Haiti's Elections

central america / caribbean | repression / prisoners | other libertarian press Wednesday December 07, 2005 00:09 by Brian Concannon Jr., Esq. - Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti brian at ijdh dot org PO Box 745, Joseph, Oregon, 97846 541-263-0029

Seeing the Forest and the Trees

Haiti’s election dates have now been reset for the fourth time in the last five months by the Interim Government of Haiti (IGH) that the U.S, France and Canada installed after kidnapping Haiti's elected President in February, 2004. The IGH will now miss the February 7, 2005 deadline for transferring power that it had promised to meet for 21 months.

These delays, and the logistical problems underlying them, are a cause for concern. But the logistical defects should not obscure the more fundamental problems that will prevent the elections, whenever held, from helping Haiti to break from its brutal history of political instability.