now, preelection violence was a familiar phenomenon in Haiti. Murders and drive-by shootings multiplied. The chief of Haiti's national police, Pierre Denize, seemed to concede that law enforcement was beyond his control: “The last elections were the same thing. I don't think there is too much we can do about this except go through the elections and get it over with.”
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On November 17, the State Department issued an advisory to Americans that their safety could not be guaranteed in the week leading up to November 26, and noted that the tone of the dialogue among candidates and government officials had become “distinctly anti-American.” Members of the so-called popular organizations supporting Aristide were responsible for sporadic violence, threats, and fires.

Democratic Convergence, the fifteen-party opposition alliance, boycotted the election and refused to recognize Aristide as the legitimate president-elect; they vowed to create a shadow or alternative government unless an agreement could be reached with him to rectify the problems of the 2000 elections. Threats against the opposition intensified; its leaders were told to drop their plans to form an alternative government or suffer extreme consequences. On January 9, 2001, groups claiming to support Aristide and the Fanmi Lavalas summoned Haitian reporters to St. Jean Bosco (the church where Aristide had preached as a liberation theologian) and read the names of opposition figures whose “blood will serve as the ink and their skulls the inkwells for writing Haiti's second declaration of independence.”
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The list included most of the leading opposition figures.

Representatives Porter Goss (R-FL) and Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) denounced the threats. “The long list of political assassinations in Haiti is proof enough to believe these are not idle threats,” they said in respective statements. “Instead of keeping his promises to President Clinton, Mr. Aristide is condoning by his silence thuggish acts of violence in his name.”
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Most dramatic were the efforts of purported Lavalas followers to kill opposition leader Evans Paul, the leader of the Espace de Concertation (Space for Dialogue) party. Haiti's police remained passive during these attacks, but arrested, beat, and jailed Aristide's opponents after the elections. These patterns of violence continued despite repeated appeals by France, Canada, the United States, the OAS, and the UN Secretariat for Aristide to denounce the violence.

The political opposition continued to protest the outcome of the November election, and Aristide's followers protested the protests. Nonetheless, on the basis of the May and November elections, Aristide and a new parliament were inaugurated on February 7, 2001, with few international observers.
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Aristide and his followers claimed that the elections were free and fair, but virtually all opponents and observers declared them neither free nor fair. While Aristide was being sworn in as president, the Democratic Convergence Party denounced Aristide's election and named its own alternative president, Gérard Gourgue. This government became the principal target of pro-Aristide factions, which have kept up violence in the streets ever since.

It is not easy to describe the process by which the “new” Aristide government came into being. Aristide was declared president after a so-called election, and a new parliament (consisting entirely of his followers) was “elected.” He and his followers ran virtually without opposition after violence and threats of violence had driven out or silenced potential opponents. Haiti's elections were mired in force and fraud. Violence was endemic; corruption universal, and turnout extremely low.

Aristide and his Lavalas Family constructed a one-movement state that ruled on the basis of intimidation, fraud, and fear. Nonetheless, they sought to reap international support for having been “chosen” in democratic elections and tried to collect the $600 million from international agencies and other governments that would have been available to a fairly elected government.

The many violations of normal democratic rules discredited the new government before the governments of the world and the leading international organizations, including the UN and the OAS. In a report to the General Assembly in November 2000, Secretary-General Kofi Annan charged that Haitian authorities had disregarded all calls for rectification of the May 2000 elections, and he recommended that the UN close its mission (MICAH—the International Civilian Mission in Haiti) because it could not function in a “climate of political turmoil.”
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(MICAH closed on February 6, 2001, the day Gérard Gourgue was named provisional president by the opposition and the day before Aristide's inauguration. Since the May 2000 elections, Annan noted, “Haiti's political and electoral crisis has deepened, polarizing its political class and civil society.”
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The first report of the OAS mission on the elections reported: “[T]he aftermath of the May 21 elections…exacerbate[d] an existing political and democratic-institutional crisis in the country rather than beginning to resolve it, as it had been hoped. The sense of the urgent need for political dialogue now coexists with extremely serious doubts about whether such a dialogue is possible.”
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OAS assistant secretary-general Luigi Einaudi traveled to Haiti twenty times over the next two years to mediate a dialogue between the government and the opposition. A number of proposals were advanced, but the OAS generally found a mutual lack of trust and an atmosphere that was not conducive to negotiations. Meanwhile, the political polar
ization and security climate worsened. In March 2001, the State Department issued a statement that said, in part, “The United States is deeply concerned by escalating political violence in Haiti. Opposition demonstrators began peacefully on March 14. However, anti-opposition protests by ‘popular organizations' have turned increasingly violent in recent days, with incidents of tire burning, rock throwing, roadblocks, and shootings that have resulted in several reported casualties.”
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Gourgue went into hiding after the Senate passed a unanimous resolution calling for his arrest.

