Thousands greet Aristide’s return to Haiti

Jean-Bertrand Aristide returns to Port-au-Prince on March 18.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return to Haiti released a tidal wave of celebration. Though most of Haiti’s radio stations misreported that his plane would arrive days later, hundreds of his most fervent supporters still went to the airport on March 18, and thousands accompanied his motorcade a few miles to his Tabarre home.

President Barack Obama had called President Jacob Zuma of South Africa earlier to urge him to keep Aristide from leaving until a few days after the March 20 Haitian runoff elections. Obama claimed that Aristide’s return before the election would be “destabilizing.” Zuma rejected Obama’s request and let Aristide return, while South Africa gave Aristide quite a warm sendoff.

Aristide’s lawyer said the former president wanted to return before Haitian President René Préval, who had made the arrangements allowing his return, left office. One of the candidates running in the March 20 election, Michel Martelly, has crudely threatened to kill Aristide; the other, Mirlande Manigat, said she had no problems with his return, but preferred that he would delay his arrival.

For seven years the people of Haiti in the thousands and tens of thousands have marched to demand Aristide’s return. Cops and the U.N.’s occupation force, called the Minustah, attacked many of these protests, killing scores and injuring hundreds. Both Haitian and imperialist politicians maneuvered and connived over his return, but the Haitian people’s firm, unwavering support was the real force that won Aristide’s right to come home.

Aristide’s political enemies were able to split his party, Fanmi Lavalas. The part oriented toward small business, with a relatively well-off constituency under Préval, broke away to form Inite (Unity), which is probably going to maintain control of the Haitian Parliament after the election. The more community oriented part of FL, with strongholds in the poor and working-class communities in Port-au-Prince, is less cohesive at this time.

FL has been unable to force the Haitian electoral commission to allow it to run in elections, after it was clear that if allowed to run, FL would win. Since FL is a party oriented to elections, its exclusion from participating produces internal strains.

In his homecoming speech, Aristide called for “a social policy of inclusion, not exclusion.” (Al Jazeera, March 19).

Michel Martelly is not just an electoral candidate. In some of the poorest neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, where whatever jobs people get pay at most $1 a day, he is recruiting young men to join his youth group for a fairly hefty fee, holding out the promise of a job or at least access to officials. If elected president, this can give him the option of using his “youth group” as an extralegal counterweight to Inite’s control of Parliament, much like the Tonton Macoutes that François Duvalier put together a half-century ago, said Kim Ives of Haïti Liberté on March 19.

Martelly’s organization disrupted a campaign rally that Manigat tried to hold in Mirebalais. Carrying posters saying she was not welcome in Mirebalais, Martelly’s supporters shouted her down for half an hour. When her security tried to remove them, Martelly’s forces started throwing rocks, Manigat’s supporters responded, and the cops broke the rally up by firing in the air. (Haiti-Libre, March 16)

The first results of the election held March 20 are scheduled to be published at the end of March and certified by mid-April.

Since FL and other progressive candidates were excluded from the ballot, some progressive political and community groups have called an election “boycott.” Aristide’s return and how he raised the issue of “exclusion” in his homecoming speech may give this boycott campaign impetus.

The official results of the first round of voting in November put voter participation at only 23 percent. Disorganization and the lingering effects of the January earthquake — lost identification, polling places destroyed — were obvious factors in the low turnout, but it was also significant that no candidates represented the interests of the mass of the Haitians.

The Institute for Justice and Democracy, in a March 16 press release, documents a number of glaring irregularities in this vote, from widespread disenfranchisement of voters to international — that is, imperialist — pressure to adjust the results of the first round to allow Martelly to run in the second.

Some early reports by Let Haiti Live, a project of TransAfrica, established numerous instances of disorganization in the March 20 vote — polling places opening late, lacking ballots and voter lists — and that many areas of Port-au-Prince had low voter turnout. The March 21 New York Times admitted that “the turnout was unclear.”