More stories

  • in

    A Go-It-Alone President Wants to Reshape Haiti. Some Are Skeptical.

    Haiti, facing a prolonged crisis, is preparing for the biggest shake-up of government seen in decades with a constitutional referendum and national elections slated for this year.Haiti’s president knows he has a problem: Governing a country that at times seems to verge on the ungovernable is hard enough when you have a lot of support.Jovenel Moïse clearly does not.In a recent interview, the Haitian leader lamented that he has the confidence of only a small sliver of his people.He won the 2016 elections with just under 600,000 votes in a country of 11 million. And now many are angry over his refusal to leave office in February, amid a dispute over whether his term ended then or should extend for one more year.Yet Mr. Moïse, 52, has chosen this moment to embark on the biggest shake-up Haiti’s politics has seen in decades, overseeing the drafting of a new Constitution that will restructure government and give the presidency greater powers.The need for a new Constitution is a rare point of agreement between Mr. Moïse and his many detractors. What concerns some observers is the president’s unilateral approach to writing one. Others just don’t trust him.Mr. Moïse, critics charge, has become increasingly autocratic and is relying on a small circle of confidants to write a document that, among other changes, will give the president greater power over the armed forces as well as the ability to run for two consecutive terms. It would also grant Haiti’s leader immunity for any actions taken in office.A protest againt Mr. Moïse.Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Moïse says the broader powers are necessary.“We need a system that works,” he said in the telephone interview. “The system now doesn’t work. The president cannot work to deliver.”Haiti won its independence in 1804, after Haitians rose up against colonial France, but it was not until 1990 that it had its first election widely regarded as free and fair. Even then, in a country with a long history of dictatorships and coups, democracy has never fully taken root.Many Haitians say a new Constitution is needed. The current one has created two competing power centers in the country — the president and prime minister — which often leads to friction and a fractured government.The draft Constitution would abolish the Senate, leaving in place a single legislative body elected every five years, and replace the post of prime minister with a vice president that answers to the president, in a bid to streamline government.Haitians will vote on the new Constitution in June, ahead of national elections slated for September.But some take little reassurance from the ballot casting ahead.“People need to realize that elections are not inherently equivalent to democracy,” said Jake Johnston, a research associate for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.Every time there is a political crisis in Haiti, he said, the international community tends to call for elections. That leaves the country limping from one paralyzed government to another, instead of trying to reform the electoral process and work to engage voter participation.“When an election actually ceases to represent the will of the people, what kind of government do they expect that to produce?” Mr. Johnston asked.Since 1986, after nearly 30 years of dictatorship, voter turnout has steadily declined in Haiti. Only 18 percent of all eligible Haitians participated in the 2016 election that brought Mr. Moïse to power.Now, the country’s deep economic and social morass may only encourage more Haitians to stay at home when it is time to vote on the new Constitution and then for a new president.Unemployment is rampant and desperation is at an all-time high. Many Haitians are unable to step onto the street to run basic errands without worrying about being kidnapped for ransom.A market in Port-au-Prince. Many Haitians are unable to run basic errands without worrying about crime, including being kidnapped.Chery Dieu-Nalio for The New York TimesMr. Moïse says he, too, is concerned about voter participation.“There is a silent majority,” he said. “Many Haitians don’t want to participate in something they think will be violent. We need peace and stability to encourage people to vote.”As the June referendum on the Constitution approaches, the government is trying to register five million voters, Mr. Moïse said. His goal, he said, is to inject the process with more legitimacy than his presidency had.According to the United Nations, there are at least 6.7 million potential voters in Haiti. Others say that number is an undercount, since many Haitians are undocumented, their births never registered with the government.In an effort to placate critics, and ease concerns that he is positioning himself to benefit from the new Constitution, Mr. Moïse has promised not to run in the next election.But to fix the country before he steps down, he says, he needs to accumulate enough power to take on an oligarchy he says has paralyzed Haiti to profit off a government too weak to regulate or tax their businesses.“We are suffering today from state capture — it is the biggest problem we face today,” Mr. Moïse said.Some view with deep skepticism Mr. Moïse’s claims that he has made an enemy out of big businesses by trying to regulate them. They say the president is simply trying to stoke populist sentiment to deflect from the failures of his own government and sideline political opponents.Police officers clashing with protesters demanding the resignation of Mr. Moïse.Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOthers are willing to be more charitable, but say he has not done enough to build support.“The problem is that the way that Moïse has gone about it,” said Alexandra Filippova, a senior staff attorney with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, an organization that provides legal representation for victims of human rights abuses. “He is unilaterally pushing it forward.”The draft Constitution, for example, released last month, is available only in French — which the vast majority of Haitians do not read — instead of Creole.And no members of civil society were invited to take part as the document was drafted. Mr. Moïse instead appointed a special commission to do that. That, critics say, dims the chances for real progress.“Constitutional change is supposed to reflect a social consensus of some sort,” Ms. Filippova said. More

  • in

    Did a Coup Attempt Really Happen Two Weeks Ago in Haiti?

