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Posted Thursday, November 26, 2009
         
Former President Aristide's party, not permitted by Haiti to participate in legislative elections
          
By Reuters
            
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) — The political party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide will be barred from legislative elections scheduled for Feb. 28, Haitian election officials said Wednesday.

The decision drew immediate criticism from Mr. Aristide, who was a populist hero in Haiti before being ousted in an armed rebellion in 2004. From exile in South Africa, he asked whether Haitian election officials were trying to organize an election or “to make a selection.”

Mr. Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, became Haiti’s first freely elected president in 1991 and won a second election in 2000. His Lavalas Family party is still considered the most popular political force in Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation of nine million people.

“The Lavalas Family party will not be allowed to participate in the next election, because the electoral council’s legal counsel said the party did not meet all legal requirements,” the electoral council president, Gaillot Dorsinvil, told local radio stations.

He did not specify which requirements the party had failed to meet.

All but one of the 99 seats in the Parliament’s Chamber of Deputies will be at stake in the February elections, along with one-third of the 30-member Senate. The vote for the one remaining lower house seat will be held later.

Mr. Aristide faced accusations of corruption and despotism when he was forced from power in February 2004 during a bloody armed rebellion. He was also under pressure to quit from the United States and France.

Officials familiar with the electoral council’s deliberations said that the decision to bar Mr. Aristide’s party was motivated by suspicions that the signature on a faxed letter sent by Mr. Aristide, authorizing local representatives to register the party, had been falsified.

Last week, the council asked a Lavalas Family official, Maryse Narcisse, to provide the original copy of Mr. Aristide’s letter. It was provided to election officials, who then decided to bar the party.

In a rare interview, Mr. Aristide confirmed Wednesday on Haiti’s Radio Solidarity that he had given Ms. Narcisse the authority to register the party, and he questioned whether Haitian officials really wanted to hold fair and democratic elections.

“That will depend on whether the electoral council wants to organize an election or to make a selection,” Mr. Aristide said in a telephone interview from South Africa with the radio station. “If they want to organize elections, I encourage them. But if they want to make a selection I urge them not to take that path, because it will not serve the country’s interests.”

The Lavalas Family party was barred from previous elections over accusations that it had failed to meet legal requirements. Mr. Aristide’s allies accused election officials of dismissing their party to aid a new coalition close to President René Préval. The coalition, called Unity, succeeded a previous coalition known as Lespwa.
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