Keefer’s comments on the election and expert and link to article below. Amazing stuff. What else would we expect from the author of The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio. Oh, and we did this one with Canada and France. Vive la reunion.Keefer commented recently:“I recently completed a long-ish piece on the Haitian election & the multiple forms of vote suppression and fraud put into play there.
The 'interim' government installed by the US, Canada and France after they organized the coup of February 2004 that overthrew Haiti's democratically elected government was distinctly unsubtle in its proceedings: after making sure that as many as possible pro-democracy activists (i.e. Lavalas supporters) were dead or in jail, they shorted the number of voter registration centers (providing one-twentieth the number that were available for the 2000 election), shorted the number of voting centers (one-fifteenth the number there were in 2000), and then set to work on fiddling the vote-tabulation.
Oh yes--and it all took place under the watchful eyes of the UN occupation force (which had joint responsibility with the OAS for organizing the election), and of international election observer teams (organized by the US, Canada and France), who said the election was just fine until crowds paraded in the streets with the charred ballots and ballot-boxes from the dump--and then maintained a discreet silence.
The scale of the fraud was hallucinatory. It involved the ransacking of 8 voting centres by paramilitary gangs, the destruction or miscoding of tally sheets representing over 9 percent of the total votes cast, the discarding of a further 7 percent as null ballots by electoral officials none of whom belonged to René Préval's 'Espwa' (='Hope') party or to Aristide's 'Fanmi Lavalas', a high probability of major ballot-box stuffing, firmly attested tabulation fraud, and, as a climax, the discovery of tens of thousands of ballots smoldering in a dump outside Port-au-Prince. The coverage of the election in the US press, and especially the post-election commentary, has been equally hallucinatory.If I weren't such a computer dummy I'd snip out some of the more tantalizing passages and post them here, with a proper link.”
Fraud and Scandal in Haiti’s Presidential Election
Préval’s Victory and the UN’s Disgracehttp://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=homeby Michael KeeferMarch 3, 2006
Haitian voters went to the polls on February 7, 2006 to elect a new president. The election was conducted under the tutelage of the United Nations, which for most of the past two years has been supporting and sustaining Haiti’s flagrantly illegal interim government with an occupation force of over 9,000 soldiers and police.
After a week of increasingly obvious fraud and chicanery in the counting of the vote culminated in the discovery of tens of thousands of ballots smoldering in a dump outside Port-au-Prince, the Provisional Electoral Council (Conseil Électoral Provisoire, CEP) announced on February 15 an arrangement by which René Garcia Préval could be awarded the presidency. The CEP’s decision appears to have been a reluctant one, but the alternative would have been to face increasingly large and vociferous demonstrations from an aroused electorate.
This result is a victory for the Haitian people: Préval, who received more than four times as many votes as the second-place candidate—and also, one must insist, won a clear majority of the votes cast—is quite obviously their choice for president.
But this outcome of an ‘arranged’ victory is also, it would seem, exactly what the anti-democratic forces in this situation were hoping they might achieve. (‘Anti-democratic forces’: this category includes not just the Haitian gangster elite that participated in the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide two years ago, but also, to their shame, the US State Department, the US National Endowment for Democracy and the NGOs it has corrupted, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, the Organization of American States, and the United Nations.) These agencies knew as well as everyone else that Préval was going to win by a landslide. Their goal appears to have been to secure an outcome that would make it possible for propagandists and pundits to argue, with their habitual dishonesty, that Préval’s victory was in some sense incomplete, or tainted, and that his administration therefore needs to include representation from the more significant defeated parties—who just happen to have been participants or collaborators in the violent overthrow of the Aristide government in February 2004.
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