This week in HaitiHaïti Progrès
21 - 27 June 2000
Disinformation and Meddling
in Wake of Lavalas LandslideAs baseball great Yogi Berra once said, "It's déjà vu all over again."
Once before, in Dec. 1990, the Haitian people poured out in the millions to vote Jean-Bertrand Aristide into power. Almost immediately, the corporate press, U.S. and European diplomats and bureaucrats, local "opposition" politicians, and functionaries for the United Nations (UN) and Organization for American States (OAS) began sniping at the newly elected president and his democratic nationalist program, culminating in the bloody Sept. 30, 1991 coup d'état.
Today the scenario is almost identical. Millions of Haitians voted Aristide's party, the Lavalas Family (FL), into the vast majority of Haiti's municipal and legislative posts this past May 21, foiling brazen foreign meddling by the U.S. State Department.
Now the "democratic correction," as putschists called their 1991 mutiny, has once again begun.
Leading the charge is the OAS Electoral Observer Mission, which falsely asserts that, in Senate races, Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) "officials counted the votes of only the top four contenders and not the others who ran and may have gotten a few votes," a charge which the Associate Press uncritically presents as true. The Miami Herald, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, and other corporate press outlets have bleated the same falsehood, apparently never checking the CEP's calculations for themselves.
Such a review shows that the CEP counted the votes cast for all candidates, divided the total in half, then narrowed the field for the run-offs to the top four aspirants garnering the highest percentage. Anyone with over 50% plus one vote won in the first round (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 18, No. 12, 6/7/00).
On Jun. 19, the CEP began releasing its final results for the eight departments covered in the May 21 vote. (The Grande'Anse Department's polling took place on Jun. 11 and no results have been announced.) The FL swept 16 of 17 Senate seats up for grabs in the first round. The exception: Luc Fleurinor, an independent in the Northwest, who also won his Senate seat in the first balloting. For lower house races, the FL won 26 of 65 races in the first round, and its candidates are in all but five of the remaining run-offs. (Eighteen other deputy races are being fought in the Grand'Anse.) The second round was scheduled for Jun. 25 but is now postponed. No new date has been fixed.
Meanwhile, the FL captured over half of the 133 mayoral races, and the vast majority of seats in the rural Communal Section Assemblies (ASECs).
CEP results were released without the signatures of three members -- President Léon Manus, Débussy Damier, and Emmanuel Charles -- linked to the opposition front Space of Concord (EC), which had demanded that its partisans resign from the body. Resign they did, and for added effect, Manus even flew into exile on Jun. 16. But the remaining six members, including EC-appointee Irma Rateau, achieved a quorum, and signed the results.
"It was a real, democratic, peaceful revolution at the polls done by over 60 percent of the Haitian voters," wrote Father Gérard Jean-Juste, the pastor of the capital's St. Clare's Church, in a Jun. 19 open letter to the editors of the Washington Post. "Most of us, Haitians, told 'you' what is good for us." He denounced the "false accusations against Aristide [as] continued colonialism" and reproached the racist portrayal of Haitian street fighting as more violent than European or North American.
And what are the false accusations being made against Aristide? The web-page of the Democratic Party-aligned Center for International Policy (CIP) offers a good example. The CIP claims that President René Préval brought Manus to the Palace to have him sign the final election results but "Manus refused to budge." At that point, Préval led Manus into his office, made a phone call to Aristide, and "Aristide told Manus that this had gone on long enough and he had better sign off very soon or else bad things might happen to him." Yeah, right. Aristide is so desperate to win the elections that he is going to personally deliver a death-threat to Manus over the Palace's telephone!
The CIP's research director James Morrell also told the Chicago Tribune that the electoral sweep was due to "power plays by Lavalas" because "they don't want to just win. They want to obliterate the opposition."
Then there is the more clever "shading" of the news done by people like the AP's Michael Norton, who repeats in his many dispatches that Haiti is "on the road to becoming a virtual one-party state." The Miami Herald reinforces the message by quoting EC sympathizer Jean-Claude Bajeux: ''It's a one-party state with a charismatic leader in a poor country" as well as EC candidate (and former putschist) Claude Roumain: "Aristide is the new dictator."
In fact, mainstream stories are studded with such scathing quotes from followingless politicians and unnamed diplomats. The CEP's angry denials of miscalculations are brushed aside as dishonest, while FL and popular organization voices are completely absent.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has come to the OAS's side saying that he too is "troubled by continuing irregularities in the way the votes for Senate candidates were being calculated," and lectured CEP members to "strictly adhere to the procedures stipulated in the electoral law," as if they weren't.
The U.S. State Department's Haiti coordinator Donald Steinberg and National Security Council senior director Arturo Valenzuela were also in Haiti this week, trying to push around the Haitian government about the final tallies. "The manner in which they're counted and finalized is very important to us," State Dept. spokesman Richard Boucher said with blood-boiling arrogance. "We believe the process needs to be handled very carefully."
An election official in Haiti remarked that the elections were Haitian not American, and that the CEP was "the sole authority in the matter."
In the face of so much disinformation and meddling, it is no wonder that the Haitian people have risen up in anger. They took to the streets on Jun. 17 and 19, virtually shutting down Haiti's three largest cities. Protestors burned the U.S. flag in front of the U.S. embassy to let Washington know that they see its hidden hand behind the OAS, the UN, and Haiti's destabilization. When election results were released, the crowds receded and calm returned.
