On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Michael Perelman challenged the Council on Foreign Relations' assertion
> that voter turnout in Aristide's election was 5%. Here's corrorboration.
>
> I interviewed Robert Fatton, author of Haiti's Predatory Republic, on
> the radio today - it'll go up on the web tomorrow. The publisher, Lynne
> Reinner Books, made me pay the FedEx bill and still couldn't get it here
> before the show, so I only just started looking at it. On p. 123, it
> says, "While in both instances [1997 & 2000] fraud was pervasive and
> voter participation extremely low (barely 5 percent in 1997), the
> Clinton administration and the international community characterized the
> elections as 'free and fair.'"
This isn't corrobation, although it might be a good guess as to where the CFR's mistake originally came from. The 5% cited here has nothing to do with Aristide's election in 2000. It refers to a completely different election, the 1997 midterm elections to the Haitian Senate under the muddy administration of Rene Preval.
According to this Human Rights Watch Report, which is scathingly critical of Lavalas' behavior during the 2000 elections, the turn out for those elections was "well over 50%:"
URL: http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/americas/haiti.html
Michael