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyDid a Coup Attempt Really Happen Two Weeks Ago in Haiti?The Biden administration must speak up for human rights in the island nation.Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board.Feb. 23, 2021A copy of the Haitian Constitution wrapped in an American flag at a march in Port-au-Prince on Feb. 10. The Haitian president’s supporters and opponents disagree on when his term ends.Credit…Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCatherine Buteau, a 33-year-old marketing and communications specialist in Montreal, woke up on Feb. 7 to a lot of missed calls on her phone. Her relatives in Haiti had been desperately calling her. Her father, mother and aunt had been snatched from their beds in Port-au-Prince in the middle of the night.“No one knew what was happening, just that they were taken,” she told me. “In the beginning, not understanding what’s happening, I thought the worst.”Later that day, Ms. Buteau learned that her parents and her aunt were among the eighteen people who had been arrested and accused of attempting a coup against Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse. Since that day, she’s been working around the clock with a lawyer in Haiti to try to get her parents out of prison.Were they plotting a coup or trying to restore democracy?Jake Johnston, a Haiti specialist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me that the answer depends on when you think the president’s term is up. Opposition leaders say it ended on Feb. 7, four years after his inauguration in 2017. They were openly planning to swear in a parallel government to force him to relinquish power. But supporters of Mr. Moïse say he has another year left in his term, because a disputed election delayed him from taking office.“That’s what so much of this comes down to: legitimacy,” Mr. Johnston said.Some coups are obvious, like the recent military takeover in Myanmar. Others are murkier. What constitutes a coup d’état is all too often in the eye of the beholder.Coups are getting rarer, according to John Chin, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who tracks illegal power grabs. The 1960s saw dozens of coups around the world each year. More recently, there’s been only one or two a year. But accusations of coup plots have not gone away. Indeed, even the leaders of democracies — like Donald Trump in the United States and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel — have cried coup to delegitimize opponents by portraying their conduct as illegal and undemocratic, Mr. Chin told me.The question of whether something is deemed a coup has practical implications. In 2009, when Honduran special forces escorted President Manuel Zelaya from his house in his pajamas at gunpoint and onto an airplane flight out of the country, the U.S. State Department refrained from calling it a “military coup,” because doing so would have meant cutting off aid to the Honduran military.And, in 2019, when Bolivia’s president Evo Morales, an icon of the left, was forced to flee to Mexico just weeks after he was declared the winner of a fourth term in office, U.S. officials rejected the term “coup” and called it an expression of “democratic will.”If a government is unpopular enough, its overthrow is called a revolution. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Haiti, a nation founded when enslaved and free people revolted against their French colonial masters, winning independence in 1804. Few historians would call that a coup.But popular revolts are easier to produce than popular governments. Haiti has endured a number of brutal dictators, notably François Duvalier, known as “Papa Doc,” in the 1950s and ’60s and his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, “Baby Doc,” who ruled from 1971 to 1986. There were lots of plots to take out Papa Doc, who survived by relying on a dreaded militia, the Tontons Macoute. Haiti is an example of how failed coups, or even purported failed coups, can strengthen a leader’s hold on power by giving a pretext to crack down on opponents.Haiti didn’t have its first free democratic election until 1990, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide won in a landslide, only to be deposed twice in military coups. Once a country catches a case of the coups, it can be hard to cure. Every leader afterward is less secure.Ms. Buteau’s parents don’t seem like the coup-plotting type. They weren’t soldiers. Her father, Louis Buteau, is an agronomist who worked for years in Haiti’s Ministry of Agriculture. Her mother, Dr. Marie Antoinette Gautier, is a well-known surgeon at Hôpital Eliazar Germain who once opened a clinic inside their house for people in their neighborhood. Dr. Gautier also ran for president in 2015 as a long-shot candidate.“My mother, she is very vocal,” Ms. Buteau told me. Raised by a widowed nurse with seven children, Dr. Gautier went into medicine, while her sister, Marie Louise Gauthier, joined the national police.