Haiti's general election poses more questions than answers

This article was first published in the April 2006 issue of Diplo Magazine

Haiti is a country that rarely figures in the Western media, and when it does the coverage is overwhelmingly negative: a steady drip-feed of coups, civil unrest, political assassination and brutal violence. The first months of this year have been no exception to this dismal rule. The general election on 7 February was rocked by accusations of fraud, plunging the country into a fresh crisis, and quite possibly dashing hopes that the country’s long-running strife would be consigned to the past.


The poorest country in the Western hemisphere, Haiti has struggled throughout its history with appalling leadership on a vast scale. The site of the world’s first successful slave revolt, in 1804 Haiti became only the second independent nation in the Americas. Sadly this auspicious beginning proved illusory. Over the decades, the country’s intrinsic problems of poverty, lack of development, poor nutrition and education, not to mention its strategic importance to the burgeoning superpower to the north, have left it the most impoverished nation in the hemisphere. The statistics are bleak: life expectancy for men is 48, one child in ten fails to reach his or her fifth birthday, and over 85% of the population subsist on less than a dollar per day.


Haiti’s recent history is bleak. After the overthrow of the notorious Duvalier dictatorship in 1989, a quasi-democracy was born, and in 1991 the country held its first election. Yet coups and attempted insurrections resulted in constant upheaval, and finally, the fig-leaf of legitimacy was torn aside in 2004, as US Special Forces stormed the country to remove President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, ostensibly to prevent further unrest. While Aristide was undoubtedly corrupt, there was a sinister motive behind the American intervention. The Haitian government had committed the cardinal sin of seeking to address the country’s crippling poverty, and in doing so had made economic decisions that threatened the rude health of the companies that had set up shop in Port-au-Prince during the nineties. As Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973, had already found out, a sovereign nation cannot snub Washington and think they will escape without a bruised nose.


Since 2004 – the bicentennial year – Haiti has been under the interim control of Boniface Alexandre, who has gingerly steered the country toward this year’s election. During that time, despite the further decline of the economy and mass emigration that sees the few educated nationals leave as soon as possible, there has been one source of hope: the election itself, seen optimistically as a turning point. Some 33 candidates ran, and despite an increase in violence and kidnapping, the hopeful mood prevailed. Yet barely had the polling stations closed before the results were in doubt. Burned ballot papers were discovered at a city dump, and 150,000 votes were invalidated due to tally sheets being incorrectly filled out by poll workers. Frontrunner and former president Rene Preval, who saw his initial share of 61% drop to 48.7%, claimed that he was denied an outright victory due to ‘massive fraud and gross errors’. His supporters, who include the country’s main street gangs, organised protests that swiftly turned violent.


A last-minute intervention by the Brazilian-mandated UN peacekeepers and the Organisation of American States led to a deal which exploited a loophole in Haitian law, allowing some 85,000 blank votes to be disregarded (they had previously been counted as a separate category). This tipped Mr Preval’s share of the vote up to 51%, edging him just over the crucial 50% mark and thus avoiding a recall election. Despite this, the electoral debacle doesn’t bode well for the future health of Haiti’s democracy. The election official, Jacques Bernard, has been forced to flee the country in fear of his life after his farmhouse was burned down. The general picture is of a country on the edge of social unrest, hardly the brave new world that the election was supposed to herald.


And even if the result is confirmed, will the president-elect be allowed to keep his campaign promises? The United States made it abundantly clear during the campaign that they were not in favour of Mr Preval. As far as Washington is concerned, in a polarised world, the Haiti result indicates that it has elected to follow the centre-left pattern of government that has taken hold over the last five years throughout the Americas. Furthermore, Preval was once the protégé of the exiled Aristide, although the two no longer see eye to eye. With these things in consideration, it is important that recognition from the US, as well as other world organisations, is swift. US State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack sounded a hopeful note, saying that his country ‘should unconditionally support a government that wins a democratic election’.


As the only Haitian-elected leader to complete his term of office (from 1995-2000) without either being ousted, assassinated or seeking to extend his rule by extrajudicial means, Mr Preval commands a respect unique in his country. The name of his party, Lespwa, the Creole word for ‘hope’, is fitting. If he can bring stability and a period of legitimate rule, then perhaps the corner towards national unity and reconstruction could be turned. With luck, between now and his 29 March inauguration, a period of calm will prevail. Preval’s task is colossal, but one with immense rewards: the steering of this blighted country, now in its third century as an independent nation, towards a better future.

