RD-HAITI: It’s official! Repatriations began!

Since Thursday, August 13th, agents of the Dominican immigration have been in the streets throughout the country, verifying the immigration status of foreigners, in search of all the immigrants (of any nationality) whose status in not in order.

As a result, dozens of illegal immigrants were immediately taken to the Welcome Center (Transit) of Haïna.

These foreigners are not registered on the PNRH, the National Plan to Regulate Foreigners. Thus they are not authorized to stay on Dominican territory.

On Friday morning, some of our fellow countrymen who were released, as they were registered on the PNRE, underlined that they were treated well at the time of their arrest. They also praised the quality of the Welcome Center.

Others who were arrested, approximately 20 illegal Haitians who had not managed to qualify for the PNRE after having completed the identification forms according to International Conventions, were sent back to Haiti aboard a minibus in two groups of 10.  They were handed over to Haitian authorities in Elias Piña and Dajabon.

Until now the immigrants, whose status was checked in the center of Haina, are all Haitians. They were arrested on the base of Mirador Sur, on the Avenue Jose Contreras and at km 8 and 9 of Carretera Sanchez.

It should be recalled that before the beginning of these repatriations, the Ministry of Dominican Defense trained for several months 2,000 soldiers, who learned among other things: Haitian Creole, human rights, migratory intervention, and the use of technology for biometric checks. In addition, they conducted five simulation exercises along the Dominican-Haiti border.

March of Haitians in NY to denounce the decision of the Dominican Republic

The coalition to defend human rights in the Dominican Republic, accompanied by more than about fifteen organizations, organized a peaceful march on  August 14^th in New York to denounce publicly the decision of the Dominican Republic to deport Dominicans of Haitian origin in Haiti, learnt HPN.

"We do not want to remain indifferent. We want to take to the street and to denounce publicly the injustice of the Dominican Republic by denationalizing Dominicans of Haitian origin while violating international standards and norms on the subject," said one of the initiators of the movement, Lesly Thomas to HPN.

The march was scheduled to leave Brooklyn, Eastern Parkway at 9 am in the morning and take Flatbush Avenue toward the Brooklyn Bridge. It was scheduled to end in front of City Hall.

"We mobilized the majority of the Haitian churches in New York, and the media of the Haitian community. We have supporters who cover the social media and certain celebrities support the movement, such as Emmeline Michel and Wyclef Jean," said Thomas.

"The march is not only [for] Haitians, but also it is to defend human rights, because those concerned are Dominicans of Haitian origin," specified Thomas who wants to draw the attention of the international media and American president Barak Obama concerning this inequitable treatment of Dominicans of Haitian origin.

USA-HAITI: Kenneth Merten was scheduled to officially begin on Monday, August 17th.

The former ambassador of the United States in Haiti, Kenneth H. Merten, will officially take office on Monday, August 17th as special coordinator for Haiti to the State Department.

He succeeds Thomas Adam.

Merten, according to a press release from the U. S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, served as special coordinator for Haiti and as assistant-secretary to the Office of Business in charge of the Western Hemisphere since the middle of August, 2015. He was an ambassador twice previously. Most recently an ambassador of the United States in the Republic of Croatia from 2012 till 2015, and ambassador of the United States in Haiti from 2009 till 2012. He was also executive secretary to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and prior to that to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Haitian media did not hesitate to underline that it was Kenneth Merten who had come to the aid of President Michel Martelly when the Senate tried to dismiss him from his post due to his foreign nationality. During a ceremony at the national Palace, Kenneth Merten had declared that President Martelly does not have U. S. citizenship. Consequently, he was accused by the opposition parties of supporting the administration in office.

Here's What went wrong with Haiti's Elections by David Kroeker Maus

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, August 10, 2015 (AMG) — The official results from [last week’s] first round of legislative elections won’t be announced for 10 days, but as polls closed last night, the numbers were coming in nevertheless: 54 voting centers (5% of the total) forced to close because of violence and intimidation; at least 5 people killed, and 137 arrested for election-day violence or disruption.

