The May 21 2000 Elections Guy S. Antoine
November 2000The unbridled ambition of a group of opportunistic politicians, clamoring for option zero at every turn, has cast a pall on the legitimate grievances that arose from the conduct of the May 21 elections. It's too bad that the condemnation of electoral fraud has not been adequately formulated, in a spirit of strengthening our institutions, rather than undermining them.
The tabulations of those elections were, in a well chosen word, screwy. The chosen method of evaluating the percentages renders the interpretation of the winning percentages meaningless in a mathematical sense. We have to make sure that this situation never repeats itself. Minority votes should never again be rejected in such an arbitrary fashion.
But what is the true story behind this debacle?
Leon Manus's flip-flops certainly do not help. We have heard of "private" conversations between Préval, Manus, and Aristide, which lead one to wonder just where those leaks came from. Was the presidential line bugged? Is it still bugged and who is doing the bugging? Did the OAS unduly interfere in the internal affairs of the Haitian State? Were they invited to do so? If they were aware of how the votes were going to be counted beforehand, why did we not hear their protests at that time??? Did Leon Manus fly the coop out of paranoia or were his life and his family's threatened? All those questions have been raised before, but the problem is that we have only heard answers from people who were not really in a position to know.
So many among us like to affirm, but never confirm.
But to come back to the issue at hand, the tabulations were indeed screwy and they did favor Fanmi Lavalas, but to what extent? It would appear to a logical mind that a number of people who got elected in the first round would have had to go to a second round otherwise, but that they were indeed the leading vote-getters. Would this have been anything more than a formality, a procedural matter that should be respected to be sure? When one reads the Haitian political situation and the mood of the Haitian electorate, is it reasonable to assume that the population would have turned its back on those leading vote-getters of Fanmi Lavalas?
From an objective standpoint, it would seem far more likely that they would have won by even greater percentages. If so, why did not the party choose to send its victorious candidates back to a second round? But this may be expecting too much from a political party, anywhere. The CEP was predetermined to be the sole arbiter in resolving these electoral issues. Like the Supreme Court of the United States in legal matters. Like Alan Greenspan and co. in U.S. monetary policy. So the real question should be how to strengthen the CEP, how to place it above the pressures of the politicians and "chimeres" alike, how its members should be selected to induce a lawful, nonpartisanship state of mind, and the total dedication of each one of its members to the wellbeing of the Nation, and not a rigid allegiance to any political party.
We need not be concerned only with whether there was fraud, but we need to have a clear idea of just how much fraud there was. We need some quantification, not just superlatives and overheated rhetoric, the sort of which we have been bombarded with. Just what were the conclusions of the electoral observation groups? What other evidence can be submitted for verification? Please, let's not rush to conclusions of electoral theft, without first coolly analyzing the available facts.
It appears to me that once three years were "stolen" from the mandate that the Haitian people had given to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the implacable will of the people has been to reinstate those three years, and add two for just measure:
"Nou pèdi twa zan, n ap tire senk an nan bounda tout kokorat yo!"
In very colorful Creole language, the popular song line conveys the determined intent of getting back five years for the three that were stolen.
It is a simple logic, that we should all be free to agree or disagree with as individuals. Furthermore, every healthy political system needs to accommodate a viable opposition, if only to keep the governing party honest. But the opposition needs to be enlightened, hard working, patient about its own successes, and must present a reasonable alternative to the people, by appealing to the people's interests. Do you think that this is what happened in Haiti? Once again, it appears to me that the Haitian people are in no mood to see another coup d'état, real or virtual, they know WHOM they want, they know just for how long, they are dead tired of having their future decided for them in Washington or in intellectual circles. That's the political reality today. Are they wrong in their determination to have JBA and Fanmi Lavalas represent them? Time will tell, BUT aren't they entitled to make their own mistakes, if this were such?
We could decide that Bush or Gore is the wrong person to assume the office of President of the United States. But are we entitled to do anything more than our civic duty and vote our conscience? If the Haitian or Cuban governments, for instance, did not like the selection of a particular American candidate, would they be entitled to form terrorist groups to attempt and influence the natural course of American politics? Why in the world do we speak of democracy, and constantly refuse to accept its implications, one of which is simply that every people should be entitled to make its own choice, whether you consider it to be the right choice or the wrong choice!
