Happy flag day and hopefully some good news for Haiti

Add another country to the former president’s future travels.

The United Nations, according to news reports, plans to announce on Tuesday that former President Bill Clinton will become a special envoy to Haiti, which has been ravaged by a series of storms and hurricanes that left nearly 1,000 dead.

Mr. Clinton visited the nation along with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon a few months ago, and he appealed at a donors conference here for contributions to help with disaster aid as well as investment aid.

While the former president’s actions are independent of his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, she, too, visited Haiti briefly in mid-April to call attention to the nation’s plight and to pledge rebuilding aid.

In a statement he gave to The Miami Herald, he said he would be employing the Clinton Global Initiative, his far-ranging philanthropic effort, to try to help Haiti rebuild.

Haiti will have to wait awhile

Looks like it will be awhile before Haiti knows the results on the election. Even with the low turn out it will take at least eight days before we know the results Ballots are being counted at polling places and tabulated at a warehouse computer center guarded by armed U.N. peacekeepers in an industrial park in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Turnout appeared to be extremely low in the capital, where voter apathy and fear of election-day violence were more common than political interest. President Rene Preval declined to comment on the turnout Sunday until official results are calculated.

U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson, who toured the tabulation center Monday, remarked that "Historically, off-year elections in the United States as well as in other countries tend not to be as well-attended as presidential elections. We'll have to see."

The international community gave at least $12.5 million, including $3.9 million from the United States, to help carry out the election.

Supporters of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — whose still-popular Fanmi Lavalas party was prohibited from running by electoral officials — had also encouraged citizens to stay away from the polls.

The party took credit for the apparently low turnout Sunday.

Voting for a 12th seat from the rural Central Department was halted by Haiti's provisional electoral council after demonstrators ransacked polling places and a poll supervisor was shot in the plateau town of Mirebalais. That race will be rescheduled.

On Monday, Haitian workers guarded by Chinese police in blue U.N. berets examined, scanned and tabulated the results reported by polling places across the country. The original ballots are archived elsewhere.

Since the Port-au-Prince facility is the only place where results are being tabulated, voters will have to wait for ballots to make hours-long journeys over Haiti's washed-out, dilapidated mountain roads and to be brought in by boat from surrounding minor islands.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission issued a statement Monday expressing its hope that the Haitian people and political parties will "await calmly the publication of results ... and that any dispute will be pursued through legal channels."

   

     

1990s tried to establish democracy in Haiti

Throughout the 1990s the international community tried to establish democracy in Haiti. The country's first elected chief executive, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a leftist Roman Catholic priest who seemed to promise a new era in Haiti, took office in Feb. 1991. The military, however, took control in a coup nine months later. A UN peacekeeping force, led by the U.S.—Operation Uphold Democracy—arrived in 1994. Aristide was restored to office and René Preval became his successor in 1996 elections. U.S. soldiers and UN peacekeepers left in 2000. Haiti's government, however, remained ineffectual and its economy was in ruins. Haiti has the highest rates of AIDS, malnutrition, and infant mortality in the region.

In 2000, former president Aristide was reelected president in elections boycotted by the opposition and questioned by many foreign observers. The U.S. and other countries threatened Haiti with sanctions unless democratic procedures were strengthened. Aristide, once a charismatic champion of democracy, grew more authoritarian and seemed incapable of improving the lot of his people. Violent protests rocked the country in Jan. 2004, the month of Haiti's bicentennial, with protesters demanding that Aristide resign. By February, a full-blown armed revolt was under way, and Aristide's hold on power continued to slip. The protests, groups of armed rebels, and French and American pressure led to the ousting of Aristide on Feb. 29. Thereafter a U.S.-led international force of 2,300 entered the chaos-engulfed country to attempt to restore order, and an interim government took over. In September, Hurricane Jeanne ravaged Haiti, killing more than 2,400 people. Lawlessness and gang violence were widespread, and the interim government had no control over parts of the country, which were run by armed former soldiers.

Political Turmoil Continues

U.N. urges generosity

By Patrick Worsnip

UNITED NATIONS, April 6 (Reuters) - The United Nations pressed rich nations on Monday to aid impoverished Haiti at a donor conference next week, and won a pledge from the United States that it would be generous.

The Caribbean state is the western Hemisphere's poorest nation, but U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon believes it is poised to grow rapidly if it makes internal reforms and receives help from the outside world.

In a letter last week to donor countries, released by the United Nations on Monday, Ban said the April 14 Inter-American Development Bank conference in Washington was of "fundamental importance for consolidating the fragile stability of Haiti."

"I wish to enlist your assistance in making a special effort to support Haiti through renewed technical and financial engagement so that Haiti is firmly on the path to lasting stability and sustainable development," he added.

Ban, who visited Haiti last month along with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, appealed for high-level attendance at the conference.

In a report to the Security Council on Monday, U.N. envoy to Haiti Hedi Annabi said international assistance was vital for Haiti to build up its infrastructure and meet a $125 million requirement for budget support in this fiscal year.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice told the council Washington was encouraged by progress Haiti had made despite devastating hurricanes last year, adding, "We look forward to participating actively and generously" in the April 14 conference.

The hurricanes caused an estimated $1 billion of damage, while the global financial crisis brought a 14 percent reduction in February in remittances vital to many Haitian families.

Ban has been influenced by a report by British academic Paul Collier which said that if Haiti could improve its roads and ports it was well-placed to benefit from low labor costs and duty-free access it currently enjoys to the U.S. market.

Haiti has a troubled history of dictatorship and political violence. But Annabi's report said the country "now has its best chance in decades to break from the destructive cycles of the past, and to move toward a brighter future."

He said, however, that Haiti needed to move further on moves begun by President Rene Preval to resolve political differences through dialogue if it was to advance in other areas. A key test of stability would be Senate elections due just five days after the Washington conference.

"At this critical time, Haiti cannot afford the kind of discord that paralyzed the country for almost five months last year," Annabi said.

He also noted that despite improvements in Haitian security forces, the 9,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops and police there remained "indispensable when a real crisis erupts."

Rice, who went on a Security Council trip to Haiti last month, said much more needed to be done in key economic areas. "Desperate poverty, malnutrition, lack of education, and other socioeconomic problems continue to bedevil Haiti," she said. (Editing by Jackie Frank)