Lu Pour Vous: How Hillary Helped Ruin Haiti
INTERFERENCE
04.13.16 1:25 PM ET
How Hillary Helped Ruin Haiti
By Theodore Hamm*
Much of the blame for Haiti’s chaotic political scene can be
pinned on Hillary Clinton’s State Department, whose handpicked president has
only made things worse.
Last week Haiti’s Electoral Council postponed the nation’s
current presidential election indefinitely.
The present chaos is a fitting coda
to the recent presidency of Michel Martelly, a novice politician who governed
accordingly.
Amid the current upheaval, the name Mirlande Manigat is well
worth recalling. As Haiti struggled to dig out from the disastrous 2010
earthquake, Manigat stood poised to become its first elected female
president—until Hillary Clinton’s State Department intervened.
Photo: Stringer. /Reuters- Manif en Haiti |
A former First Lady of Haiti and a respected university
administrator, Manigat invoked Brazil’s Lula as she ran on a moderately
left-wing platform championing universal public education. Manigat, who holds a
Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, also campaigned in the U.S., detailing at length her
vision for Haiti.
Ominously, Dr. Manigat criticized the aid organizations that
swarmed into Haiti after the earthquake. Singling out those groups’ lack of
accountability, Manigat assured Time that “My government will not operate the
NGO way.”
In late November 2010, Manigat, a Duvalier-era exile, topped
a field of 19 candidates, garnering 31 percent of the vote and setting herself
up for a runoff election against the initial second-place finisher, Jude
Celestin. A close ally at the time with Haiti’s then-President Rene Preval,
Celestin barely edged out Martelly, the popular singer better known as Sweet
Micky.
After the election results were announced in early December,
Micky’s devoted supporters rioted for three straight days. Hillary Clinton, in
turn, told President Preval that if he didn’t force Celestin to drop out,
Congress would cut off aid to Haiti. Martelly soon became the second candidate
in the runoff.
In March 2011, Sweet Micky parlayed his support from the
Duvalier-aligned Haitian right and the U.S. into a comfortable victory. On the
night he won the runoff, Hillary’s State Department team celebrated, with her
chief of staff Cheryl Mills assuring them that “You do great elections.”
By the end of 2015, according to a congressional report,
“much of the Haitian public” believed that international disaster relief money
had been mismanaged, fueling calls for Martelly’s ouster (PDF).
Under Martelly,
the Haitian gourde also depreciated by 30 percent, compounding the nation’s
rapidly growing food crisis.
Instead of the grandmotherly figure of Dr. Mirlande, in the
aftermath of the devastating earthquake Haiti was ruled by a risqué, misogynist
musician. Yet despite his volatile character, once in office Micky remained a
consistent ally of the Clintons.
One year into Martelly’s term, U.S. Ambassador Pam White
informed Mills (PDF) that Haiti insiders viewed Martelly “not dumb as many may
think, [but] he is wild.” Martelly soon appointed close Clinton ally Laurent
Lamothe as prime minister, but Lamothe was forced to step down two years later.
When Caracol Industrial Park, a signature project of the
Clinton Foundation, opened in northern Haiti in October 2012, Sweet Micky
joined Bill and Hillary at the ceremony. There Haiti’s president and the U.S.
Secretary of State heaped high praise on one another.
Martelly, Clinton declared, was the impoverished nation’s
“chief dreamer and believer.” Sweet Micky, in turn, said the Caracol project
showed that Haiti “is open for business, and that’s not just a slogan.”
The high-profile launch of the industrial park, Time
reported, was also designed to rebut criticisms within Haiti regarding exactly
where the many billions in post-earthquake aid money had ended up.
At the time, Martelly proclaimed that the Caracol project would
deliver more than 100,000 jobs, while the Clinton Foundation vowed that it
would bring 60,000 in five years. As of mid-2015, the actual number was closer
to 5,000.
Throughout his five-year term, Martelly gave free rein to
NGOs and foreign business interests. Amidst Haiti’s ongoing turmoil, a simple
question thus arises: Why, exactly, did Hillary Clinton’s State Department
support Sweet Micky instead of Dr. Mirlande Manigat?
*Theodore Hamm is chair of Journalism and New Media Studies
at St. Joseph’s College in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Source: The Daily Beast
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Vidéo de la semaine pour HCN, en mémoire de Robert Anglade, propriétaire de l'Hôtel Jardin sur Mer, assassiné récemment sur sa propriété à Zanglais, près d'Aquin, Haiti
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Vidéo de la semaine pour HCN, en mémoire de Robert Anglade, propriétaire de l'Hôtel Jardin sur Mer, assassiné récemment sur sa propriété à Zanglais, près d'Aquin, Haiti
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