In Haiti, Democracy Sinks Into Disorder

GRAND-GOAVE, Haiti — It was just after sunset when “The Gift of God” mowed down dozens of men and women in this coastal town.

Sixteen died on the spot as the passenger bus bearing the name “Le Cadeau de Dieu” barreled onto the roadside with lights dimmed.

The driver fled on foot before police arrived. The owner has yet to be held accountable. And, as three more people among the two dozen injured died in the days after the March 7 roadside carnage, Grand-Goave’s estimated 65,000 residents took matters into their own hands.

Thousands stormed the police station, drove officers out of town, seized their weapons and burned the bus and two police vans.

“I was actively involved,” Mayor Joseph Jean-Pierre Salam said proudly last week, just days before he and other politicians across Haiti were to have stood for reelection. “If I didn’t participate, it would have been much worse.”

That display of frustration and populist justice, analysts say, reflects a perilous trend in this land--where the rule of law has broken down and democracy is, at best, endangered. The opposition party mayor has no official control over the town. His legal authority has expired, along with that of every other elected official in Haiti except one: a president who has ruled by decree in the 14 months since he dissolved the opposition-led Parliament and allowed all local officials’ terms to lapse.

Long-delayed national polls to replace them were scheduled to be held today, but President Rene Preval on Thursday postponed them by decree--indefinitely.

Citing a litany of registration snags that would have disenfranchised at least 1 million potential voters, Haiti’s independent Provisional Electoral Council earlier this month postponed until April 9 the national polls that are being financed with the help of more than $20 million from the U.S. taxpayers.

Preval’s response: He, and only he, has the power to set the election date, the president told the nation. But still, he hasn’t.

And in the continuing vacuum, with the uncertainty, helplessness and ire that helped fuel the Grand-Goave uprising, this country is descending even deeper into chaos.

No U.S. Condemnation of Delayed Vote

The Clinton administration, which sent 20,000 troops here in 1994 to drive out Haiti’s military dictatorship and reinstate elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Operation Restore Democracy, has issued no public condemnations of Preval’s repeated postponements.

President Clinton’s personal envoy, Anthony Lake, met Preval in Port-au-Prince on March 10, a few hours before the Haitian president publicly rejected the electoral council’s new date. But Lake’s departure statement merely encouraged Preval’s regime to hold the elections as soon as possible.

The U.N. Security Council, which was forced to shut down a police training and monitoring mission here last week after Congress withdrew U.S. funding, issued a statement calling the elections “crucial to democracy and all aspects of Haiti’s development” and strongly urging authorities to hold “credible elections as rapidly as possible.”

By all accounts, the nine-member electoral council, which diplomats here say is as incompetent as it is independent, had ample justification to delay the vote. Materials for new voter identification cards have been lost or stolen. There are too few registration offices. And hours-long waits outside those offices, which testify to the strong popular desire to vote, deter many of the employed middle and upper classes from registering.

A poll published last week in the daily Le Nouvelliste showed that 52% of the eligible voters in Port-au-Prince, the capital, want to vote but have yet to receive their cards.

Part of the problem is the utter disarray in Haiti during the decades of dictatorship and army rule that preceded Aristide’s 1994 return and on through the 1995 election and subsequent rule of his handpicked successor, Preval. Haiti’s last official census was in 1982, and no one knows how many citizens are qualified to vote beyond the 2.9 million who already have secured new voter ID cards.

“Nobody even knows how many Haitians there are,” said Colin Granderson, who headed the five-year joint U.N.-Organization of American States police monitoring mission that expired last week. “All the numbers here are just guesses.”

But many Haitians view the nightmarish registration process and many election-date delays as deliberate tactics by Preval, with the tacit endorsement of Aristide and his Lavalas Family party. The Haitian Constitution required Aristide to step aside after one term. The former priest, who remains Haiti’s most popular politician, is expected to run again in presidential polls scheduled for December. And most Haitian analysts say his party would fare better behind Aristide’s coattails if the parliamentary, local and presidential elections were held simultaneously.

Whatever the motives, the lack of a functioning parliamentary government has cost Haiti dearly. It has led donors to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in international development aid earmarked for a nation where the majority are unemployed, the average wage is $400 a year and the rate of illiteracy stands at 80%.

A dysfunctional judiciary has deepened the crisis. And together, those woes are eroding one of the country’s few functioning institutions--a 4 1/2-year-old National Police force that the U.S. government has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to create and train after Aristide disbanded the army.

A State Department report on human rights released last month cites “a sharp increase” in extrajudicial killings by the National Police. “Allegations of corruption, incompetence and narcotics trafficking target members at all levels of the force,” the report states, adding that the judiciary “remained largely weak and corrupt.”

“Methodical investigations and prosecutions are rare and impunity remains a problem,” it adds. “Fair and expeditious prosecutions are exceptions rather than the rule.”

The result: “Vigilante activity, including killings, remained a common alternative to formal judicial processes,” the report concludes.

So, analysts here say, the Grand-Goave uprising 23 miles southwest of the Haitian capital after “The Gift of God” plowed through a roadside Mardi Gras procession should not have come as a surprise.

“The surprising thing isn’t that these kind of things are happening, it’s that there aren’t more of them,” said Trinidadian diplomat Granderson of the police monitoring mission.

Even Mayor Salam, whose Organization of People in Struggle party fiercely opposes Aristide’s Lavalas party, said he was surprised that his townspeople didn’t kill anyone the day they exacted their small measure of revenge.

“You cannot imagine the frustrations here,” he said. His town has had no telephone service for 22 days, he said. Grand-Goave gets six hours of electricity every three months, he added, “and not even 50 of our young people are gainfully employed.”

“It’s only when we demonstrate and block the roads that we get any attention,” he said.

Rumors Spiral Out of Control

Reporters at the local Radio Saka, which can broadcast only 12 hours a day on the five gallons of fuel it can afford for its generator, said there were two sparks that ignited popular passion that day. Both were rumors: that police had released two suspects arrested from the bus shortly after the accident, and that the bus owner was offering the equivalent of $12 to each family of the dead.

As it turned out, the two detainees were potential material witnesses--not suspects--who had been transferred to an adjacent town for their own safety. But the rumors quickly created a hellish reality.

Riot police sent to lift the siege of the police station went house to house, using batons to beat suspected rioters, according to witnesses.

“This is an incredible situation,” said local broadcaster Booz Bellerice. “No one has come to investigate the killings of all these people. No one has come to help the victims or the families of the dead. They just send riot police to beat us.”

For Salam, an unemployed welder, there is only one immediate solution: “We believe elections will solve at least some of the problems we have in this country. We have to build new institutions. Because now, we have nothing.”