Haiti's yawning leadership vacuum

By COHA Research Associate Ritika Singh

The 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated entire sections of the Republic of Haiti on January 12th intensified an already unbearable burden for the small Caribbean country. Described by the Inter-American Development Bank, without hyperbole, as “the most destructive natural disaster in modern times,” the Port-au-Prince earthquake and its aftershocks have left approximately 230,000 Haitians dead, displaced more than 1.2 million people, and generated an estimated $14 billion in damages.

Plagued by abject poverty and political instability for most its history, Haiti remains perpetually ranked as the most unqualifiedly destitute nation in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, President René Préval continues to be engulfed by international criticism as well as much abuse at home for demonstrating a breathtaking failure in leadership at a time when his country desperately required a firm hand.

Immediately following the earthquake, Préval disappeared from the public arena, and instead of taking control, he chose to all but totally shy away from a decision-making role.

In the aftermath of his nation’s tragedy, President Préval repeatedly was criticized for failing to show leadership in a time of awesome catastrophe. According to Amy Wilentz, at the University of California at Irvine, “President René Préval of Haiti is odd… his reaction to the destruction of his country is to walk around with his shoulders down, like a beaten dog.”

Similarly, Ludovic Comeau, a former chief economist at Haiti’s central bank, said “He just doesn’t have what it takes,” in response to the president’s languorous and demonstrably ineffectual reaction to his county’s calamity. Préval’s elemental competency as president indeed has been called into question, both among Haitians and from all corners of the international community.

Plummeting Leadership Qualities
At a mass grave for earthquake victims, mourners railed against Préval, telling reporters that his pathetic behavior was as “expected” and that the country needed “someone competent to take charge.” In a country as fragile and ripped apart as Haiti, Préval’s primary aim should have been to reassure and unite his people when they were suffering most and required constant reassurances.

Instead, his invisibility, if not quietism, has triggered anger and resentment among the ranks of a legion of current critics, further exacerbating an already spear-headed political situation.

From the beginning of the crisis, COHA was told by Préval’s battalion of critics that he has turned out to be a totally inept emergency leader (for a country undergoing the most severe emergency in its history). One can think of almost no country in the world that would have so pathetically handled its post-earthquake situation, while it appeared to be totally paralyzed.

Préval and Aristide: An Ancient Relationship Gone Sour
René Préval spent the majority of his political career linked to former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide with Aristide repeatedly being described by average Haitians as “a fiery populist demagogue who could command Haiti’s poor masses as firmly as Moses did the Red Sea.”

Aristide had electrified the country with his 1990 presidential campaign and then went on to win the election by an overwhelming majority. Haitians called the two men, who had been the best of friends as well as the closest of political allies for years, “the Twins.”

When Aristide was inaugurated in 1991 for his first presidential term, Préval was his immediate choice to be prime minister. However, less than a year into Aristide’s second term, his Parliament – led by René Préval – usurped his authority in a no confidence vote. Aristide attempted to rule without parliamentary support, but eventually was ousted by a military coup and was forced into exile by a US-Canadian, French and UN complot.

Upon his election, Préval now began to downplay his links to Aristide, eventually, running for the presidency in his known name in 1996 on a completely new platform and under the banner of his own LESPWA party. After several decades of being roiled by dictatorships and political unrest, the philosophical, soft-spoken, and indecisive professional agronomist appealed to a country that he hoped was looking for a level-headed and highly regarded politician to calm the country’s turbulent political atmosphere.

Préval took office amid high expectations that he would end the country’s long and tormented history of violence and economic stagnation.

Préval as a Ruler
Préval eventually turned on Aristide in order to cravenly expedite his own political aspirations. Préval was elected for a second term in 2006 after two years of intense political strife that eventually required the presence of Brazilian-led international peacekeeping forces in Haiti. Claiming the vote count was being conducted in a fraudulent manner, Préval demanded that he immediately be declared the winner.

After protests and riots had paralyzed Port-au-Prince, the Provisional Electoral Council appointed him president with 51.15% of the vote. Préval then proceeded to disqualify fifteen political parties, including Aristide’s still popular Lavalas party, from taking part in this year’s elections.

Opposition leaders, including Aristide (who, even in exile, remained highly popular with poverty-stricken Haitians) have accused Préval of restructuring the Parliament in order to facilitate the constitutional changes necessary for him to run for a third term in November 2010.

However, prospects for Préval’s third term look anything but promising for the president, who said in a radio interview after the earthquake: “I don’t do politics, okay?” Opposition parties are using Préval’s woeful and inadequate response to the earthquake as an opportunity to further stomp on his ailing administration.

