Stephen Lendman

[A man lies dead on the ground after an anti-government demonstration in the southern city of Les Cayes, Haiti, Monday, April 7, 2008. Hungry protesters angered by high food prices flooded the streets of Port-au-Prince, forced businesses and schools to close as unrest spread from the countryside. Witnesses said the man was killed by elite protecting hotel 'security guards.' Photo: AP/Nick Whalen/The WE!]

Martelly's mandate is to facilitate profiteering from misery.

Except for Aristide's tenure, what passes for Haitian democracy would make a despot blush, thanks to America's imperial grip on the hemisphere's poorest, long-suffering people.

As a result, last November's presidential and legislative elections might best be called a cruel joke. The entire process was rigged to exclude 15 parties, including by far the most popular, Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas.

Moreover, the election was so tainted by brazen disenfranchisement and fraud, including ballot box stuffing and other irregularities, that legitimate independent observers would have demanded throwing out the results and starting over.

Most Haitians, however, weren't fooled. A scant 22%, in fact, voted, a hemispheric low since record keeping began over 60 years ago.

Since no presidential candidate won a majority, a March 20 runoff followed, pitting stealth Duvalierist Michel ("Sweet Micky") Martelly, an anti-populist former Kompa singer, against Mirlande Manigat, wife of former right-wing president, Leslie Manigat. Between them, they got about 11% support in round one, making them both illegitimate presidential choices.

Even more so for winner Martelly with fewer than 22% of Haitians voting, a new record low so embarrassing it was almost like holding a national election and no one showed up. Why bother with only US approved candidates participating, making both rounds fraudulent, illegitimate, and predictable, assuring sham democracy, continued repression, deep poverty, and exploitation for another five years.

Nonetheless, on May 14, Martelly will be inaugurated as president, by imperial selection, not popular mandate. In a nation of about 9.7 million people, he got about 700,000 votes, about 16.7% of registered voters (about 7% of all Haitians), making him perhaps Haiti's least popular president ever. The people's choice, he's not, with good reason.

Barry Grey
WSWS

Migrants who successfully made the boat trip to the tiny island
of Lampedusa, Italy from the unrest in north Africa receive as-
sistance. Photograph: Francesco Malavolta/AP

The attempt to justify the imperialist war by casting it as a humanitarian intervention to protect Libyan civilians against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi exposed as fraud

The British Guardian newspaper published an investigative report Monday documenting the case of African refugees who were left to die in the early days of the war against Libya by NATO and European authorities who spotted their vessel drifting in the Mediterranean but made no effort to rescue them.

The newspaper, citing the account of survivors and an Eritrean priest in Rome who was one of the last people to communicate with the stranded boat, said the passengers were left to drift in open waters for 16 days, even though the Italian coastguard had been alerted and the vessel had been seen by a military helicopter and an aircraft carrier.

Only nine of the 72 people who boarded the boat in Tripoli on March 25 in a desperate attempt to reach the Italian island port of Lampedusa 180 miles northwest of the Libyan capital survived the ordeal. The others, including 20 women and two babies, died from thirst and starvation while on the boat or after beaching near Misrata on April 10.

The Guardian exposé coincided with an announcement Monday by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR that a refugee boat with as many as 600 people on board sank Friday off the coast of Tripoli. There are no reports of survivors.

UNHCR spokeswoman Laura Boldrini said that, besides the disaster on Friday, at least three other boats with a combined total of several hundred passengers left Tripoli in late March and disappeared.