The election-related violence ought to have been and continue to be vigorously denounced by all responsible political parties in Haiti and their leaders, that is every aspiring leader ought to condemn not only the violence of his opponents but the violence coming from all sides.
For my part I have refused to "automatically" assign the planning and execution of those violent acts to Fanmi Lavalas, as many others routinely do. I well remember the time that whenever some bad news came out of the country, some of my acquaintances would invariably respond without further analysis: "C.I.A. !" To this day, I don't know if they were right or not, but that ultimate predisposition to accuse the C.I.A. on an automatic basis, and absolving Haitians from the possibility of conceiving a perverse political act or human rights violation on their own has always baffled me. Before jumping to a (perhaps rightful) conclusion, let's dig together and come up with some incontrovertible evidence, and not only of the circumstantial garden variety. The last few years, we have witnessed the same situation with respect to Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Somebody's mother dies of natural causes, hey "it's because of Aristide ". I just do not get it.
The absolute dreadful thing in Haitian society is that no criminal investigation ever seems to run its course. We hear theories, insinuations, accusations, usually with no real evidence to back them up, and then it's an imperfect but nonetheless oppressive silence that follows. It all fades back to our tradition of impunity.
Think of so many honorable haitians who have been the victims of social crime or political violence (and it's sometimes not easy to distinguish between the two) in the past ten years alone! Their memory unfortunately recedes with the passage of time (though there is at least one group in New York who is committed to not let us forget), but the trauma and resulting impact on the Haitian psyche is inescapable. Impunity leads to paralysis, fear and mistrust, and to a severe loss of confidence as a people. It makes Haitians swear never to invest in this "hell hole of a country" again. Which political party could ever benefit from such a situation? Are we that myopic? Until the Haitian people and their governments decide to place Justice at the forefront of their priorities, there is indeed little to hope for. Respect for individuals' life and property is fundamental in re/building a society, and conversely our police and judicial institutions have to perform a thousand times better than they ever did, if we are to see a renewal of hope and investment in Haiti again.
We need to become smarter in the affirmation of our national sovereignty. We should not continue undoing our own best initiatives, continue to engage in senseless fratricidal fights, and then pointing to the international community and say "There's the bogeyman!" It's similar to leaving your doors wide open, and then calling "Thief!" afterwards. It's similar to not managing the Haitian-Dominican migration problems anywhere close to adequacy, and then shouting "Racist bastards!" afterwards. It's similar to inviting USAID to fund and manage your national institutions, and then screaming "Interference!" afterwards. It's similar to not doing your homework, and then decrying the severity of the professor afterwards. Well, members of the governing and opposition parties, it's exactly what it's all about: doing your homework and assuming your responsibilities! There will be no free lunch... Let's present a united front for a change, and understand the flow of time: not every party can be the winner at any moment in time, but we could all be winners if we choose to be.
May 2004
Addendum
Those elections were not rigged in the traditional sense. Given the overwhelming support for Fanmi Lavalas, they did not need to be. Yet irregularities did happen in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere. Nothing on the level of what happened in Florida the following November, but let's focus on Haiti at this time.
Fanmi Lavalas, as is the nature of all political parties, wanted a crushing majority in Parliament. At that time, and allegedly throughout Rene Preval's presidency, Aristide was very much in charge. It was widely rumored that no one in Fanmi Lavalas dared challenge him. Given those circumstances, it is extremely doubtful that an independent-minded electoral commission, which would take actions unfavorable to the popular Lavalas electoral base would have been tolerated.
As members of the ICIO (Independent Commission of Electoral Observers) for the presidential elections in November 2000, we spent half a day in at the CEP headquarters, observing the prevalent attitudes and looking for signs of partiality beyond the official propaganda. We were invited to attend a briefing by CEP officers, who were interested in presenting their case as to the legitimity of the May elections and the constitutional requirements for holding Presidential elections in November in spite of the fact that the major opposition parties had called for a boycott and did not field any candidates. The body language clearly betrayed some impatience and dismissiveness towards the opposition parties that incessantly called for the annulment of the congressional and municipal elections.