Evans Paul, a longtime opposition figure, condemned Préval when he declared, “During the greatest disaster Haiti has ever faced, our president has been incapable of pulling himself together, much less this deeply divided society. He has single-handedly shown the Haitian people that he cannot lead them.”

During Préval’s first term in office, he was credited with building dozens of public schools, putting thousands of people to work, and issuing titles to thousands of hectares of farmland. In his second term, Haiti experienced modest, but hopeful levels of economic growth.

Unfortunately, Préval’s inaction since the earthquake has overshadowed all of the achievements of his previous incumbencies. Indeed, he seems to have sealed his political destiny forever.

Judith Marceline, a Haitian woman who lost everything after the quake except for the clothes she was wearing, may have described it best: “I stood in line for hours to vote for Mr Préval in 2006. Today, I wonder why I supported him.”

Rene Préval now has been working breathlessly to prove to a hopelessly skeptical world that he is no longer standing on the sidelines in the aftermath of the disaster. Struggling to counter the perception by the international community that Haiti’s government is scarcely better than a Mickey Mouse game, he has vowed that “Haiti will live on after the quake.”

The Haitian president came to Washington on March 10th with a game plan and a list of priorities for Haiti’s recovery effort. His request for continued help from the US came two weeks before international donors would meet at the United Nations on March 31st to plot the country’s long-term reconstruction. Préval is hoping the US will play a leading role at the conference and will drum up support among donors who largely had frozen funding to the government because of Haiti’s legendary history of corruption and squandered aid.

Préval says he is working hard to meet the demands of the Haitian people and the international community in facilitating the estimated $11.5 billion reconstruction effort needed to rebuild the devastated country, although it is likely that many will remain skeptical of such claims.

As coverage of the earthquake fades from the front pages of newspapers, Haiti needs an effective leader now more than ever. The leadership vacuum that the country now faces becomes more apparent every day as the country struggles to recover and rebuild its most basic institutions and infrastructure.

Although Préval may be taking important steps behind the scenes, simply helping to manage the large-scale reconstruction effort is not enough. The country needs more than an administrator in these trying times – it needs a president. In this respect, President Préval woefully has let his country down.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being "one of the nation's most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers." For more information, visit www.coha.org

March 25, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

The Haiti debacle

By Lloyd B Smith:


WONDER what is going through the minds of Jean-Claude Duvalier and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the two exiled top honchos of Haiti? No doubt, both men would love to return at this time to their country which has been devastated by what has been described as that poverty-stricken country's worst earthquake in 200 years.

In the case of Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc), will his conscience sufficiently prick him to the extent where he will repatriate some of the many millions that he plundered from the public purse? Surely, he cannot return in the flesh lest he be numbered among the thousands of corpses in short order. Aristide, on the other hand, has a tremendous following but his return may well present a serious political dilemma for an already very confused state.

I don't know about my readers, but when I ponder the fact that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere that has now been hit by perhaps the worst natural disaster in living memory in the same region, one has to wonder if bad luck is worse than obeah (or is it voodoo?) Incidentally, it has been rumoured in Haiti that a high-ranking voodoo priest is responsible for this latest debacle because of an ungrateful people who made Aristide go. And here in Jamaica, there are the many cynics who maintain that the Haitians "wuk too much obeah (voodoo)", so that's why they received such a catastrophic visitation.

Be that as it may, the Haiti quake may well turn out in the long run to be a blessing in disguise for that most unfortunate country. Indeed, one cannot help but ask why, after all these decades during which Haiti has been ignored and despised, it is now being showered with so much aid, money and debt forgiveness? Isn't there some amount of hypocrisy involved here?

I must confess that I have become a bit sceptical about this massive outpouring of generosity and can only hope that most if not all that is being donated will in fact reach those thousands of suffering victims now bereft of just about everything except their miserable lives. In this vein, I must warn would-be donors to be wary of scammers and shysters who will use even this most tragic spectacle for self-aggrandisement. And please, don't just send "ole clothes" or personal effects that you have got tired of and were waiting to throw out, not to mention those expired foodstuff, including canned goods. The Haitians are poor and beleaguered, but they still have their dignity and self-respect.

In the meantime, what I find most interesting, if not intriguing, is the juxtaposition of the Jamaican "tax quake" which jolted us recently thanks to "Papa Bruce" and his team and that seismic wonder not too far from our shores. God-fearing Jamaicans are praising the Almighty for having spared us, because if it was us and not Haiti which had been so affected by that quake, then not even dog would want to eat our supper!