Sad confirmation of Christopher Hitchens' mental illness

In what could be the nadir of his writing since moving to the US - although you feel that he can outdo himself in rhetorical incoherence time and time again - Christopher Hitchens' column this week for Slate is a posturing, puffed up piece of armchair-warrior bravado and wishful historical reimagining that proves the lie of the arch-polemicist's supposed "concern" for the world's "decency" (his own, much abused, word).

Hitchens Watch and The Poor Man Institute offer decent enough dissections of his hooch-addled hoardings, but in essence the slipperiness of Hitchens' grip on both his sanity and his inner demons can be gleaned by the final line:

We could have been living in a different world, and so could the people of Iraq, and I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.

In a word: wow.

I truly hope that Hitch gets the best medical treatment available. Too many times in my visits to America, I have seen poor, crazed souls in piss-drenched rags scrounging through garbage cans or barking at passers-by. Mental illness is a horrible thing, especially in one whose mind was once so sharp, yet I fear our man in Washington has slipped into an abyss of paranoid delusion and violent fantasy. I genuinely fear for the audience at his next hack-rant "debate".

Bush's Iraq analsis conveniently sidesteps reality

Three years ago a “coalition” of one big playground bully, a once-powerful puppy dog and a handful of insignificant lackey countries embarked on an invasion that was described as a “liberation”, which would be over (we were told) in a matter of months, and which would end with grinning American marines would be greeted by tearful Iraqis throwing flowers and praising them as heroes.

Three short years, in which that invasion swiftly passed the liberation stage and became an unending occupation; where months have become years, and years could to turn into decades; and where the only things thrown by the less-than-grateful Iraqis at American marines are liable to smell of gunpowder rather than pollen. And yet if you listen to the rhetoric of President George W. Bush, one could be tempted to imagine everything has gone according to plan.

In a press conference of outstanding evasion, he managed to avoid any mention of the chaos that is engulfing most of the country, choosing instead to focus on the fledgling democracy and the elusive prospect of “victory”. Neither the 2000+ American casualties, nor the scores or even hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, were worth a mention; the mantra of success and progress was adhered to rigidly, never mind the facts. The prospect of civil war – which recent polls suggest 80% of the American people think likely – apparently did not even cross the President’s mind.

With his boss’s approval rating at an all-time low for a second term president, plummeting beneath even Watergate-era Nixon levels, Donald Rumsfeld entered the fray in a Washington Post article, speaking of “resolve” and “commitment” and other similarly bullish phrases that have become essentially meaningless in the Defence Secretary’s garbled language. His article spoke of “gain” and used the tired old trope of claiming that people who criticise the war, who dare to mention that troop morale may be low or that the country is going from bad to worse, are naturally supporting the terrorists.

Yet dissenting views are coming now not from certain sections of the press, or “old Europe” in Rumsfeld’s memorable definition, but from people whom the Bush administration may find closer to home. Former Prime Minister Ayad al-Alawi, handpicked by the Americans to take over as the L. Paul Bremer’s coalition as the country was “handed over”, has suggested that the country is at civil war. The US Special Envoy to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, voiced fears recently that the invasion could well open up a “Pandora’s Box” of terrorism across the wider region and indeed the world, and lead to the establishment of a government that will “make the Taliban look like child’s play”

Rumsfeld has argued that such prognostications are premature and overly cynical; that, historically, the invasion will be judged a success. For an administration that has demonstrated such a blinkered approach to history as the current US one, that is a statement of stunning insincerity. In his recent book, Understanding Iraq, William Polk offers an overview of Iraqi history and argues that the planning, execution and aftermath of the war demonstrates such a huge ignorance of Iraqi geopolitics that it was almost deliberately set up to fail. The parallels with both the 1920 British invasion of Iraq, and the British-imposed kings that followed until the 1958 revolution, are numerous. In its attempts to stifle the overwhelming truth of the scale of the disaster that it has unleashed across Iraq, the American administration is becoming increasingly dismissive of reality, yet the history of the country it chose to invade is quickly catching it up, and the prospects for the region are ominous.

Book Review

“The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is fighting back – and how we can still save humanity", by James Lovelock


The gargantuan, awe-inspiring new Madrid airport, designed by architect Richard Rogers, is at the cutting edge of energy efficiency. It is designed to retain heat and maximise its energy consumption, and makes exemplary use of natural light. This is impressive stuff, if one ignores the primary reason for the building’s very existence: the arrival and departure of some 120 aeroplanes each hour, pumping out hundreds of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The airport is a perfect synopsis of the international community’s myopic approach to climate change. Governments are all too willing to cut corners and do their bit for the environment, so long as it doesn’t harm their economic prospects.

