Haiti’s president shameful assault on democracy
The Biden administration’s response to Haiti’s spiraling political crisis may be motivated by wariness of entangling the U.S. in a neighbor’s affairs, or adding another challenge to the Administration’s extremely full plate. But Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse appears to be taking the response as a green light to continue his assault on democracy.
The assault is making the crisis worse for Haitians and threatens to entangle the United States in a much more serious crisis.
In April 2019, I met in Haiti with the victims of the November 2018 La Saline massacre, an attack by gangs, police officers and government officials intended to punish the neighborhood for organizing anti-government protests. When I returned, I warned the Trump administration, which provided generous financial, diplomatic and political support to President Moïse, that unless there was accountability for the dozens of killings at La Saline, Haiti would descend into a spiral of chaos and violence.
Over the next two years, the Trump Administration continued to stand by President Moïse as he dismantled Haiti’s democracy and promoted the chaos and violence I had feared. With U.S backing, Moïse refused to negotiate in good faith with opponents. Terms expired for most legislators in January
2020, and all local officials in July, without elections for their replacements. Government-allied gangs created a formal alliance and systematically waged deadly attacks on opposition neighborhoods, often with police support. Police met peaceful protests with teargas, clubs and bullets. Dissidents and journalists were arrested and killed. President Moïse created an unconstitutional National Intelligence Agency to spy on opponents.
President Moïse now says he wants elections, but only after a constitutional referendum, which is scheduled for April. The referendum is Moïse’s most audacious and dangerous power grab yet. The changes he proposed to the Constitution would completely eliminate the Senate, replace the semiindependent Prime Minister with a Vice-President, and allow Moïse to handpick an electoral council that would run the next two Presidential elections.
This referendum is as unconstitutional in Haiti as it would be in the United States. Two years before the current Constitution’s adoption in 1987, the notorious dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, had engineered a similar referendum that proclaimed him President-for-Life. In response, the new Constitution explicitly prohibited referendums, and established an intentionally difficult procedure for amendments that requires super-majorities in the legislature, as the U.S. Constitution does. President
Moïse’s referendum is subtler than Duvalier’s, but it is similarly autocratic.
Haiti’s crisis escalated on Feb. 7, the date that President Moïse’s term ended, according to a large swath of Haitian civil society, including the judicial oversight body, the bar association, church leaders and thousands of people on the streets. They are joined by several of my Democratic colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy. President Moïse, on the other hand, contends he has another year in office. On Feb. 5, the State Department announced that it agreed with him.
The Moïse Administration apparently took the announcement as assurance that the Trump Administration’s policy of near-unconditional support would continue under President Biden. Before sunrise on Feb. 7, police arrested – illegally – Supreme Court Justice Yvickel Dabresil and nineteen other suspected dissidents. Protests that day and the next were quickly snuffed out by police teargas, brutality and bullets.
On Feb. 8, Moïse fired Justice Dabresil and two Supreme Court colleagues. This move was just as illegal as it would be in the United States, and left the court short of a quorum required for rulings on constitutional issues.
The U.S. Embassy did express concern about the justices’ firings, but that mild reproach will have no effect. On Feb. 10, police and soldiers turned their guns and tear gas launchers towards journalists, injuring several. Judge Dabresil was jailed for five days, before being released after two courts ruled his arrest illegal.
All signs point to the Moïse Administration continuing to dismantle Haiti’s democracy. That will eventually present the U.S. with a refugee crisis and an expensive tab for helping to put the country back together.
The Biden Administration can take several practical, low-cost steps to help resolve Haiti’s crisis without risking entanglement. It can start by acknowledging the broad consensus in Haiti — reflected on Capitol
Hill — that President Moïse’s term has ended, which will force Moïse to negotiate in good faith with his opponents.
Second, the U.S. can declare that it will provide no support for the unconstitutional referendum, either directly or through other organizations such as the United Nations or the Organization of American States.
Finally, the U.S. can comply with the Leahy Law’s prohibition on U.S. financial support for security forces involved in human rights violations and apply Global Magnitsky Act sanctions on any Moïse Administration official engaged in human rights abuse or corruption.
A group of senators, Cuban-American politicians, exile organizations, and members of the island’s opposition asked President Joe Biden Wednesday to condition any eventual negotiation with Cuba on improvements in human rights and political freedoms.
Cuban-American Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that one of his priorities is to restore the promotion of human rights and democracy as fundamental pillars of U.S. diplomacy.
“And that absolutely includes the policy of the United States towards Cuba,” he said in a video shown at an event in Miami, in which he switched from English to
Spanish several times. The issue “is deeply personal for my family,” he noted.
Without referring directly to a possible policy change under Biden, Menendez, one of the most vocal critics within the Democratic Party of the thaw promoted by former President Barack Obama, said that U.S. policy toward the island should obtain concrete results.
“As the U.S. strives to strengthen respect for democracy and human rights in Cuba and around the world, we must make sure our efforts produce tangible results on these fundamental issues,” he said. “We must guarantee that the conduct of U.S. diplomacy, in turn, requires and demands that our adversaries and authoritarian regimes take steps to restore and respect the rights of their citizens.”
The Biden administration has said it is reviewing policy toward the island. Biden has vowed to reverse former President Donald Trump’s sanctions, starting with lifting restrictions on remittances and travel. But it remains unclear whether he would completely dismantle the previous policy to foster a new thaw in relations.
The event, organized by the Inspire America Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks regime change on the island, offered its vision for bipartisan unity on Cuba policy, which is not the prerogative of a single party, said the group’s president, lawyer Marcell Felipe. In the past, Felipe has organized events to rally support for Trump’s Cuba policies and other Republican politicians among Cuban exiles.
“Elected officials in this community have differences, but if something unites us, it is asking for the freedom of Cuba,” said Republican U.S.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez, former mayor of MiamiDade County. But the majority of Republican politicians at the event openly pushed back on pursuing normalization with Cuba or called for conditioning it on the release of political prisoners and the holding of free elections.
“It is important that we make it clear that any rapprochement with the Cuban regime will not change the future of Cubans at all,” said Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in a video recorded in Spanish.
“Trying to reestablish relations with [Cuban leader Miguel] Díaz-Canel, Raúl Castro’s puppet, is not viable and much less reasonable considering his ties to terrorist groups such as the FARC, the ELN and the narcoregime of [ Nicolás] Maduro,” added Rubio, who was one of the architects of the sanctions against Cuban military companies under the Trump administration.
The Cuban dissident and leader of an island-based opposition group known as the Patriotic Union of Cuba, José Daniel Ferrer, also asked the administration
“not to make concessions that oxygenate this iron grip dictatorship,” in a video sent from Santiago de Cuba. He was released from jail last year after an international outcry but sentenced to house arrest under charges that several human rights organizations labeled as political.
Wednesday’s event came after several memos and letters published by groups that favor a rapprochement with Cuba, asking Biden to eliminate sanctions and resume the process of normalization of relations initiated by Obama.