The announcement of election results favoring the party of president Rene Preval has given the appearance of a stolen election in Haiti and triggered several days of violence, according to the Montreal Gazette.
From 2004 – Poor neighborhood in Haiti
For a number of years, Haiti has been one of the poorest countries on earth, with many neighborhoods strewn knee high in garbage, and the squalid stagnation got much worse after the catastrophic earthquake on January 12 of this year.
The violence was triggered on Tuesday by the announcement of election results that eliminated Michel Martelly, a popular carnival artist, from the runoff election to be held in January, according to the Guardian.
It’s widely believed that vote-rigging was used to eliminate the popular Martelly, in favor of two other candidates who are considered to be closer to the establishment.
Haiti’s population consists of two major groups — the dark-skinned “noirs” or blacks, the descendants of slaves imported from Africa by the French colonizers in the 1700s, and the light-skinned “mulattoes,” resulting from intermixing of French and slave bloods. The mulattoes are a market-dominant minority, with under 5% of the population, but controlling over 50% of the nation’s wealth. The two winning candidates are perceived to favor the mulatto élites, while Martelly is thought to favor the noirs.
Haiti is one-third of the island of Hispaniola, which was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1492. France later colonized the island as well. After centuries of conflict, the island was partitioned into French-oriented Haiti and Spanish-oriented Dominican Republic.
During the 1700s, the island was an extremely wealthy French colony, thanks to crops sugar, rum, coffee and cotton — and thanks to the efforts of 500,000 slaves that the French had imported from Africa.
A violent slave rebellion in 1791 led to a 13-year civil war and formal recognition, in 1804, of Haiti as the second Republic in the Western hemisphere. However, the United States didn’t grant Haiti diplomatic recognition until 1862 — when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed America’s slaves during the Civil War.
There have been dozens of coups in Haiti’s history since independence. Historically, civil unrest in Haiti dating back to the 1800s has followed a certain formula and cycle: First, The President and high government officials of Haiti work with the wealthy mulattoes to maintain order. Then, a rebellion from the majority blacks results in a coup replacing the President with someone new, usually someone black, who vows to alleviate poverty. But alleviating poverty turns out to be impossible, because there’s no infrastructure to fight the corruption, and so the new President liaisons with the mulattoes to preserve public order, repeating the previous pattern.
Although there have been many coups in Haiti’s history, the 1915 coup turned into a major crisis rebellion. US Armed Forces had frequently landed in Haiti to protect American interests during numerous minor rebellions, but this time total anarchy was breaking out, and President Woodrow Wilson eventually felt it necessary to take complete control of all governmental and financial institutions in Haiti. The American armed forces remained for 20 years, withdrawing only in 1934.
The current crisis is exacerbated by the spread of cholera to every part of the country, according to the LA Times. More than 91,000 people have gotten sick, and over 2,000 have been killed. In some cases, death occurred within two hours of falling ill from the disease.
A lot of popular anger has been leveled at the U.N. peacekeeping forces for apparently introducing the cholera into Haiti for the first time in decades. A new report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, seems to confirm those accusations, according to the LA Times. According to the report, the cholera strain in Haiti is one which has previously been seen only in Asia, where it’s a particularly virulent strain that has displaced the milder forms of cholera in that region. It’s now believed likely that the cholera strain was introduced into Haiti by peacekeeping forces from Nepal or another Asian country.
The Nepalese deny that they’re responsible, but a recent article by Fidel Castro himself identifies the Nepalese as the cause, and blames the U.N. for a cover-up.
In the past few years, I’ve reported on violence in Kenya, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Thailand and Burma (Myanmar). When violence burst into the news in each of those cases, I was able to use the Generational Dynamics methodology to predict that the violence would fizzle out within a few weeks or months because these countries were in generational Awakening or Unraveling eras, and in each case the violence did fizzle out. (See “Basics of Generational Dynamics.”)
But no such prediction can be made of Haiti, which is well into a generational Crisis era. The violence in Haiti could easily spiral into full scale civil war, and frankly the only thing stopping it is the presence of U.N. peacekeeping forces, and injections of massive international aid.
Haiti is expected to dominate a meeting to be held on Monday of North American foreign ministers, according to the Toronto Star.
Of particular concern is that fact that billions of dollars in aid money has been contributed to Haiti, but people are still living in tent cities, indicating that the money is being wasted on corruption, and is not reaching the people who need it. Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the senate committee responsible for funding foreign aid, is calling for a freeze on US aid to Haiti’s government, according to AFP. Leahy also wants to deny travel visas to government officials, until a fair election outcome has been shown.
Meanwhile, with the violence increasing, the U.S. has reissued a travel warning recommending all U.S. citizens reconsider nonessential trips to Haiti, according to AP. Canada has closed its embassy until further notice.
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