 A kidnapped international Red Cross worker was found shot to death, the organization said Friday, expressing its concerns about escalating violence that threatens elections to replace ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. "Elections are the bridge to democracy," trumpets a slogan to persuade frightened Haitians to vote.
| Liberty's the bridge to democracy. If you're not living in fear of your life from roving bands of banditti, you can vote, just like you can do most other things. Emma Goldman was a hairy old bitch. |
Crossing that bridge is proving anything but easy.
| That's usually the case when you confuse the effect with the cause... |
Daily killings and kidnappings, dismally low voter registration and logistical snags are forcing election organizers to consider tough choices, including suggestions of delaying the balloting in some areas.
| Which brings up the libertarian dichotomy: anarchy is the logical extreme of libertarianism. To achieve genuine liberty for most, sometimes somebody — which will usually but not always be the gummint — has to crack skulls or even stack bodies of a few. |
Joel Cauvin, a Haitian employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross, was abducted Wednesday evening and found dead near his home the next day, the committee said Friday. The Geneva-based organization said it was "extremely concerned about the growing insecurity in Haiti."
| But not concerned enough to call for some serious head cracking. They can always hire somebody to take his place, and the guys wrinkling their brows and looking Concerned™ aren't the guys who're on site, taking their chances with today's equivalent of the Visigoths. |
Cauvin's family had been negotiating a ransom with his captors when talks abruptly and inexplicably broke off, said Wolde Saugeron, an ICRC spokesman in Haiti.
| That'd be when the thugs bumped him off... |
U.N. peacekeepers said they freed a kidnapped woman in a raid Wednesday, and local Radio Metropole identified the victim as a worker for the Haitian Red Cross. "Until the people of Haiti can walk outside of their homes in peace, they cannot be expected to vote," said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who has called for a delay in Haiti's polls until security is restored. The U.S. House of Representatives refused to support her appeal this week.
This is one of the few occasions where I agree with Maxine, though we favor different approaches to the solution of the problem. Until the people of Haiti can walk outside of their homes in peace, they cannot be expected to do much of anything productive, not just voting. Going for groceries is dangerous, not to mention going to work. Delaying the elections as she envisions it would be an indefinite thing — sometime, perhaps 400 years from now, Haiti will be civilized enough to hold them.
Haiti needs a benevolent but ruthless dictatorship to maintain or in many cases introduce some level of services for the citizenry, while at the same time hunting down and either killing or jugging the gangsters who're the legacy of not only Father Aristide, but Papa Doc and Baby Doc and of their predecessors as well. It's the society that's corrupt, as is evidenced by the fact that Haitian emigres do perfectly well in the U.S.A. They even vote.
The problem with my approach is that particularly in Haiti, dictatorships, while usually ruthless, haven't ever, as far as I know, been benevolent. Luckily, not being in charge, I'm not required to come up with an approach that avoids the extremes of dictatorship and anarchy. The only real solution might be to remove all the Haitians to other countries and repopulate the country from scratch. That'd be an interesting, if impractical, experiment. I suspect that the new inhabitants would immediately lapse into the kind of brutal corruption that's always been Haiti's lot because it's actually something in the water. |
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