Haiti Risks Losing U.S. Aid Over Skewed Election Results

The Clinton administration will warn Haiti’s government next week that it risks losing tens of millions of dollars in U.S. aid unless it voids the results of widely condemned elections, a State Department official said Friday.

The balloting in May and July gave the party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide sweeping victories in both houses of Haiti’s reconstituted Parliament. But U.S. officials and international monitors say the results were tallied in a way that violated rules established by Haiti’s own election commission, skewing the outcome.

Since 1994, when American military forces intervened to restore democracy, the United States has channeled at least $2 billion in aid to Haiti. U.S. officials now acknowledge that the funds largely have failed to institutionalize democracy or bring sustainable development to the troubled nation.

This year’s elections were the first since Aristide’s handpicked successor, Rene Preval, came to power in 1996. Since January 1999, when the terms of previous members of Parliament and all local officials ended, the country has been without a functioning parliament, leaving Preval to run the country as he pleased.

The elections took place only after the United States and the international community applied considerable pressure on Preval’s government.

They will be followed by Nov. 26 presidential balloting in which Aristide is strongly favored to win.

The senior State Department official said the warning will be issued Tuesday during a meeting in Washington of the Organization of American States, which also has condemned the elections.

“We’re deeply concerned about these developments, and that’s why we’re taking some of these measures,” said the official, who requested anonymity to avoid disrupting sensitive, last-minute negotiations with the Haitian government.

The threatened measures include the withdrawal of about $20 million in financial support for the November presidential election, denial of U.S. recognition for the new Parliament that was installed Monday, and a recommendation that international lending institutions not extend new financing to the Haitian government.

The United States would continue to contribute about $70 million a year for education, development and infrastructure programs. But that aid would be channeled through nongovernmental groups and used for private-sector programs not administered by Haitian officials.

“We hope that these steps will prevent the government from controlling these resources or using them for political purposes,” the State Department official said. “We’re not going to make the Haitian people suffer because the government isn’t doing the right thing.”

Observers predict that another round of desperate Haitian rafters and asylum-seekers will set out for Florida’s shores this year, especially if the amount of aid and loans to the country is reduced.

Preval’s government has asserted that the nation’s election commission is an independent body whose decisions cannot be overturned by the government.

International monitors say that if the country’s electoral law had been followed, 10 of the 19 Senate seats at stake would have been subject to runoff elections.

Republican lawmakers in the U.S., opposition leaders in Haiti and even some members of Aristide’s party have criticized U.S. assistance to the country as a failure. They contend that, despite the costly U.S.-led military and civilian effort, which drove out a junta and restored Aristide to power, there are more signs today of budding dictatorship than of blooming democracy.

While many governments in Europe and Latin America condemned the elections almost immediately, the U.S. remained publicly silent until now. But the State Department official said this week’s installation of the new Parliament was “the final straw.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, an OAS mission will issue a report that mirrors the administration’s findings, the official said. The U.S. representative to the organization, Luis Lauredo, will announce Washington’s new position.