by Thought Merchant

http://thoughtmerchant.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/haiti-election-violence.jpg?w=600&h=337    —Picture of Protests in Haiti After November, 2010 Election

In a country that faced one the greatest natural disasters in modern history, with over 350,000 lives lost, 1.5 million displaced citizens living in barely functional tent cities, government buildings and infrastructure ripped to shreds and strewn throughout the capital, one would think the natural instinct of those charged with the care of the survivors would be quickly dispatching resources to limit their suffering. That assumption sadly does not work in Haiti. In Haiti, governments are known to function in several ways, most of them to the detriment of the Haitian people. Combine that with the collusion of international forces that have ensured the Haitian government remained weak and ineffectual over the 200 plus years of Haiti’s history, and what has now resulted from the farcical sham masquerading as an election that took place on November 28, 2010 should be no surprise.

The inevitable event of a fraudulent Haitian election was so ever present that U.S. Republican Senator Richard Lugar, a fellow Party member to George W. Bush, who orchestrated a foreign led coup to remove Haiti’s perhaps first truly democratically elected President, Jean Bertrand Aristide, stated clearly that he feared that a fraudulent election would be held so closely after the Haiti earthquake.

In June 2010 Senator Lugar issued a report:

From this link :

The [Haitian] government has failed to make basic reforms such as ensuring transparent elections and reducing barriers for private investment, according to the report “Without Reform, No Return on Investment in Haiti,” by Sen. Richard Lugar (R., Ind.), who criticized Haitian President Rene Préval’s leadership during the crisis.

[Haiti’s President] Préval hasn’t been receptive to earlier suggestions from the Senate. After Sen. Lugar recommended an international team restructure Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council, which has been accused of being loyal to the president, Mr. Préval rejected the proposal, saying it would cause “anarchy.”

So here we have a Republican Senator, of all people, voicing his clear disbelief in President Preval’s ability to hold a fair election with Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) stacked with his acolytes, and Haiti’s President responds by saying any reformation of the CEP would result in “anarchy.” The tragic irony of such statements in the face of Senator Lugar’s report is that the main cause of the anarchy Haiti has been drowning in since the announcement of elections results on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 was the corrupt CEP engaging in massive election fraud causing 12 of the 19 presidential candidates to state on the day of the election, almost halfway through that day, that the election had to be annulled and a new vote had to be taken to ensure the integrity of the process.

The other tragic irony that brought forth the disastrous results we have in Haiti currently is that President Obama’s administration chose to ignore the obvious logic of Senator Lugar’s report, even though many of the same warnings came from the U.S. House of Representatives, including many members of the Congressional Black Caucus, part of Obama’s own Democratic Party.

From this link:

In October, 45 Members of the House wrote Secretary of State Clinton urging her to make it clear that Washington would withhold funds for the election if they were not going to be free, fair and inclusive. They were ignored.

So we have President Obama’s favorite mantra, bipartisan support, to ensure that the Haitian people have free and fair elections coming from Republican Senator Richard Lugar, and 45 mostly Democratic Congressmen in the House of Representatives, yet the Obama administration chooses to ignore these warnings and spends 15 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars to pay for an election that ends up being a total sham resulting in anarchy, violence, and bloodshed within the financially tenuous Republic of Haiti and among the Haitian people. These events are so surreal they should be considered illusions or conspiracy theories, but they are not, they are actual facts that occurred in this absurdly cruel joke being played on the Haitian people after suffering in perhaps one of the worst natural disasters in modern history.

The reality is that Rene Preval is a highly corrupt incompetent politician whose only expertise is in manipulating the international community, the U.N., and the Haitian people in ways to assure that his political shadow is cast over the billions of dollars in aid money supposedly flowing into Haiti after this election charade for at least one more term of a Haitian President after his own is completed.

So with a complete lack of patriotism and fealty to his homeland of Haiti, the first Black Independent Republic known in modern history, Preval would rather allow it to burn to the ground rather than denying the ability of his putrid hand to oversee the distribution of the money coming into his country purportedly to help his almost incessantly suffering Haitian people. And this is the man the Obama administration allowed to oversee the first election after Haiti’s devastating earthquake even though esteemed members of both of Americas political parties warned him profusely.

The only bright spot in this whole travesty is that Preval is begining to show honesty in how he governs his country:

From this link

Acknowledging there was “certainly” fraud in Haiti’s contested elections, President René Préval appealed for calm Wednesday, telling Haitians they will not resolve the country’s electoral crisis through chaos.

“Every election has fraud,” Préval said. “The [complaint process] is there to uncover the fraud.”