Haiti Democracy Project web page item #4748 (http://www.haitipolicy.org)
It was at U.S. insistence, against the advice of the majority of Haitian politicians, that elections were held under the corrupt administration of former president René Préval, instead of waiting for a more neutral interim regime. It was a U.S. policy choice to intervene in those elections to the extent of correcting fraud in the presidential elections, while leaving equally-fraudulent parliamentary results essentially intact. Now this uneven policy has delivered its predictable result: a popularly-elected president blocked by an unelected parliament of corruptionists. Should President Martelly cave in to this blackmail, his administration will end up being as ineffective and graft-ridden as the ones that preceded it. Equally predictably, Washington officials will wring their hands saying, "There they go again!" But this was an election made in the U.S.A., shaped by U.S. policymakers, and paid for by U.S. taxpayers. In 2006 Haiti held largely free and fair elections under the formula of an interim regime whose members were ineligible to run for office and therefore lacked the incentive to manipulate the results. In 2010, Haitian intellectuals, surveying the damage of the earthquake and knowing President Préval’s record of rigging elections, advocated this same solution. The majority of Haiti’s independent political parties agreed. The United States and international community said no, hold them under Préval, and their word prevailed because they pay for elections. In protest of this decision, most of the independent parties boycotted the elections. The United States acknowledged that the elections were false when in January 2011 it sent a verification mission to correct the presidential count, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself went to Haiti to drive this correction home. But that is where U.S. efforts petered out. It made no comparable effort to correct parliamentary results even though its own investigator had found 57 percent of electoral results to be fraudulent. The Haitian people have done their part: the electors voted for change, the politicians warned of what would happen with their vote. Since U.S. policy-makers obviously knew better, it is now up to them to find a solution to the unelected and illegitimate parliament their actions have wrought.
Haiti Democracy Project web page item #4748 (http://www.haitipolicy.org)