Will Haiti have a transitional government soon? Disagreements lead to more delays

Two weeks after Caribbean nations and the United States helped broker a plan to help Haiti forge a path out of its current gang-driven crisis, designates of a proposed presidential council and the groups that named them are still struggling to find common ground on major points.

The council will be tasked with naming a new prime minister, prepare for the arrival of an multinational force and set a path toward elections. Among the issues still unresolved: Will all the panel’s nine members be involved in governance discussions or just its seven voting members?

While seemingly minor, the differences over the panel’s makeup underscores the delays in finalizing the formation council, which the U.S. and Caribbean leaders are counting on to help stem the tide of violence that has engulfed the capital since Feb. 29 and plunged Haiti deeper into a humanitarian crisis.

On Saturday, the council’s proposed members, meeting over video, agreed that only seven of them will have the right to vote. However, there remains confusion about whether the two observers, representing civil society and the interfaith community, will be allowed to take an active role in discussions. At least one of them is threatening to quit if he isn’t allowed a vote.

“We have fallen into total improvisation,” former Prime Minister Evans Paul said Monday morning during a call-in to Port-au-Prince Radio Caraibes, where he questioned the legality of the plan and voiced strong doubts that it will work. “We need to have nine presidents? We already had this experience in 1956 and that government didn’t last a month …. We cannot return to this again.”

In 1956, Haiti was engulfed in political chaos after President Paul Magloire failed to call elections. Rioting and civil unrest forced Magloire to resign and the country passed through the hands of five provisional governments over seven months before Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier rose to power in 1957 in controversial elections to eventually become president for life.

Paul sees similarities with the forced resignation of current Prime Minister Ariel Henry, which he described as “a coup d’etat.” Henry, who was away from Haiti when the latest violence broke out, was prevented from landing in the Dominican Republic to fly into Haiti and was then pressured by the U.S. and the Caribbean Community to resign. He has said he will resign when the transitional presidential panel is installed.

“Mr. Henry left and went on a mission and they locked him out of the country. Whatever you call it, it’s a coup d’etat,” Paul said. “The biggest mission we have to do today is to restore the authority of the state.”

Paul said he has strong doubts that the current plan will succeed. He said he has yet to see any signs that the transitional council will resolve the grave crisis facing Haitians.

“We have people who don’t have food to eat, who are hiding,” he said. “There is something that needs to be done and the international community is leading us astray.”

It will soon be a month since armed groups in Haiti targeted key government institutions, attacked police stations, the main port and international and domestic airports and succeeded in releasing thousands of prisoners from the country’s two largest prisons.

The siege of the capital has continued since. As members of the council continued discussions among themselves over how they will act, gang members set fire to about 100 vehicles and several buildings in the center of downtown Port-au-Prince and continued to blanket other neighborhoods with heavy gunfire.

Caribbean leaders, who have been engaged in discussions with Haiti’s political and civic leaders, had hoped that a new inclusive government not led by Henry would bring a measure of stability. However, Haitians have struggled to get through just the initial formation of the presidential council.

There have been several changes to the council’s make-up since Caribbean leaders, following a meeting in Jamaica on March 11, gave Haitian political parties and sectors 24 hours to name nine representatives to the panel.

Though representatives were named days later, some have already been replaced and more changes are possible. The person representing civil society — which includes journalists, human-rights advocates and other groups — was replaced soon after being named. The representative of the interfaith community is threatening to resign if he isn’t allowed to cast a vote, and the political party Platform Pitit Desalin, led by former senator Jean-Charles Moïse, is facing an internal insurrection over the politician’s decision to join the transition after at first saying he would not.

On Sunday the political party of former Haitian Prime Minister Claude Joseph announced its third change of designate. Last week, the group had replaced its original choice, a lawyer from Cap-Haitien, with Haiti’s delegate to UNESCO, Dominique Dupuy.

But on Sunday, Dupuy, after impressing members Caribbean leaders, announced she was withdrawing from the process amid a barrage of attacks on social media. In a short video clip in Creole, she said she had received threats to her life and that some people had raised constitutional reservations about her age. Having turned 34 the day before, Dupuy was set to be the council’s youngest member and only woman.

Though Haiti’s constitution requires persons to be 35 years of age to be president, age was not among the four criteria listed by the Caribbean Community when it brokered the creation of the plan. Still, it was raised during discussions among the designates as Dupuy’s name was cited as among five potential candidates to serve as the panel’s president.

“We cannot get out of this current crisis we are in if we don’t divorce ourselves from the bad political practices,” Emile Hérald Charles, a Port-au-Prince political analyst, told the Miami Herald. “If we stay aligned with the political culture that we have, we will not be able to change the situation of the country. To get different results, we have to change the political culture and the way we practice politics.”

Still, like Paul he sees problems ahead for the council, from its inability to arrive at a consensus on the future members of the government to even its debate over whether its final makeup should be announced by proclamation or appear in the country’s official gazette.

Charles said among the ways for them to reduce tensions is for each council member to have equal political and administrative weight. And instead of naming one of the members as president, they should select a member to coordinate meetings and monitor resolutions.

Charles said the biggest problem with the proposed presidential council is that it’s not a solution that came from inside Haiti but “facilitated” by the international community because Haitians could not agree among themselves on a plan forward.

“It’s not a real consensus that is uniquely Haitian,” he said.