“These are people who have dedicated their lives to public service in Haiti,” Ms. Buteau said.Images from a petition to free Dr. Marie Antoinette Gautier, left, Marie Louise Gauthier and Louis Buteau.They sounded like the kind of educated and civic-minded Haitians who might throw up their hands at the political situation and emigrate to the United States or France or Canada. But Ms. Buteau’s parents didn’t want to leave Haiti.They stayed even when, a few years ago, Mr. Buteau was shot by robbers outside a bank, and then a wave of kidnappings washed over the country, snapping up a distant cousin for ransom. Still, the last time Ms. Buteau talked to her parents, they were on edge because of the deteriorating political situation. The last year has been marked by increasing protests against the president, who has ruled by decree since he dissolved Parliament in January 2020.Whatever legitimacy Mr. Moïse enjoys stems from his 2016 election. But political legitimacy gets murky when large numbers of people have been kicked off the voter rolls and when elections have a reputation for being rigged.Only about 20 percent of Haitians turned out in the election that brought Mr. Moïse to power. Merely holding elections isn’t enough — the public must perceive the vote to be free and fair for the winner to carry moral force. That’s a warning for the United States, where Republicans are busy trying to toss people off the voter rolls, and where some Democrats feel it’s futile to try to convince Trump supporters that President Biden won fairly.The question of when the president’s term ends should have been answered by a constitutional court. But the justice system in Haiti isn’t functioning as it should, thanks to the president. So Mr. Moïse has been planning another year in office, even rolling out plans for a nakedly unconstitutional referendum in April that would strengthen his grip on power. While a consensus has formed in Haiti that some political reforms are necessary to prevent cyclical deadlock, the current Constitution specifically forbids amendments by referendum.After the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, Americans no longer have much credibility to lecture other countries about elections, if we ever had it to begin with. In the past, Americans overtly meddled in Haiti’s politics, in ways that didn’t produce good long-term results. It isn’t our place to resolve the crisis in Haiti.Nor should U.S. tax dollars pay for Mr. Moïse’s unconstitutional referendum. And Haiti’s leaders should not be allowed to park their money in U.S. banks if there is reason to believe it was pilfered in corrupt schemes or garnered through kidnapping rings involving state security forces. That’s what the Magnitsky Act is for.Many people in Haiti believe that the Trump administration made a deal with Mr. Moïse: If he supported the U.S. case against Venezuela, then Washington would look the other way when it came to human rights abuses in Haiti. But things have gotten so bad there that even the Trump administration couldn’t stay silent. In December, the Treasury Department issued sanctions on two former officials in Mr. Moïse’s government and a notorious gang leader for their alleged role in a 2018 massacre in which at least 71 Haitians were killed, reportedly for refusing to side with the president against the opposition.More must be done to hold those who committed atrocities accountable. It’s hard to imagine free and fair elections in Haiti as long as such killers walk free. Still, the State Department initially supported Mr. Moïse’s view that he has another year in office, a declaration that some feel gave him the confidence to arrest Ms. Buteau’s relatives, although a spokesman also called on him to adhere to the spirit of the Constitution. Other voices inside the U.S. government have spoken up forcefully about the situation in Haiti.Mr. Moïse’s government put out a videotape showing “proof” of a coup, which featured a recording of a conversation between Ms. Buteau’s aunt, the national police’s inspector general, and the head of security at the presidential palace. The government says the tapes prove that Ms. Buteau’s aunt tried to bribe the security chief into arresting Mr. Moïse so that a new provisional president — a Supreme Court judge who was also arrested — could be sworn in.Was this really proof of a coup? Not likely. The video named the coup’s mastermind as Dan Whitman, an American who served as the U.S. Embassy spokesman in Haiti 20 years ago. Reached at his home in Washington, Mr. Whitman told me the allegation “couldn’t be more bizarre and more untrue.”Mr. Whitman, who retired from the State Department in 2009, told me he hasn’t been to Haiti in two decades. He had lost track of what was happening there until a Haitian radio journalist called him to ask for a comment about the purported plot. He has since heard a rumor that someone impersonating him has been calling up opposition figures in Haiti and giving orders that paved the way for the Feb. 7 arrests.“I’m disgusted,” he told me. “I’m creeped out. But I’m not surprised. This kind of thing happens all the time in small, vulnerable countries.”The Biden administration must find ways to speak up for fair elections in Haiti without trying to decide the outcome. In a draft of letter to Congress, Frantz G. Verret, former president of Haiti’s electoral commission, asked for help convening a meeting between the opposition and the president. He likened it to “roadside assistance” to get Haiti’s democracy moving again.That’s the sort of help that would be proper for the United States to provide. After all, it is the people of Haiti who must decide if their president is legitimate or not, and if the foiled coup in Haiti was really a coup at all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More