In May 2000, Fanmi Lavalas had indeed won in a big way. The electoral process was certified by the OAS (that is, before they changed their minds, the reasons for which have not been revealed to this day), and all the successful candidates for the Senate (except for one "independent") were from the Lavalas party. How much influence did a friendly CEP have in the outcome? Though there was no substantial evidence of vote fraud, it would appear that Aristide's demise was planted, perhaps methodically, at that point in time by a far-seeing enemy. The seeding consisted of those screwy calculations to determine the winners, something that lent no rationality to the percentages, whatsoever. In districts where one had 3 or more candidates, they decided to basically throw away the vote count of the trailing candidates, except the leading two, and then determine the winning percentages from that reduced count, thereby eliminating the need for rerun elections (that Electoral Law had determined necessary, if the leading candidate failed to win 50% + 1 votes).
I think that decision from the CEP left a lot to be desired:
- The insidious message that someone's (anyone's) vote did not matter, if one voted for a minority candidate. For a party that was issued from a grass-roots movement, to send the message that any person's vote could be arbitrarily discarded was most definitely wrong. This made a lot of people angry, and justifiably so.
- That the CEP had been invested with the power to interpret the Electoral Laws and the authority to enforce that interpretation, in the manner of the U.S. Supreme Court's judicial activism with respect to the U.S. presidential elections of November 2000, remains unquestioned. However, this did not necessarily make it a JUST interpretation.
- The CEP claimed that it had used that method of determining percentages in previous elections, before. This is arguable, as previous elections did result in run-offs, a highly improbable outcome if one reduced the pool of candidates to only two candidates. Had they used that method previously, it must have been in instances when the winning margins made the counting procedure irrelevant as to the outcome. This is in no way, proper justification. One can even speculate that this particular counting procedure was a seed expertly planted, a ticking time bomb, given that the OAS knew about it and did not object at that time.
- Had run-offs been allowed to proceed, was there any chance (excluding paranoia for the moment) that the leading candidates would not actually have won the second time around? I would contend that with the field of candidates now officially restricted to the leading two, the Lavalas candidates would have won with even more imposing percentages (and statistically significant at that!)
Fanmi Lavalas, in its obsession for a crushing majority that would guarantee the passage of laws, cementing perhaps the gains of the movement (as a charitable interpretation of their intent) refused to give in and reconsider, when the OAS chief election monitor in Haiti, Orlando Marville, CEP chief Leon Manus, and the various opposition parties cried foul play. The Lavalas leadership stood by its decision not to not send its "contested" winners back to run-off elections. I knew then, just as now, that this was a political blunder of the greatest magnitude. This would entail, in the brouhaha that followed, a long neglect of the people's affairs. Lavalas had mistakenly but with willfulness, handed their opponents the keys for unending recrimination on a silver platter.
At that time I wrote that "bourik yo pap sispann ranni jis gouvènman Lavalas la rive nan bout li" (The asses would not stop braying until the end of the Lavalas government). The fact that the seven senators later resigned proved to be a gesture that was too little and too late: First, that did not change the overall composition of the Senate in any significant way. Second, the floodgate of Haiti's archetypal pattern of self-destruction, aided and abetted by powerful external agencies sponsoring eager and opportunistic local players, had already opened too widely to likely shut again.
The time for an intelligent compromise had expired.
One can reasonably argue that if Lavalas agreed to send the seven or eight contested candidates back to run-off elections, some anti-Lavalas agents, enjoying unreserved support from the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, would have cranked their operations up a notch to allow opposition candidates to win the second round. Yet, Fanmi Lavalas would still have secured an absolute majority.
It can still be argued that no matter what, the same agents would have found a way to destabilize the Haitian government. I have no doubt in this matter. Still, it remains that it was profoundly unintelligent of Fanmi Lavalas (read President Aristide) not to have compromised at the right moment and to have presented their opposition a gift on a silver platter. It's hard to forgive such stubborness, given what Haitian nationals had to endure consequently.
Yet, the role played by the OAS monitors and particularly Orlando Marville, the CEP and Leon Manus, the opposition parties and foreign sponsors, should be thoroughly investigated. Aristide may have fallen for a trap that was calculated to result in his downfall, by exploiting his personal and organizational weaknesses. Will the truth of this matter ever come out?
Fanmi Lavalas fell victim to its own singular lack of political intelligence. But of course, to a much greater extent, the majority class had to pay and continues to pay dearly.
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