Washington reluctantly concedes Préval is Haiti’s president-elect

Under conditions of profound political crisis—a popular upheaval against the attempt to rob Préval of his election victory, the exposure of massive electoral fraud, and the worried intervention of representatives of the US, other powers, and the UN and its Haiti-stabilization force—Haiti’s election council voted early last Thursday morning, 8 to 1, to declare Préval elected.

“We had to do something,” said council member Patrick Féquiere. “We could have just told Préval he got 48.76 percent, but when he contests the results all of this mess is going to come out—the blank votes, the missing votes.”

The council’s vote was preceded by several days of frantic consultations and negotiations involving Préval, Haiti’s US-installed interim government, Washington and diplomats from France, Canada, the Organization of American States and the UN.

That the Bush administration was not easily reconciled to a Préval victory is underscored by an op-ed piece that appeared in last Thursday’s Miami Herald by Robert Noriega. As US assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere from 2003 to 2005, Noriega was one of the principal architects of the 2004 coup that deposed Haiti’s last elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Noriega, who was quite willing to use a rebellion by fascist-minded former Haitian army officers and leaders of the vigilante group FRAP to chase Aristide from power, argued in his Herald piece that “violent mobs” of Préval supporters appeared intent on denying Haiti legitimate government “by trying to convince those tallying the ballots that 49 percent is ‘good enough’.”

Diplomats from France and Canada, countries that worked hand-in-glove with the US in the campaign against Aristide, are said to have continued to insist, long after UN, Brazilian and Chilean diplomats had conceded that the official vote count was riven with irregularities, that Préval be forced to contest a second run-off presidential election.

Two factors explain the shift in the attitude of the imperialist powers.

First, fears of the mounting popular anger against the attempt to falsify the election result—an attempt which masses of poor Haitians rightly recognized to be a continuation of the 2004 coup. On Monday, Feb. 13, Port-au-Prince was paralyzed by mass protests, as Préval supporters, mainly shantytown dwellers and other working people, took to the streets. While this protest and smaller demonstrations on subsequent days were almost entirely peaceful, there was palpable concern among leaders of the interim government and the UN stabilization force of a popular eruption should it be officially announced that Préval would be forced to contest a second ballot, thus opening the door to further manipulations and provocations by Haiti’s elite and their allies in Washington.

Read More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/hait-f21.shtml