Clinton’s Long Shadow
Hillary Clinton may never be
called to account for her role in Haiti’s ongoing political crisis.
Is Hillary Clinton’s
presidential bid suffocating democracy in Haiti? A growing number of informed
observers, both in Haiti and in the United States, think so. They contend that
the former secretary of state’s political ambitions are having a profound
effect on the Haitian electoral process.
The island’s deeply
flawed elections — held last August and October, backed by over $33 million
in US funding — triggered massive political unrest this past January.
Coming on the heels of Michel
Martelly’s disastrous presidency, the elections spotlight how badly Clinton’s
attempts as secretary of state to direct Haitian politics have backfired. The
unrest caused the final round of balloting to be suspended and sent the US
State Department into damage-control mode.
The department’s overriding —
though unofficial — concern over the past year has been to finish Haiti’s
elections before the US general election campaign begins in earnest this
summer. It desperately wants to keep the results of Clinton’s involvement in
Haiti out of the media glare.
Brazen Robbery
Michel Martelly has been aptly described as a Haitian version of Donald Trump.
Brash, uncouth, and unapologetically reactionary, Martelly used his celebrity
as a popular konpa singer (known as “Sweet Mickey”) to power his rise to the
presidency in 2011.
While in office Martelly
earned a reputation for corruption and authoritarianism. He wooed foreign
investors with the promise that post-earthquake Haiti would be “open for
business,” and surrounded himself with the children of Duvalierists
and shady underworld figures known to be involved in drug trafficking and
kidnapping.
For four years, Martelly
declined to organize elections, appointing mayors directly and allowing
parliamentarians’ mandates to expire without elected representatives to take
their place. He jailed and intimidated political opponents, repressed
anti-government demonstrations, and, at the very end of his term, revived the
disbanded and much-despised Haitian Army.
By January 2015, Haiti’s
parliament was dysfunctional and Martelly was ruling by decree. Under pressure
from growing street protests against the return of one-man rule, Martelly
grudgingly agreed to organize elections.
Openly declaring his intention
to establish a twenty-year political dynasty, he selected Jovenel Moïse, a politically unknown agricultural
entrepreneur, as his successor. In August and October of last year, Haitians
went to the polls to elect representatives at all levels of government.
Neither election would meet
any reasonable democratic standard. Widespread violence, disorder, and stuffed
ballot boxes characterized the August elections; in October, hundreds of
thousands of fraudulent votes, cast using party accreditation cards sold on the
black market, completely skewed the results.
These perversions of the
democratic process were compounded by historically low turnout rates and
corruption scandals within the electoral council itself, which further
undermined the elections’ credibility. In both the legislative and presidential
races, Martelly and his allies predictably came out on top.
“Even by Haitian electoral
standards, this was brazen robbery,” said Henry “Chip” Carey, a political scientist who has
observed numerous Haitian elections since the 1986 fall of the Duvalier
dictatorship.
Despite the election fiasco,
the United States (and the other wealthy nations) were enthusiastic, declaring
them “a step forward for Haitian democracy.”
The small European Union (EU)
and Organization of American States (OAS) observer missions rushed to approve
the vote, claiming that the “irregularities” and “isolated” acts of violence
had not affected the results.
Elena Valenciano, head of the
EU’s electoral observation mission, did not even wait for the polls to close
before declaring that the August election day had unfolded in conditions of
“near total normalcy.”
Shortly before the October
vote, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Haiti to reaffirm US support
for Martelly’s stewardship of the process. As former Haiti expert for the US
State Department Robert Maguire lamented,
the international powers’ “objective seem[ed] simply to be able to check an
‘elections done’ box.”
But most Haitian observers
denounced the elections, and Haitian citizens proved unwilling to accept the
low democratic standards set by donor countries. Confronted with the outright
theft of their elections, hundreds of thousands of Haitians rose up against
what they called an “electoral coup d’état.”