In May 2001, Aristide advanced a proposal that included the resignation of the seven senators whose seats had been contested and a commitment to appoint a new CEP, which would set dates for elections for those seven seats and organize early elections for the rest of the parliament. The Democratic Convergence argued that this proposal would allow the Aristide government to secure the release of the blocked foreign aid and still avoid holding immediate elections for all offices. The OAS worked to build on the initiative and continue dialogue.
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On July 18, the two parties agreed to hold new legislative and local elections, although they could not agree on election dates.
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But violence flared once again. On July 28, armed men in military uniforms attacked two police stations, killing five police officers and injuring fourteen. A
Los Angeles Times
article reported that the attacks had lasted sixteen hours before police commando units were dispatched to restore order. The Aristide administration denounced the attacks as an attempted coup and claimed that the armed men were former members of the Haitian armed forces. Government officials took to the airwaves and urged Haitians to mobilize against any plots. The opposition denied involvement and suggested that the administration had arranged the attacks to derail progress on resolving the political impasse. OAS secretary-general César Gaviria urged the parties to continue negotiations, 119 and the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince called on the Haitian government to put a stop to arbitrary arrests and killings in the wake of the attacks. (By August 8, more than forty people, most of them members of the opposition, had been arrested in connection with the attacks. All were released by mid-September.) Not surprisingly, these events largely undid the progress toward a political compromise that had been made in July.

This became a familiar pattern. Under OAS auspices, talks between the government and the opposition coalition were resumed in October, only to collapse a day after they started. The opposition said, “We cannot accept the unacceptable…. Last year's so-called elections were an electoral coup d'état.”
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Meanwhile, in a letter to President George W. Bush, the CBC pleaded for a change in U.S. policy, in particular its refusal to allow the IADB to release loans to Haiti.

Einaudi returned to Haiti in December to restart the dialogue, but was defeated in the attempt by another resurgence of violence. Two days before his scheduled arrival, radio journalist Brignol Lindor was hacked to death with machetes—he had received death threats the week before for inviting opposition supporters onto his talk show. Violence flared at his funeral. On December 17, armed commandos stormed the National Palace. Seven were killed before the attack was thwarted. Once again government officials condemned the attack as an attempted coup, and their supporters took to the streets and burned down opposition headquarters and the homes of several opposition leaders. Gérard Gourgue again went into hiding, saying “I don't know what happened at the National Palace, but it has become a pretext to massacre the opposition.”
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In the spring of 2002, the OAS appointed a Commission of Inquiry to examine the acts of violence that occurred on December 17 and created a Special Mission for Strengthening Democracy in Haiti, which would work in four core areas: security, justice, human rights, and governance. In July, the OAS issued a report stating that the December 17 attack was not a coup attempt “but rather an outbreak of violence connected to the general breakdown of law and order.”
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Einaudi was sent to Haiti to recommence negotiations, but again little progress was made. The OAS negotiator commented that the “government was
not
assuming its responsibilities” vis-à-vis the negotiations.
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An Aristide spokesman claimed that the opposition would not budge until Aristide resigned and general elections were held.
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In August, anti-Aristide protests broke out in Gonaïves and surrounding areas.