The long-awaited elections, the country’s first in over four years, had been greeted with enthusiasm and energy from the candidates and political parties: 128 different parties registered to participate in the election, and during the last two months, every available surface – from telephone poles to broken-down cars left on the roadside – was plastered with campaign posters.

But the response from the general public was a shrug: even before reports of violence at voting centers discouraged would-be voters from turning up, most analysts were predicting very low turnout.

The sheer scale of the election — all the positions that should have been contested during the last four years are now being contested in the same year — combined with the staggering number of political parties fielding candidates, meant that this election was always going to be a logistical challenge.

To these logistical impediments were added a number of political hurdles, some of which arose during the course of the campaign, but many of which have much deeper roots. All these combined to create a strange mix of apathy and instability that cast a pall over elections that were supposed to return Haiti to democratic normalcy.

Here’s what went wrong.

Official laxity and denial: Throughout the day, as reports of irregularities and attacks on polling stations multiplied, various officials, from the President on down, continued to insist that everything was under control. Indeed, the head of the Provisional Electoral Council (known by its French acronym CEP) triumphantly declared that the skeptics who questioned the CEP’s ability to organize a free and fair election had been proved wrong.

This naïveté, or else outright denial, in the face of apparent instability also characterized the Haitian authorities’ response to pre-election day violence. Even when several candidates were attacked in the weeks leading up to the election, the CEP and police insisted that the violence was unrelated to the campaign.

This attitude of denial appears to have influenced security planning for the election, as guards at voting centers were either unprepared to handle attacks by partisans or totally absent. Some eyewitnesses reported that police didn’t arrive at a voting center that was ransacked in Cité Soleil until one hour later, whilst another report indicated that three officers had been present when the tension started, but failed to intervene.

Party Observers: One measure meant to increase transparency of the voting process was allowing political parties to send representatives to the voting centers to observe both the actual vote and the counting afterward. In theory, having representatives of every side should reduce the potential for irregularities that favor one particular party. But in practice, allowing all 128 parties to send a representative to all 1,508 voting centers was logistically impossible.

One the eve of the election, as party observers waited up to 12 hours to get their credentials, the CEP decided at the eleventh hour to allow only five observers per voting center, but without a clear formula for how those spots would be distributed amongst the parties. This led to mass confusion on Election Day, as observers from different parties at some of the larger voting centers fought, pushed and shoved one another out of the way, trying to make their way in. In at least a few of the voting centers, the vandalism of ballot boxes was perpetrated by disgruntled party observers who’d been denied access.

Late opening: Although all voting centers were officially scheduled to open at 6am, actual opening times varied widely across the country. A crowd-sourced map of election incidents showed reports that some voting centers didn’t open until 11am.

The official ballots for the election, which were imported by UNDP from Dubai, didn’t arrive in Port-au-Prince until just over a week before the election, and some polling places still hadn’t received their ballots by Sunday morning.

There also seemed to have been a bit of carelessness in the printing of the ballots.

“Indelible ink:”

The CEP’s assurances that the ink used to mark who had already voted was ‘indelible’ proved not to be universally true shortly after the first voters left their polling places. While some voters were indeed left with ink stains on their fingers, many were able to easily wash it off with nothing but water, raising questions about whether some voters would be able to vote multiple times.

Foreign intervention in previous election: Although not immediately apparent, the intervention of the ‘international community’ (specifically the US and Canada) during the country’s last election cycle in 2010-11 had a profound effect on this one.

After results from the first round of presidential voting in 2010 showed Michel Martelly in third place, his supporters took to the streets to protest the outcome, demanding that their candidate be included in the second-round run-off. The Organization of American States (OAS) obliged and intervened, declaring the first-round results null and void, and replacing Jude Célestin, who had come in second, with Martelly on the second-round ballot.