Street protests surged after
the October balloting, culminating in January’s angry and disruptive
demonstrations. Protesters demanded the establishment of an interim government
and an independent election commission to verify the vote.
Saving Face
At the peak of this crisis,
former Brazilian diplomat Ricardo Seitenfus made an intriguing allegation: he charged that Haiti’s electoral calendar had been
subordinated to the US election cycle. Meeting popular demands for a
verification process would require time, much more time than Martelly had left
in his mandate.
But American diplomats Kenneth
Merten (who served as ambassador to Haiti under Clinton from 2009 to 2011) and
Peter Mulrean were demanding that the elections be completed without delay and
pressuring opposition candidates to drop their boycott of the final round
scheduled for January 24.
Merten and Mulrean insisted
that the United States simply wanted constitutional deadlines respected — a
laughable claim given how little respect US policy has historically accorded to
Haiti’s constitution.
Seitenfus has another
explanation for their hostility to an independent investigation of the
elections or the establishment of any kind of transitional government: “They
want to quickly elect a president in Haiti in order to not make any waves, so
that Hillary Clinton’s campaign goes smoothly.”
The reason for the haste,
Seitenfus argues, is that Clinton is to blame for both Michel Martelly’s
disastrous presidency and the present crisis of Haitian democracy. During the
2010–11 elections, Clinton was determined to see Martelly elected.
His pro-business outlook made
him the ideal candidate to lead Haiti’s post-earthquake reconstruction. But,
according to official (though strongly contested) results, he did not win
enough votes in the first round to advance, so Clinton threw the full weight of
the State Department behind her favored candidate.
Clinton’s team exploited every
pressure point: cutting off aid, denying visas to top government officials,
even plotting a coup against then-president René Préval. In January 2011,
Clinton, with the help of behind the scenes pressure from Haiti’s business elites,
persuaded Préval to bump Martelly up to second place and into the next round,
where he would win the presidential runoff.
“Since Ms. Clinton was deeply
involved in the decisions of 2010–11, if things have started badly, they must
finish well,” notes Seitenfus, who, as the Organization of American States
(OAS) special representative in Haiti, saw these strong-arm tactics firsthand.
Seitenfus’s critique of US electoral influence made him a minor celebrity
among Haitians, but cost him his OAS post.
The renegade diplomat is not
the only one pointing the finger at Clinton. Many other analysts agree that the
United States has unduly influenced the international response to the current
elections, out of concern for her campaign.
“What international community?
In Haiti, it doesn’t exist,” a disgusted diplomat remarked to Swiss journalist Arnaud Robert. “It is the
United States that decides, in particular the Clinton couple who simply want to
save face before the elections.”
Members of Haiti’s powerful
elite agree: “I do not see it going longer than the US election, for obvious
reasons,” a member of the Private Sector Economic Forum, a powerful group of
Haitian businessmen, said. “They can’t afford this not being solved by the full
US election. If Clinton is still in the process . . . they don’t want
Haiti in the news, so they want it solved by summer.”
Robert Maguire concurred. “Keeping Haiti off the front page” is a major
concern for US policymakers, “even more so with US presidential elections
approaching.”
The Sweatshop Model
Sweet Mickey’s presidency is
only part of Clinton’s dismal history in Haiti. Jonathan Katz, who covered Haiti for the Associated Press
before, during, and after the 2010 earthquake, argues that America’s rush to
get past Haiti’s tumultuous elections stems from Clinton’s ongoing involvement
in the failed reconstruction efforts.
“Instability in a place where
she and her husband have planted a big flag would hardly help her campaign,” he
notes.
Throughout her term as
secretary of state, Clinton made Haiti one of her top foreign-policy
priorities. She and her chief of staff Cheryl Mills closely managed the
internationally financed effort to rebuild Haiti after the quake. Bill Clinton
pitched in as co-chair of a commission tasked with approving reconstruction
projects.
As Clinton wrote in her memoir
Hard Choices, rebuilding Haiti was “an opportunity . . . to road-test
new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the
world.”