Despite the fact that Jamaica and Haiti are in the same fault line, we experienced only some minor shocks. But you know, I have to wonder if God is partial? After all, why should he bypass us and take on Haiti? Are we the preferred "children of Israel"? Whichever way one looks at this scenario, it is obvious that we are a very lucky country and Haiti, on the other hand, is a very unlucky place to live. Four hurricanes in one year battered that country, then this quake.

But while Jamaica has been spared the debilitating effects of natural disasters (acts of God), we have been subject to many acts of man such as our record number of murders. So let us not become too smug as if to say everything is coming up roses. Indeed, if all the promises and plans now being offered by the international community to Haiti should materialise, then Jamaica may well begin to compete for its current position - that of being the poorest country in the West!

It is good to see Jamaicans rising to the occasion in a bid to help our Haitian brothers and sisters in their distress. Our Prime Minister Bruce Golding has taken on the task of leading the charge on behalf of Caricom and this is most commendable, although he must be reminded that he still has his "quake back a yard" to deal with. In this context, we can only hope that Mr Golding does not become too comfy and distracted from his major task at hand - that of salvaging the Jamaican economy.

I am a bit worried about what I am hearing on the streets being spouted by gleeful Jamaica Labour Party supporters who feel that the Golding Cabinet pulled a fast one on the Jamaican public with respect to the tax package and the debt-management initiative. Against this background, Mr Golding needs to clarify whether the first tax package announced at the end of 2009 was a deliberate ploy to prepare the country for the debt-management initiative. There is talk that this was the only way to get the International Monetary Fund to soften its position while at the same time bullying the well-off who were benefiting so profusely from government paper to decide to share some of the burden. Is this a classic case of the politics of deception or expediency?

Meanwhile, there are many lessons to be learnt from the Haitian debacle, chief of which is what corruption can do to a country, including the needless loss of many human lives. More anon.

lloydbsmith@hotmail.com

January 19, 2010

jamaicaobserver

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International

The Bahamas Prime Minister, Perry Christie Questions Aristide's Resignation

PM Questions Aristide's Resignation

Candia Dames

candiadames@hotmail.com

Nassau, The Bahamas

03/03/2004

 

 

Prime Minister Perry Christie on Tuesday stopped short of saying that circumstances surrounding the resignation of Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide were questionable.

 

"The Americans are saying they did not force him out," said Mr. Christie, who spoke to reporters at the Nassau International Airport before leaving for Jamaica.

 

Mr. Christie is expected to return home today after an emergency CARICOM meeting to discuss the future of Haiti and CARICOM's role in that future.

 

"The Americans are providing all of the documentary evidence, resignation [letter], and their accounts of what took place," the prime minister added. "Aristide is saying that he was forced out. All we know is that at 8pm on Saturday, the Foreign Minister of Jamaica spoke to President Aristide and at that stage he had no intention of leaving.

 

"Throughout that day and the day before he had declared to me that he had no intention of leaving, he would die first.  And so, on the face of it, I suppose we are in a position to presume that certain things took place that might not have been consistent with volunteering to go."

 

But Mr. Christie said that CARICOM was about seeking the facts.

 

"We have to sit as group of leaders and discuss these things very frankly, agree on the facts if we can," Mr. Christie said.

 

Mr. Aristide said in a live interview with CNN Monday night that he was forced out of Haiti, but it was a claim U.S. government officials flatly denied.

 

"I was told that to avoid bloodshed I'd better leave," Mr. Aristide said.

 

He said he was forced out of Haiti in a "real coup d'etat" led by the United States.

Mr. Aristide's resignation has brought into question the future of an accord between the Haitian and Bahamian governments that officials expected to sign soon. The agreement would allow Haitians who were in The Bahamas before January 1985 to be regularized.

 

"We expect that from our point of view business to continue and that for the accord to be signed at some stage in the future," Mr. Christie said, "Now, we put a question mark on it. It was negotiated by President Aristide and not by this new group of leaders. We do not know what will emerge...We do not know the extent to which the larger powers involved are directing what takes place in Haiti."

 

The prime minister also recognized that The Bahamas is in a delicate position given its role in CARICOM and its close ties to the United States of America. He said the interests of The Bahamas must be taken into consideration "for any final course of action we take."

 

Mr. Christie added that it is important for The Bahamas to "speak to the truth of what took place, but at the same time always recognize that we do not have the liberty to get on our horse and ride into the west with a sword in the right hand and one in the left hand."

 

"We have a responsibility to understand how events take place in the world and to always keep in balance what [is in] the best interest of our country," Mr. Christie said.

 

He said he planned to telephone Mr. Aristide some time between Tuesday and Wednesday, if that were at all possible.

 

Last reports placed Mr. Aristide in the Central African Republic.