Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Haiti: Government and Politics
late 1995. As the election date drew near, speculation centered
around two questions: would President Aristide seek to extend
his term by three years to make up for the time spent in exile,
and, if not, to whom would he give the Lavalas nod as candidate.
Both questions remained unanswered until several weeks
prior to the election date. Ultimately, Aristide did not respond
to pressure from among his partisans for his additional three
years and endorsed his close friend and first prime minister,
Rene Garcia Preval, as the Lavalas candidate. Running under
the Bo Tab la (Everyone Around the Table) symbol of Lavalas,
Preval easily defeated the handful of barely known opposition
candidates from small political groups. Although his margin of
victory was huge, voter turnout, at just 28 percent, was significantly
lower than the 51 percent for the parliamentary and
municipal elections held just months earlier. Haiti experienced
the first peaceful transition in its history of democratically
elected presidents at Preval's inauguration on February 7,
1996. As Jean-Bertrand Aristide handed over the presidential
sash, his successor assumed the difficult roles of leading a
country still reeling from decades of bad governance and of
succeeding an enormously popular, and young, national hero.
Preval chose agronomist and OPL partisan Rosny Smarth as
his prime minister nominee. Smarth easily won parliamentary
confirmation as the post-intervention international military
presence continued to diminish. The MNF had already withdrawn
on March 31, 1995, handing over its authority to a much
smaller UN peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Mission
in Haiti (UNMIH), whose mandate was set to end a year later.
Through a series of UN Security Council resolutions responding
to requests from the government of Haiti, however,
UNMIH's mandate was extended to July 1996. The UN peacekeepers
ultimately remained in Haiti until November 1997,
however, through a vastly scaled down United Nations Support
Mission in Haiti (UNSMIH) between July 1996 and July 1997,
and an even smaller United Nations Transition Mission in Haiti
(UNTMIH) from August to November 1997.
While the international military presence was diminishing
and the PNH was assuming complete responsibility for Haiti's
public safety, the Preval/Smarth government enacted programs
and policies aimed at addressing Haiti's most pressing
social and economic problems. To emphasize its advocacy of
decentralization, the government spotlighted programs that
would move resources out of Port-au-Prince to the countryside.
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