This blatant foreign intervention had at least two effects: It drastically reduced Haitian voters’ confidence in the efficacy of their votes, contributing to a general lack of trust in elections, and thus widespread apathy (if not antipathy) toward this particular election. Secondly, it legitimized the role of partisan instigators in determining election results.

Having managed to cancel out 5% of the votes before they were even tabulated, rowdy partisans have already made their mark on this election, and, following the example of 2010, may strike again when official results are announced next week.

Illogical voting registration: Another recurring problem on Sunday was voters showing up to polling places and being turned away when their names were not found on the lists. This can be attributed, at least in part, to the haphazard and illogical way in which registered voters were assigned a polling place. For example, Daniel, a resident of Delmas — a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince that lies east of the city center — was assigned to a voting center in Carrefour, a city west of Port-au-Prince. Yves, who was registered to vote in the southern city of Jacmel, was assigned to a voting center in the rural hinterland.

Many of those who knew before Election Day that they had been registered in faraway voting centers chose to stay home. But others, assuming they could vote at the center nearest their home, showed up only to be disappointed.

Accessibility: For the minority of Haitians who still trusted the integrity of the elections and wanted to vote, an additional obstacle was put in place: the government announced that no public transport would be allowed on Election Day. Although this ban wasn’t strictly enforced — I saw several ‘tap-taps’ (pickup trucks converted into buses) on the roads of Port-au-Prince yesterday — it certainly acted as a deterrent, thus discouraging those would-be voters who had been assigned to vote at polling places far from their home.

Some of these problems can be addressed before Haiti’s presidential elections on October 25; many cannot. After what they saw yesterday, Haitian voters will require a lot of convincing.

$36 million [US] spent on Haiti's elections how?

Written by Staff Writer on 10 August 2015.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (sentinel.ht) - Where did $36 million [US] spent on legislative elections in Haiti go? There are countries in Africa, of the same population size as Haiti, which spend $8 million on good elections.

Rwanda, with a population of 11.7 million, organizes good elections where results are returned within 24 hours. Their 2013 legislative elections cost $8 million [US].

With the technology available in 2015, it takes Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council weeks to publish results for poorly held and contested elections.

CEP President Pierre Louis Opont could not give turnout figures during a press conference that followed the closure of all polling centers throughout the territory. Opont hadn't even a ballpark to give journalists which posed questions mainly about the election administrator revoked for trying to "manipulate the process", according to him.

A scandal during the process may give some clues about the spending decisions of the Haitian electoral council. When local publishing houses offered quotes of $4 million [US] to print election ballots, the CEP president instead opted for a $10 million [US] printer in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Reliable and secure tourist taxis …

Last Thursday, at a press conference, the Ministry of the Tourism and the Creative Industries (MTIC) launched a project of support for the tourist taxi drivers of the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince. The aim is to establish a reliable and secure transport service for visitors from the hotels of Pétion-Ville and the City center.

For that purpose, six new tourist taxis were present to the representatives of two associations of tour guides: the Association of Independent Drivers for the Development of the Tourism (ACIDT), and the Association of Tour Guides of Haiti (ACGH).

"The MTIC gave itself the task of supporting the drivers of these associations by enabling them to have the proper training, as well as a fleet of cars adapted to provide optimal tourist transport to the tourists who choose  Haiti …" declared, Maryse Noel, Chief Executive Officer of the Ministry.

It should be noted that the drivers of the ACIDT and the ACGH have received a two-month training to offer a service that is adequate to the visitors during their stay.

For her part, Johanne Barthelemy, the Assistant Coordinator of the department of Promotion, Travel and Events of the MTIC, explained that in agreement with the drivers, a price list of fares and the address and phone number of these associations, will from now on be on-line on the Ministry’s promotional site.

These exclusive taxis which can transport a maximum of three passengers will be at the service of the customers in four Pétion-Ville Hotels and in two hotels based at the heart of the Haitian capital.