Editorial | Decree welcome, but …

This newspaper welcomes the formal decree for the establishment of Haiti’s transitional presidential council.

However, we look forward to assurance from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) that the fine print of the proclamation accords with the agreement reached in Kingston a month ago rather than an effort by those in power to circumvent some of its provisions as is apparently being claimed by some political actors.

At the same time, CARICOM, through its Eminent Persons Group of former regional prime ministers, has to remain fully engaged in the process to help Haiti, in particular the presidential council, once it is in place, navigate what will be a fraught political period.

This has to be done without being overly intrusive or seeming to remove from Haitians the agency for political action. For there are many Haitian forces, who, for their own advantage, hope for the early collapse in this arrangement and for the security crisis and political instability to continue in the country.

Indeed, some have already cast this agreement, for which CARICOM facilitated Haitian stakeholders, as a foreign imposition – akin to the early days when Haiti was subjected to foreign interventions and gunboat diplomacy.

COMPELLING REASONS

There are many compelling reasons for supporting the transitional arrangement that Haitians now have on the table and why The Gleaner holds it as a potentially good model for the country’s long-term constitutional arrangement. Not least of these is that in a notoriously fractious political culture, with weak institutions and consensus-building an almost alien notion, it will force disparate political actors into the same room to debate and negotiate and to agree on actions for the functioning of the state.

Indeed, under the Kingston Accords, a nine-member council with seven voting members from political parties and the private sector, plus two non-voting members representing NGOs and interfaith groups, is to be set up.

The council is to appoint an interim prime minister to replace Ariel Henry, who has acted in the post and has been the only recognised constitutional authority for the more than two and a half years since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. The council and the new prime minister are to name a Cabinet and run the country until presidential and assembly elections are held.

Their other critical short-term role is to prepare for the international security mission to the country, which has been subject to a near takeover of criminal gangs that have killed and injured several thousand people and created a wholly dysfunctional society in the time since Mr Moïse’s murder. Nearly half of Haiti’s more than 11 million people are either food-insecure or outright hungry.

While the council is transitional, with the job of returning the country to regular constitutional arrangements – insofar as there is adherence to such norms in Haiti – its demonstration effect, hopefully, will mark it for serious consideration in a process of constitutional reform. Which should be a next-step for Haiti.

MAJORITY VOTE

The council is to operate by majority vote, and its members are expected, as CARICOM reported last month, to “co-sign the orders, decrees, and to sign off on the agenda of the Council of Ministers”.

As we observed previously, the arrangement broadly resembles the system in Switzerland, a rich democracy in central Europe, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, a post-Yugoslavia Balkan state that is still affected by the ethnonationalism that led to the Balkans wars of the 1990s. It has hints, too, of what obtains in post-Troubles Northern Ireland, where the first minister and her deputy effectively share power without the rotating chairmanship of the other two arrangements.

The fundamental premise of these arrangements is to prevent the concentration of power in a single person, thereby forcing political players to strive for consensus. Which makes sense in post-conflict states like Bosnia-Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, and has proved its worth in Switzerland for nearly 180 years.

This arrangement is likely to be Haiti’s best chance for stability for decades. It ought not be missed.

In that regard, CARICOM, as guarantor of the agreement, has to be vigilant about its execution, including determining whether there is merit to the complaint of some parties that the decree published last week introduced “major modifications” that “distort” the Kingston Accords. That claim is notable and surprising, given CARICOM’s fulsome public welcome of the decree.