Wielding an unparalleled level
of influence over massive flows of public, private, and philanthropic capital,
the Clintons set out to turn their slogan — Haiti “built back better” — into
reality.
As Katz told
the Washington Post: “There’s nowhere Clinton had more influence or respect
when she became Secretary of State than in Haiti, and it was clear that she
planned to use that to make Haiti the proving ground for her vision of American
power.”
In retrospect, the Clintons’
bold, new vision for Haiti looks more like a mirage. The “new” approach was the
same old “sweatshop model of development,” pursued by the United States since
the Duvalier days, in a slick new package, and it had the same disastrous
results.
A multi-million dollar
industrial park the Clintons promoted as Haiti’s economic salvation was a flop
on its own capitalist terms, generating only one-tenth of the promised sixty
thousand jobs.
Meanwhile, mammoth new slum
areas have sprung up north of Port-au-Prince, a testament to the mind-boggling
decision to prioritize building luxury hotels for foreign tourists, NGO workers
and businesspeople over permanent housing for the over one million Haitians
made homeless by the quake.
Six years later, there is no
hiding the fact that the Clintons have not helped many ordinary Haitians.
Hillary Clinton would prefer to ignore this unflattering reality as November
approaches. Katz notes:
By now I’d imagine she was
expecting to constantly be pointing to Haiti on the campaign trail as one of
the great successes of her diplomatic career. Instead it’s one of her biggest
disappointments by nearly any measure, with the wreckage of the Martelly
administration she played a larger role than anyone in installing being the
biggest and latest example.
Perhaps most troubling from
the Clinton campaign’s perspective: the tiny handful of players who did profit
from Haiti’s reconstruction includes several members of her inner circle, like
Tony Rodham (Hillary’s brother) and Irish billionaire Dennis O’Brien, a fact that
Peter Schweizer and other Republican critics delight in pointing out.
Today, Clinton and her
political managers prefer not to talk about Haiti at all. When Katz asked how
her experience in Haiti shaped her foreign policy, a campaign spokesperson
declined to comment, saying Clinton would address that “when the time comes to
do so.”
Judging by her campaign website —
which touts many of her foreign policy endeavors but makes no mention of Haiti
— that time has still not come.
In fact, the time for
Clinton to account for her embarrassing entanglements in Haiti may not
come at all. There was a brief uptick in national media coverage during the
January election protests, but Haiti has, for the most part, stayed out of the
headlines, which is exactly where Clinton wants it.
President Martelly’s departure
(without an elected successor) has defused a potentially explosive situation,
at least for now. And with the minor
exception of Hillary’s efforts to block a 2009 minimum wage increase,
Clinton’s challenger Bernie Sanders has ignored her ignominious record in Haiti
to focus on inequality, health care, and other domestic issues.
But Haiti’s simmering
electoral crisis is far from resolved. The interim government that took over in
February faces growing hostility from Martelly and his allies — including
paramilitaries who claim to represent the re-mobilized military.
A verification commission,
convened against American wishes, is currently reexamining the election results
for fraud: the United States and other international donors have responded by
cutting off all non-humanitarian aid. The commission’s findings are due at the
end of the month, and could be the spark that once again sets Haiti aflame.
Dismayed by the vehement
international opposition to the verification commission, Antiguan diplomat
Ronald Sanders warned that the search for an easy exit from Haiti’s election
troubles could backfire.
“There can be no ‘quick fix’
in Haiti,” wrote Sanders in a recent editorial. “Indeed, it is the urge for
quick fixes in the past and the desire to wash hands of the country that has
kept it in constant turmoil and retarded its chances for long-term political
stability and economic growth.”
Whether or not US officials
heed Sanders’s warning, the underbelly of Clinton’s much-vaunted foreign policy
experience is plain for all to see.
Nikolas Barry-Shaw is a
Montreal-based Haiti solidarity activist. He is the voting rights associate for
the Institute for Justice & Democracy in
Haiti and co-author of Paved
with Good Intentions: Canada’s Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism
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