In his latest book, scientist and James Lovelock takes an excoriating look at the hypocrisy of our attitudes to global warming, exemplified by such projects as Madrid’s airport and hollow agreements like Kyoto, which he likens to the Munich treaty of 1938 – “politicians out to show that they do respond, but in reality playing for time”. It is a devastatingly pessimistic examination of just what the dangerous levels of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere will do to the planet, and a savage prediction of the type of civilisation that we could be left with as a result.

Lovelock gained notoriety for the concept of ‘Gaia’; the idea that the Earth is not a lump of rock with immeasurable numbers of life forms crawling across its surface, but in fact is a kind of organism itself, with the sum total of every type of living thing existing in symbiotic harmony with the very atmosphere itself; the former regulated by the latter which in turn offers the perfect conditions for the former to live. It is a particularly metaphysical way of interpreting the Earth, and one that in the 1970s was derided by scientists whilst simultaneously being embraced by hippies and new-age spiritualists; yet in the decades since, the scientific community has gradually acknowledged the fundamental accuracy of Lovelock’s theory.

As Lovelock sees it, human activity is threatening the ability of Gaia to maintain a planetary environment fit for habitat, and we are quite literally teetering on the very edge of outright disaster. Rise in fuel consumption, and increasing demands on electricity supply, mean a constantly mounting supply of carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere. As he states more than once, the amount of CO2 from human activity would, over a year, form a mountain one mile high and twelve miles in diameter. Meanwhile, the eradication of vast swathes of natural forest – the destruction of billions of plants and trees (through hostile farming practices and our rabid expansion across the globe) that would normally counteract any increase in CO2 emission – means that the fundamental atmospheric balance of the planet is changing. As a result, we are approaching what Lovelock fears will be a tipping point of positive feedback: instead of the planet regulating itself against climate increase, any upward deviations are amplified, leading to a rapid spike in temperature. This is an irreversible process, and one that, while not necessarily wiping humanity from the face of the planet, will inherently mean the decimation of billions of people and the utter collapse of human civilisation in its current form:

“…it becomes hot enough to melt most of the Greenland ice and some of the west Antarctica ice; enough water will then be added to the world’s oceans to raise sea levels by fourteen meters… nearly all of the present great centres of population are currently below what could be the ocean surface”.

Western governments, when they address our reliance on fossil fuels and the future of energy production, usually frame the topic in terms of geopolitical significance; witness President Bush’s recent State of the Union address, in which he laid out the idea that America needs to become less reliant on oil – not because of environmental concerns, but rather because his country cannot ransom itself to a hostile region. Perhaps mindful of this prevalent attitude, Lovelock’s solution is to bring in a fast-tracked program of nuclear development, in particular the inchoate – but potentially bountiful – technology of nuclear fusion. Far from being a panacea, Lovelock sees nuclear as merely a stopgap measure, during which the burning of fossil fuels and the over-exploitation of the Earth’s resources would cease. As he sees it, we are looking at the lesser of two evils: on the one hand, a planet which quite simply ceases to have the conditions on which human life can exist, or on the other, a reliance on nuclear which – despite the danger – would at least give civilisation a fighting chance.

Lovelock’s disdain for ‘sustainable development’ is evident from the start, He equates the philosophy behind it with those who choose to ignore global warming: “the error they share is the belief that further development is possible and that the Earth will continue, more or less as now, for at least the first half of this century…. It is much too late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat”. He powerfully decimates the claims of environmental groups who suggest that bio-fuel, wind farms, solar and tidal power would be able to provide enough energy. For him, such an attitude is calamitous: vast areas of woodland would be turned over to wind farms or intensive fuel-crop growing, thus further upsetting the natural balance that Gaia has been denied.

Is Lovelock right? The range of scientific opinion on global warming encompasses those, such as Lovelock, who are concerned that civilisation’s very existence is in imminent peril, to those who believe it all to be a prefabricated myth – although the latter, embodied by oil industry puppets and ignorant non-scientists such as the Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips, are fast becoming an entirely discredited minority. However, Lovelock’s position is radical; his apocalyptic predictions for humanity’s future evoke sandwich-board-man ‘end of the world’ prophecies, albeit backed up by a lifetime’s worth of scientific study. Lovelock himself is in his eighties, and it occasionally shows; at one point he describes the competition amongst living cells as being “not unlike the behaviour of unruly, drunken mobs that gather in the city centres at night”, and his curmudgeonly opposition to wind farms rests at least partly on the facile grounds of aesthetics. Is he influenced by the knowledge that, at his age, he is unlikely to witness any of what he describes and hence can shock with impunity?

