“I express my modest gratitude to the political institutions that support me,” Lambert wrote on Friday evening (local time) on Twitter. He wants to pave the way for a democratic change of power. Presidential and parliamentary elections are scheduled for September in Haiti.
However, the Senate – the upper house of the Haitian Parliament – has no longer had a quorum since January 2010. It was therefore initially unclear whether Lambert could actually take office. Because a parliamentary election scheduled for October 2019 was canceled due to violent protests against Moses, among other things, there are only 10 out of 30 senators whose terms of office have not expired. Nobody sits in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies. According to media reports, eight of the ten senators voted for Bertrand, two abstained.
Ariel Henry Interim Prime Minister
Previously, several political actors in the Caribbean state, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic, agreed on Lambert as interim head of state on Friday. This emerges from a letter signed by representatives of several parties and movements – including the conservative PHTK, which belonged to Moses. However, the signatures of some important forces were also missing. The neurosurgeon Ariel Henry is to become interim prime minister and thus head of government. Moses had appointed him to the office on Monday.
Henry’s swearing-in, scheduled for Wednesday, was canceled after the attack. The foreign minister and previous interim prime minister Claude Joseph declared himself acting interim head of government. As such, in the past few days he has given speeches to the nation, signed edicts and held talks with representatives of foreign governments. In an interview with the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste, Henry said he believed he was prime minister – not Joseph.
The 53-year-old head of state Mose was attacked and shot in his residence on Wednesday night. His wife Martine was seriously injured. It is being treated in the USA. According to the Haitian police, 28 foreign mercenaries carried out the murder: 26 Colombians and two Americans of Haitian origin. So far, 20 suspects have been arrested and three killed. The background to the crime was unclear.
Moses extremely unpopular
Moses, in office since 2017, was extremely unpopular. He was accused of corruption, links to brutal gangs and autocratic tendencies. Opposition parties had already appointed a judge at the Supreme Court as transitional president in February because, in their opinion, Moses’ term of office had expired. Protests have paralyzed Haiti over and over again in the past three years. Most recently, bloody fights between gangs for control of parts of the capital have displaced thousands of people.
The US has rejected the Haitian government’s request for military assistance to protect important infrastructure such as airports and ports. The United States has no plans to provide military aid to Haiti “at this point,” said a senior US government official. In a conversation between the previous interim president Claude Joseph and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken Wednesday, Joseph had made the request for security support.
The UN Security Council had also been asked for help, said the Minister for Elections, Mathias Pierre. Since Wednesday’s assassination attempt, the country has fallen deeper into a political crisis that could exacerbate growing hunger, gang violence and the Covid-19 outbreak.
