Haiti: Run-off Elections
Written byJanine Mendes-Franco
Repeating Islands says that “despite government efforts to lure voters to the polls in the Senate run-off elections held yesterday in Haiti, voters stayed away in protest against what they see as failed leadership and growing despair.”
Written byJanine Mendes-Franco
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UN denials in Haiti
FULL: http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/6_30_9/6_30_9.html
After the Fanmi Lavalas party was barred from participating in Senate elections, they waged a highly successful boycott campaign of the first round held on April 19. Another successful boycott of the second round on June 21 would be a crushing repudiation of the U.N.’s attempt to legitimize their mission through ‘helping the Haitian people to realize democracy.’ If the U.N. cannot oversee a process of fair and inclusive elections in Haiti then there really is not much point in them continuing to press to extend their mission is there? The only thing standing between them passing off exclusive elections or “selections” as credible was the Lavalas movement. The message delivered by U.N. soldiers firing indiscriminately at the crowd during Jean-Juste’s funeral was to back off from the boycott and Lavalas’s political campaign or the killings and arrests would start again. Desecrating the funeral of one of Lavalas’s revered leaders and associating his cortège with violence would pave the way.
In the end, despite tremendous financial and political efforts by the U.N., Lavalas successfully boycotted the second round of Senate elections. Turnout was lower than the first round and other than inflated figures provided by the election council most observers admit that very few people showed up to vote in either election. Just like denials of firing at crowd level on June 18 and the head wound of the victim, the U.N. and the international press that feeds off them also continue to deny the successful boycott campaign. One can almost hear the collective mantra of Brazilian General Floriano Peixoto, Sophie Boutaud de la Combe, Michelle Montas, Jonathan Katz and others that the boycott had little to do with the low voter turnout. Voter fatigue, off-season elections, fatigue with ineffective government, a loss of faith in politicians and everything else under the sun except the boycott.