Haiti: consitutional coup #2?

In what the foreign “assistance” community that controls Haiti right now are calling a troubling, but constitutional, move, the Haitian Senate’s sacked  Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis and her cabinet.   While it appears that either the lower or upper house of the Haitian Parliament can remove the government at will,  there are questions about the legality of the move.  During a nine hour Senate session, lawmakers continually walked out (or ran out) accusing each other of being armed. In the end, 18 of the 29 Senators voted for sacking the government.

Pierre-Louis, who was educated in France and the United States after her family fled Papa Doc’s dictatorship in 1964, returned to Haiti in 1977 as a community organizer, developing a international reputation for her administrative abilities and skill at handling assistance funding.

Haiti — occupied by UN forces since the aftermath of the U.S. sponsored coup against former President Jean-Betrand Aristide (in whose government Pierre-Louis formerly served) — is dependent on foreign aid, especially from Canada and France, for its operating budget.  Since the coup, it has been occupied (as it has been through most of its history) by foreign troops.

With President Rene Préval’s party leading the move for removing the government, there is suspicion that the rationale for Pierre-Louis’ removal had more to do with her tight control of foreign aid funds than with any domestic issue:

Leslie Voltaire, Haiti’s special envoy to the United Nations, said the international community should recognize its role in what happened to Pierre-Louis. For example, he said, only the Inter-American Development Bank has increased its disbursements for this year. And only 15 percent of the $346 million promised at an April donors’ conference in Washington has been delivered.

“Had the international community disbursed the resources pledged in April, maybe this situation would not have happened,” he said. “We all hope that the process will be seamless and quick and that Michèle Pierre-Louis will continue to be a great asset for Haiti and accompany the Haitian people in their quest for democracy and development.”

…

Micha Gaillard, spokesman for the opposition Fusion political party, said that relationship became Pierre-Louis’ undoing.

“The error of Michèle is that she depended only on the international community. She did not look to build alliances in other sectors domestically. And the international community’s error is they depended solely on Michèle,” Gaillard said. “We should not panic. We have made a lot of effort toward stability, and it is now up to Préval.”

Several Haitians have suggested the problem was that Pierre-Louis was not only that she was not a member of any of the political parties, but that she was “too careful” with assistance funds, marshaling them into long-range development projects, like roads and infrastructure development, instead of spreading the graft around.  And her commitment to building democratic institutions from the ground up, rather than depend on local elites and foreign assistance.

Speaking to Michael Delbert of InterPress Service in July, Pierre-Louis laid out her independent program for the country, and her return to politics after the elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristides was removed by a coup d’etat:

For a long time, a lot of the elite would say that Haiti was not ready for democracy, and I was totally against that. It’s not because people are poor and they are illiterate that they are not ready for democracy. When you go to the people at the bottom, I have a deep feeling that these people really want things to change, and they are waiting for the leadership that will not bring miracles but will show them the way and not lie to them.

All the elites – the mulatto elites, the university elites, the union elites, the peasant elites – are like a huge elephant sitting on this country and you cannot move it, because there is no political class, because there are no political parties, and everyone becomes corrupted and perverted. If you can’t go into that system, the system rejects you. And so far we have not found the wrench that will move this thing.