Friday, May 6, 2011No sooner had Michel "Sweet Micky"
Martelly been confirmed the winner in Haiti's deeply flawed presidential
election than he jumped on a plane and headed to Washington, where he
met with his country's real power brokers: officials from the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the US Chamber of Commerce and
the State Department.
There, he committed his desperately
poor country - where some 700,000 people are still homeless as a result
of last year's earthquake - to fiscal discipline, promising to "give new
life to the business sector". In exchange, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton gave him a strong endorsement. "We are behind him; we have a
great deal of enthusiasm," she said. "The people of Haiti may have a
long road ahead of them, but as they walk it, the United States will be
with you all the way," she added.
Martelly, a well-known kompa singer,
is an unusual choice to lead Haiti. With no political experience, he
represents a clear break with the country's other democratically elected
presidents since the island nation ousted the dictator Jean-Claude
Duvalier and ushered in an unprecedented era of democracy.
The US press billed his victory as
"overwhelming". But with Haiti's most popular political party,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas, banned from participating in the
election, a vast majority of Haitians didn't vote. Martelly took the
presidency with just 16.7 per cent of the electorate.
Compare this dismal turnout with the
election of Haiti's last two presidents. Aristide, a popular liberation
theologian priest, won the presidency twice in landslides where a
majority of the electorate voted, first in 1990 and again in 2000.
Aristide's first prime minister, Rene Preval likewise was elected twice
by large margins with high turnouts, in 1995 and 2006. In this election,
Martelly got two-thirds of the vote - but three-quarters of registered
voters didn't turn up.
It bodes ominously for Haiti, but
Martelly may have more in common with Gerard Latortue, the head of state
imposed on Haiti following the 2004 US-backed coup d'etat against
Aristide. A South Florida talk-show host, Latortue, like Martelly, had
no background in politics. But, like Martelly, he did have friends in
Washington. During Latortue's brief stint in office, 2004 - 2006, Haiti
experienced some 4,000 political murders, according to The Lancet -
while hundreds of Fanmi Lavalas members, Aristide supporters, and social
movement leaders were locked up - usually on bogus charges. Latortue's
friends in Washington looked the other way.
Martelly's Washington friends include
Damian Merlo, his presidential campaign manager. Merlo's CV should alarm
anyone concerned with democracy in Haiti. Merlo has worked for Otto
Reich, the Iran-Contra veteran and supporter of coups in Honduras and
Venezuela. Merlo has also worked with the International Republican
Institute, which - under the banner of "democracy promotion" - funds
"civil society" organisations to destabilise governments it deems to be a
problem.
During his stint at IRI, Merlo took
steps to weaken Brazil's governing Workers' Party. Prior to taking on
Sweet Micky's campaign, Merlo beefed up his experience with John
McCain's failed 2008 presidential bid. McCain, interestingly, chairs
IRI's board, and brought Reich on as a foreign policy adviser during the
2008 campaign.
Many Haiti observers may be familiar
with the IRI for the key role it played in overthrowing Aristide's
government during his second term. IRI trained and funded various
anti-Aristide groups, promoted anti-Aristide propaganda, and, as
described in a New York Times feature article in 2006, even worked to
undermine political solutions being negotiated with Aristide by the US
embassy and the Organisation of American States. Two years earlier, the
IRI was also deeply involved in the failed coup against Venezuela's Hugo
Chavez.
Support and campaign
While in Washington, Martelly promised
his supporters that he would promote transparency when it came to
foreign aid. That openness, however, apparently doesn't apply to his
campaign donations, raising the possibility that he is funded by the
same groups which drove Aristide from power in 2004. Martelly admits
that he received financial support from foreign sources but, in response
to questioning by the Miami Herald, he refused to identify them other
than saying they are "people who believe in us". When pressed, he
deflected, telling the interviewer, "you talk to them".
All told, Martelly reportedly spent
some six million dollars on his campaign - the equivalent of $15billion
in the US. To put this in perspective, Obama is hoping to spend
US$1billion on his upcoming reelection campaign. These deep pockets were
probably the deciding factor in his victory.
It was Merlo, along with right wing
Spanish PR group Ostos & Sola with close ties to Spain's neo-fascist
Popular Party, that successfully made-over Martelly's public persona,
putting him in a suit and encouraging him to tone down his rhetoric.
These spin doctors counselled him to go from "Sweet Micky" - popular and
bawdy entertainer, to the more respectable Michel Martelly -
presidential candidate.
Still, some disturbing "Sweet Micky"
outbursts bubbled up towards the end of the campaign - troublesome
YouTube moments that might have doomed a presidential contender in the
United States. In one, apparently recent, video, Martelly was filmed
surrounded by a small group of friends at a club. "All those shits were
Aristide's faggots," he shouts in kreyol in the candid video, while
pulling his T-shirt up and rubbing his belly. "I would kill Aristide and
stick a dick up his ass." This was followed by an audio recording -
also posted on YouTube, accompanied by a photo of Martelly in a suit -
in which the candidate denounced Fanmi Lavalas: "The Lavalas are so
ugly. They smell like s**t. F**k you, Lavalas. F**k you, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide."
