Stop interfering in nation's politics, OP-Ed, Miami Herald

In light of this preference for the poor, policymakers in Washington need to review
our own policies, which too often reflectively supported Haiti's tiny elite in their
effort to destabilize Haiti's popular democracy.

The current policies have led us to a dead end of continually trying to suppress
popular democracy without raising the economic status of the poor. Although our
short-term interests may be to stop Haitian migrants and drugs from entering the
United States, our long-term interests must be to alter the economic conditions
in a country that has the largest population and therefore the largest potential
market of all the CARICOM countries.

With President Prèval we can begin to engage in a new foreign policy that should
include the following strategies:

Stop interfering in the internal politics of Haiti. Who Prèval picks as a prime
minister and members of his cabinet should be his own affair and not a ''litmus
test'' for anything. Our efforts to force a government of national reconciliation
in Haiti is an affront to Haitian sovereignty as much as it would be for the Chinese
government to tell a Republican president that he had to include Democrats, Libertarians,
Socialists and others in his government to show unity.

Similarly, we should not hamper efforts to allow all Haitians to return from abroad
who have been forced into exile or interfere in the reconstruction of Fanmi Lavalas
or any other party the Haitian people support.

Also, no funds from either the Agency for International Development or the International
Republican Institute should be expended to undermine Haiti's political parties or
to create new political parties. These are matters best left to the Haitian people
to decide.

- Work constructively with the Haitian government to provide assistance on a national
level. For the past decade our assistance has been directed to nongovernmental organizations
rather than to the Haitian government, and from 2000 to 2004 we had a total development-assistance
embargo against the Haitian government. Prèval's victory gives us an opportunity
for a new beginning where we can work with the Haitian government on their terms,
not ours. Haiti's massive health, infrastructure, environmental and educational
problems can not be solved through nongovernmental organizations.

We must provide substantial direct assistance to the Haitian government and we must
ensure that our assistance and that of other developed countries is not coupled
with political demands. Micromanaging Haiti's nascent democracy by strangling its
government economically has been a dismal failure and it ignores our own history
where democracy took decades to develop.

- Provide technical expertise and financial resources to transform agrarian life.
The United States possesses the world's greatest expertise on eliminating agrarian
and rural poverty. We have the most successful rural electrification program in
the history of the world. We have highly advanced farming facilities and agricultural
techniques that we could and should put at the disposal of the Haitian government.
Such efforts would help Haiti move toward self-sufficiency in food production, and
rural electrification would reverse the downward ecological spiral Haiti faces.

Additionally, the United States has great expertise in rural health programs. In
a country where there is only one doctor for every 11,000 citizens and where most
doctors are in urban areas, we have the capacity to develop healthcare programs
where none exist.

Interfering in Haiti's political life and conditioning assistance on political benchmarks
has failed Haiti and its poor. It is time that we begin a new, more gracious strategy,
that provides assistance simply to reverse Haiti's massive poverty.

Ira Kurzban was the general counsel for Haiti for 13 years during the governments
of Renè Prèval and Jean-Bertrand Aristide.