Monday, September 05, 2005

Anteing up

Haiti's Lavalas party, facing the choice of running a candidate from jail or not running at all in the country's next election, chose the former today:
Aristide's Lavalas Family party said it would register the Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste as its standard bearer next week, apparently ending a heated internal feud over whether to participate in elections - the first since the bloody February 2004 uprising that helped topple Aristide.

"Even if he is in jail, we will register him," Rene Monplaisir, a Lavalas leader in the pro-Aristide slum of Cite Soleil, told cheering supporters in an assembly hall in Port-au-Prince, the capital.

This is the first possible positive sign for democracy in Haiti in quite some time: at the very least the party which has consistently won past elections is willing to come to the table.

But that doesn't mean Lavalas will accept the process if it doesn't turn out for them - and as long as Jean-Juste is trying to conduct his campaign from behind bars, there'll be ready backing for a claim that the interim government has stacked the deck. Meanwhile, there's absolutely no reason to think that the military groups who launched coups against Aristide will accept a Lavalas victory this time out.

Unfortunately, the election may be nothing more than a means to determine the parties' positions in another set of gang and military clashes. Lavalas' willingness to work toward again winning the upper hand democratically is a plus, but the table is still just waiting to be overturned.

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