Too Much, Too Late

Haiti's leaders are immersed in politics as Port-au-Prince burns.

As the various armed groups around Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince besieged a vulnerable population, the byzantine plotting of Haiti’s political and economic grandees claimed the scalp of Prime Minister Garry Conille last week.

Conille, a former United Nations official who had previously served as Prime Minister from October 2011 until May 2012 during the presidency of Michel Martelly, had existed since June in uneasy cohabitation with Haiti’s “transition council,” the all-male, seven member body (attached to which are two non-voting “observers”) midwifed into existence by the regional body CARICOM in April. Comprised largely of veterans of Haiti’s political disasters past and with three of its members under investigation for corruption, the council managed to more or less hobble along under the leadership of Edgard Leblanc Fils, a veteran politician from the Organisation du peuple en lutte (OPL) political party, before its “rotating presidency” fell into the hands of Leslie Voltaire, a member of the Fanmi Lavalas party who has served as the proxy for one of Haiti’s more sanguinary ex-presidents, Lavalas leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, for the last two decades.