Martelly's ties with coup-supporting
Republicans in the US and neo-fascists in Spain are perhaps the least
worrisome of the president-elect's relationships. His relationship to
Haiti's violent far-right goes way back. It is well known, for instance,
that he ran a nightclub frequented by Duvalierists in the late 1980's
and early 1990's. He has also admitted to having joined the Tonton
Macoutes - the world-infamous, murderous militia of the Duvalier
dictatorships - in his younger days. Martelly has also spoken freely
about his friendships with convicted murderer Michel François and others
involved in the coups against Aristide - which Martelly also admits he
supported. His famous song, "I Don't Care" is a rebuff to controversy
about such associations.
Obama's push
Despite all these documented
troublesome statements and associations, the Obama administration went
to great lengths to ensure that Martelly wound up running in the
election's second round.
Official results in the disputed first
round initially had the government-supported candidate, Jude Celestin,
placed second, with Martelly close behind in third. Martelly's campaign
alleged widespread fraud and other irregularities. True enough, but it
was not clear that the net fraud went against him. When an Organisation
of American States "expert" mission was sent in to determine the actual
runner-up, they selected Martelly by recounting only a sample of the
ballots, without using any statistical inference. The 234 tally sheets
that they disqualified turned out to be from areas where Celestin had
strong support. Six of the seven members of the OAS mission were from
the US, Canada, and France - that is, the countries that supported the
2004 coup against Aristide. When questioned by independent experts from
the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (who actually counted all
the voter tally sheets in their independent election report), the
mission could not explain its methodology.
In fact, the mission's chief
statistical expert - US statistician Fritz Scheuren - admitted that the
OAS mission had no statistical basis for its recommendation: to replace
Celestin with Martelly. Observers noted that it was also highly unusual -
perhaps unprecedented - for an election to be overturned without a full
recount.
But that is exactly what happened. The
Obama administration insisted that Haiti's electoral authorities accept
the OAS mission's conclusions and put Martelly on the ballot. Hillary
Clinton made a surprise trip to Haiti - in the midst of the Egypt
uprising - just for this purpose. Preval was threatened with a cut off
of US aid and even with being flown out of the country before his term
was up - ala Aristide in 2004 - to pressure him to weigh in with the
electoral council - even though the council, by law, is supposed to be
independent.
Ultimately, the council never achieved
a majority of members to support putting Martelly on the ballot. But
the council's spokesperson publicly stated that it had, and the election
proceeded - with Martelly running instead of Celestin - with legal
experts unsure whether the election would have any legal validity.
In short, the US government got its
way. Following the deeply flawed first round of elections, Martelly
supporters launched violent protests, sometimes attacking other
candidates' partisans. By the time they were over, five people had been
killed in the riots. Other disturbing incidents persisted even after
Martelly was selected for the runoff ballot. On March 8, for example,
three campaign workers for Martelly's opponent, Mirlande Manigat, were
found murdered, their bodies mutilated in apparent signs of torture. The
killers remain unknown, as does the motive.
Martelly and the army
To many observers, the violence seemed
well-orchestrated, and Martelly conspicuously did or said little to
attempt to reign in his raging supporters. Journalist Kim Ives has noted
that, during the campaign, Martelly began organising something that
looked familiar to the old system of Tonton Macoute "volunteers".
"For $30, before the election,
potential voters could join the Base Michel Joseph Martelly," writes
Ives, "and invest in a pink plastic membership card, with photo, which
promises many advantages (such as a job, say) when the Martelly
administration comes to power."
As Ives notes, during the Duvalier
period, "every Macoute received a card that afforded him many
privileges, like free merchandise from any store he entered, entitlement
to coerced sex, and fear and respect from people in general". The
Macoutes became one of the most notorious death squads to wage terror in
the region during the Cold War - no small accomplishment.
Considering this history, one proposal
Martelly made on the campaign trail is especially alarming. He has
promised to reconstitute the Haitian army, which Aristide disbanded over
fifteen years ago.
The modern Haitian army was
notoriously bloodthirsty. Established by the US military during its
1915-1934 occupation of Haiti, the army has long been denounced as a
prolific human rights abuser. Since its 1995 disbanding - following
overwhelming support for the measure in a popular poll - its "veterans"
(including suspected narco-trafficker, Guy Philippe, and Louis Jodel
Chamblain - head of security for Duvalier since his surprise return in
January) have played a prominent role in the country's violent right
wing. They were involved in overthrowing Aristide in 2004 and, in the
past, have also engaged in occasional attacks on police stations,
pro-Fanmi Lavalas communities, and even the presidential palace -
sometimes wearing their old uniforms. When the death squad named the
Front for the Advancement of the Haitian People terrorised the Lavalas
support base following Aristide's 1991 ousting, it too was headed up by
former soldiers - who were also funded by the CIA.
The Associated Press visited one
would-be "army" camp just weeks before the second round of elections,
encountering men there who proudly acknowledged their role in the 2004
coup. Some had served in the military during Aristide's first exile,
when the army ruled Haiti, killing and raping thousands. The AP called
it "a tableaux of the pro-military fringe right, a looming presence in
Haiti".
Some of these "soldiers" and
"officers"-in-waiting told freelance journalists just a few weeks later
that Martelly had visited their camp during his campaign - certainly an
ominous sign of things to come.
In the past, Martelly has made other
worrying statements. He has said that, "Haiti needs a Fujimori-style
solution" - a reference to Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori's power
grab, when he dissolved Congress - and called for the outlawing of "all
strikes and demonstrations" - something his backers in Washington would
undoubtedly welcome.