Whilst his controversial avocation of nuclear energy is one that this reviewer shares, some of the other angles that Lovelock explores seem half-baked and fanciful in the extreme: a stratospheric ‘shield’ to deflect some of the sun’s rays; the synthesisation of foodstuffs from basic elements; the re-introduction of sailing ships as a form of mass transportation. It says much of Lovelock’s meagre intellectual investment in these ideas that they are discussed briefly in the shortest chapter.

None of this takes away from the qualities of this short, sharp book. To describe it as a wake-up call would be misleading, as Lovelock as been predicting the human-led demise of Gaia for decades, and his frustration at the failure of the world’s leaders to take the matter seriously until very recently (if at all) comes across strongly. Ultimately, this is a deeply troubling work, and despite its subtitle it conveys a deep pessimism for the future of human civilisation. If only a fraction of Lovelock’s predictions comes true, then the 21st century will inevitably see a blinkered humanity finally overstep its planetary limitations.

David Aaronovitch and the case of the mistaken Berrys

Blogs by their nature are untrammelled by such details as ‘fact’. While every decent blogger tries to keep things as accurate as possible, evidently errors and inaccuracies – often huge ones – inevitably slip through. Such is the nature of the beast. It is one of the things that differentiates such new media from the established mainstream media who, with their budgets and reputations to protect (notwithstanding the possibility of a lawsuit), are expected to fact-check to the best of their abilities.

But what happens when lazy journalists start copying huge mistakes from blogs and, trying to make a facetious point, don’t even bother to realise the error until the newspaper is in the reader’s hand?

Enter one David Aaronovitch, star columnist for the Times and occasional writer for the Jewish Chronicle. It is in this week’s JC that Aaronovitch concerns himself with the squabble between the General Synod of the Church of England and the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, about the former’s decision to disinvest in Caterpillar – the company that supplies bulldozers to Israel that are used in the destruction of Palestinian homes.

The spat has been written about at large, but what is particularly interesting in Aaronovitch’s essay is his claim that the head of Christian CND, one Neil Berry, is in fact an anti-Semite who has written articles in which he accuses the secular Nick Cohen (amongst others) of having a “Judaic mindset” and that Tony Blair was in fact lifted to Downing Street on the wallets of Jewish backers who willed him to invade Iraq.

Reprehensible stuff, no doubt. And yet today on the blog Harry’s Place, the self-impressed “watercooler” of the “muscular British left” (that curious male-dominated sphere of Iraq war defenders and pro-interventionists), a most interesting post appeared:

We would like to state categorically that the Neil Berry who wrote these articles is not our Treasurer. Neil was horrified to learn of this groundless attack on his integrity, and some of the vitriolic abuse which followed through others' responses to the piece. Whether or not the author of the piece was jumping to incorrect conclusions through a lack of research, or was aware of the error and deliberately aiming to cause damage to Neil and to CCND, we can of course only speculate at this stage. However the author of those articles is pictured here: . Whereas Neil Berry, CCND Treasurer can be seen on page two of the PDF document here and it can be quite clearly seen that they are indeed two different people.

This was part of an email sent to Harry’s Place by the somewhat affronted CCND; the original poster’s response was a genuine one:

It is absolutely clear to me that I made a stupid error and that they are different people. I really ought to apologise to the Christian CND's Neil Berry for this article, and I do. It is a horrid thing to be incorrectly identified as the author of racist material and I'm mortified that I did so. I should and shall be more careful in the future

Which is fair enough, and indeed the original post has been removed. So how on earth did David Aaranovitch make the same mistake? As the Aaronovitch Watch blog notes:

HP is almost certainly Aaro's (uncredited) source because the accusation of anti-Semitism aimed at treasurer Berry hasn't appeared anywhere else that we can find. I suspect that the reason Aaro didn't check it is that he was already aware of journalist Berry who has feuded with Nick Cohen in the last couple of years, and it didn't occur to him that there were two Neil Berries.

So evidently, Aaronovitch has lifted the suggestion that the two Neil Berrys were one and the same verbatim from Harry’s Place, not bothered to remotely check out its accuracy, and then published it in a weekly news magazine. To his credit, Aaronovitch has apologised and removed the article from his website, and presumably a correction will be published in the next issue, but the fact remains that it is a dangerous precedent when a widely read journalist is lifting his sources from blogs that ever-so conveniently fit with his worldview. One can only hope that he’ll learn someday soon how to do a modicum of research for his articles.