"Despite all the attempts and threats to carry out an electoral coup d'état since well before elections, the Haitian people went out and voted," said Yvon Neptune, one of the victorious Senate candidates for the West Department. "They knew why they were voting, how they were voting, and for whom they were voting. Now what is important is political stability so that peace can return to the country."
FIX '96:
New Laws Rip Families and Lives Apart
by Mark DowLuis Freire is one of us, but the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) is trying to make him into one of them.
Born in Ecuador, Freire immigrated legally to the United States at the age of seven. He is forty-three now. In 1975, he was convicted of second-degree murder, and he did his time: fifteen years at Attica and a series of other New York state prisons. Released in 1990, he began sweeping floors for ZZZ Carpentry, and today he is a carpenter.
In April 2000, after ten years of reporting to his parole officer every two weeks, Freire's sentence was complete. But his troubles were not. On April 15th, around 5.30 in the morning, INS agents, accompanied by New York City Police officers -- some ten in all, wearing bullet-proof vests -- showed up at his home in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. He was arrested and handcuffed in front of his family. His five-year old daughter softly interrupts the story: "I missed him very much," she says, peeking around her father's back. Freire's two young children and his wife are American-born. His mother, who also lives here, is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Freire himself, however, never became a U.S. citizen, and so, according to the law, he can be deported back to Ecuador.
An INS bus took Freire along with a group of other so-called "criminal aliens" picked up from Manhattan's Varick Street detention center to the Wicomico County jail in Maryland, where all were held with non-INS prisoners. Nationwide, county jails hold over 10,000 INS detainees (of a total over 20,000), renting bedspace to the federal agency at premium rates to supplement local treasuries. Warden Thomas Hogan of the York County (Pennsylvania) prison, which holds hundreds of INS detainees, speaks candidly about the profit motive in "Abandoned: The Betrayal of America's Immigrants," a new documentary by David Belle and Nicholas Wrathall. "We're running a business," notes the warden, "and that's exactly what this is -- it's a custody business."
The INS detainees at Wicomico were held "incommunicado," as Freire puts it. Correctional officers at the jail knew nothing about their immigration cases, and on-site INS officials move "fast through the [cell] blocks," not wanting to stop and talk. "Actually, you're lost there," he says. And yet, adds Freire without a trace of bitterness, "I happened to luck out." Many INS detainees are denied bail, but in a video hearing an immigration judge set a bond for Freire at $10,000. His family raised the money, and he was released after two weeks. Many other detainees, of course, are held for months and even years. Freire will go before an immigration judge in September. If he is deported, he will be prohibited from ever returning to the U.S., even though his life, his family, and his tax dollars are all here.
The film "Abandoned" shines a light on the hidden damage which the 1996 laws are causing to families all over the country. In the film, Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) explains how passage of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was fueled, in part, by reaction to the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Of course, the man convicted for that bombing is an American citizen. If Luis Freire were a citizen, the end of his criminal sentence would have meant the end of his troubles. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that non-citizens have become scapegoats again. Although Freire is "legal," he remains an "alien," and so the law says that he can be detained and deported. The 1996 laws eliminated legal protections which had been available to certain people in Freire's situation. In the eyes of the law, his ties here mean less than ever. Miami attorney Steven Forester, speaking in "Abandoned," calls the laws themselves "un-American." Yet the us-versus-them mentality is nothing new to American politics. Perhaps the problem is that these laws are too American.
In a recent press release, the INS declares that it is "proud" to have increased the number of "criminal aliens" in detention "from 3,300 in 1994 to more than 16,000 this year -- proof that INS has and will continue to detain people who pose a threat to public safety." But the question of public safety in these cases was already determined by the criminal courts which sentenced people like Luis Freire, and then released them when they finished paying their debts to society.
Some immigration lawyers say that the INS and courts are misinterpreting the law, which calls for convicted felons to be deported "upon release" from prison. The law is not be retroactive, these lawyers claim, and should not affect someone like Freire who was released from jail ten years ago and six years before the laws were in existence.
Many people effected by the new laws were convicted of less serious crimes, for which they did no jail time, though they are now detained by INS. Others have actually served more time in INS detention than they did for their original crimes. "They have been punished, and we accepted it," insists the relative of a legal resident convicted of drunk driving, interviewed in "Abandoned." "Now they're trying to take them away from their families."
To coincide with last weekend's premier of the new documentary in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, an organization called Citizens and Immigrants for Equal Justice (CIEJ) held two days of demonstrations -- June 17-18 -- in front of the INS offices at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan to educate the public about how families are being torn apart by the 1996 laws. Both the film and the rallies make one thing clear: the line between us and them is not clear at all, and our laws will be more just when everyone accepts that fact.
"I was blind to this stuff," said Freire at Saturday's rally. "You never know what's going to happen until it happens to you."
To join the Fix '96 campaign to change the immigration laws, contact:
Citizens & Immigrants for Equal Justice:
in New Jersey/Connecticut: kathgorman1@aol.com
in Florida: ciejfla@aol.com
in Texas: ciejtx@aol.comFor more information:
Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Services: www.lirs.org
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights: www.lchr.org
For the film "Abandoned," contact Crowing Rooster Arts: www.crowingrooster.org
or 212-334-6260.Demonstrations are held on the first Thursday of every month from 8:30 - 9:30 a.m. in front of the Federal Building at 970 Broad St., Newark, NJ. For more details, call the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom, 908-820-0875.