Dangerous poll politics in poor Haiti

http://www.nationnews.com/editorial/331330054978505.php

Dangerous poll politics in poor Haiti
Published on: 2/10/09.

POLITICAL SHOCKS come quite often from Haiti, a Caribbean nation mired in poverty and plagued with staggering social and economic problems.

This past weekend's report out of Port-au-Prince of the banning by the electoral council of all 17 candidates of the Famni Lavalas Party from contesting the forthcoming senate elections scheduled for April 19, is the latest political shocker.

Lavalas is the mass-based party of deposed President Jean Bertrand Aristide who was forced into exile by the United States-backed coup against his elected government in 2004.

Expectations have been growing that in 2009 he would be faciliated to return home with his family by the government of his once former staunch loyalist, President Rene Preval. Instead, while his former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune continues to recuperate from conditions of his illegal incarceration and detention, Lavalas candidates have now been banned from participating in the senate elections.

What is particularly stunning about this development is that the electoral council's president could have gone on record as claiming that the reason for the exclusion "was not motivated by political reasons but by legal reasons". He simply failed to identify the "legal reasons".

Under previous administrations in Washington and Ottawa, diplomatic missions of the United States and Canada in Port-au-Prince were instructed to cooperate in arrangements that developed in relation to the 2004 coup against Aristide's government.

Now, in 2009, it is encouraging to find that the American and Canadian diplomatic missions in Haiti are also outraged by the arbitrary, undemocratic decision of the electoral council and have publicly expressed their concerns.

Canada's ambassador Gilles Rivard was blunt: "Any election's credibility is based on the respect of its laws and its regulations. Nevertheless as a symbol of democracy an election must assemble and reunite and not contribute to divide a population.. . . We are concerned about the circumstances that have led to the exclusion of all the candidates of one party."

The Caribbean Community, of which Haiti is a member, was quite strident, and correctly so, in denouncing the overthrow of the Aristide government, and subsequently called for an end to the forced exile of the former president.

It must now urgently speak out with clarity on this foul political development that excludes all candidates of Lavalas for the senate elections, a decision that makes a farce of democracy under the watch of President Preval. He certainly has an obligation to let the Haitian people and the rest of the word know where he stands on this burning political issue.

It would be good to hear something solid about this from the new, ELECTED President of the U.S.

Aristide should be returned to his home, given back the life he had before _{George W. Bush} and previously _{George H. W. Bush} stole from him, and from the Haitian people who elected him to direct their country's future.