ARTICLE - LOOKING FOR LEADERS

ESSAY: LOOKING FOR LEADERS ON A DAY OF CHAOS IN HAITI
(AOL.com) - By Emily Troutman, Contributor

"As soon as you think you understand Haiti, that's the moment you can be sure you don't understand anything."

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- That Haitian proverb never seemed more true than today. There is so much to understand here, and so little to know.

Most of the 19 candidates running for president came together this weekend to denounce the election after reports of widespread fraud. Sunday was an exhausting day that left the country even more confused. It's not clear how the Haitian government, or the international community, will take action to respect their stance.

Some in Haiti believe ballots cast in the election will be counted and announced without the evidence of widespread fraud. Others think President Rene Preval has rigged the elections, and his candidate, Jude Celestin, will prevail against the sentiment of the people. Some wonder whether Preval will still be in power by Tuesday.

Over the past few days and weeks, with the support of local journalist Roxane Ledan, I was able to meet 15 of the 19 candidates. They are all different, all dedicated in their own ways, for their own reasons, to Haiti's future. And they struggle to keep that focus when, this week, no one can predict what will happen next.

Group Grows Quickly From 3 to 13
Sunday began with a news conference. Three candidates -- Charles Baker, the apparel industrialist and farmer; Jean Henry Ceant, an attorney; and musician Michel Martelly -- made a decision to denounce the elections. They started as three candidates and through phone calls and discussion with others, they ended up at a table of 13. As a group, they took some time to decide what to say.

People in the room told me it was calm. There was a consensus. For everyone, it was a powerful decision. To conclude that the election was a sham meant that each candidate risked his or her own reputation and, for some, a sense of safety.

I asked Baker, a popular opposition candidate, if he feared that the announcement would cause insecurity in Haiti.

"I'm already dead," he said. He told me he isn't afraid, but simply that he's decided. He has committed himself, in his mind, to being part of this opposition, to changing other Haitians' lives.

During his campaign, Baker traveled to the Artibonite region of Haiti nine days after the first outbreak of cholera. There was no government presence, he said. No ambulances, nothing. His campaign truck became a taxi for the dying.

Yvon Neptune, who was once prime minister and spent two years as a political prisoner here, initially left the back-room conversations discouraged, he said, by the other 12 candidates' message.

"I was president of the senate," Neptune said. "I was prime minister. I won't make decisions of the state based on impulse."

Like other candidates, including, perhaps, the few who weren't present, Neptune wondered about the motivation of the group. Was this a legitimate denouncement of illegitimate elections? Or, as Neptune told me, an attempt to "settle scores"?

"We cancel the elections, then what?" he said. "When are the new elections? Preval stays in power?" On Sunday evening, he rejoined the others' position, as did two others today.

Anne Marie Josette Bijou, a physician and candidate for president, was also with the group. This month she told me she has one dream for Haiti: "A new country, democratic, with respect for human rights."

The 12 candidates -- minus Neptune -- finally descended to a conference room at the Hotel Karibe to make their announcement.

They were greeted with wild cheers and applause. They said the elections were meaningless. People went to polling stations and could not vote, they said, which is also what I saw in the few I visited that morning.

One man, at a school in the suburb of Petionville, became furious. He almost cried, or maybe he did cry. And me, along with him. Others were nonplussed. People came into the polling station, could not find their names on the registry and went home. The few who did vote told me they had little faith that their votes would be counted.

"Change. I want change." That's what everyone told me.

Voting in the Streets
After the news conference, Michel Martelly and Charles Baker made plans to visit the office of the provisional electoral council, which manages and will eventually certify the results of this election.

But when Martelly left the hotel, another musician, one-time presidential hopeful Wyclef Jean, met Martelly's crowd. He got swept up and decided to join the entourage, sitting on top of a pickup truck as Martelly rode up the hill to the election office.

For the first 40 minutes, Jean sat on the roof of the truck, furiously concentrated on his cell phone. He seemed so disengaged that I asked him, "Are you endorsing Sweet Micky?"

The crowd was pink, pink and more pink -- Martelly's signature color. Jean told me, "Do you see me on top of any other trucks with other candidates?"

Sometimes it seems to me like everyone is here, but no one wants to be here. The crowd, almost entirely in support of Martelly, was joyful, angry, peaceful, determined, unsure, perhaps like Jean, of what would happen the next few days.

The only thing he's sure of, Jean's representatives told me, is that he wants free and fair elections for Haiti.

A United Nations helicopter circled, and Haitian police forces eventually broke up the parade, which had swelled to 10,000, then 20,000, then more, all over the streets of Port-au-Prince.

I went to meet with Garaudy Laguerre at his house. He is a young presidential candidate who is little-known but was one of the group who called for the election annulment. He was upset and wanted to talk.

Laguerre said that when he joined the opposition to call for an annulment of the election, "I did so with great pain." He said he saw Martelly, along with Baker and Jean, in what seemed to be a celebration through the streets. He said any day there is a fraudulent election in Haiti is a very sad day.

He denounced the actions of the others, saying, "I would hate for people to think this is something to be jubilant about."

Out of curiosity, I called Bijou, the physician, to ask what she thought. She said people were protesting and defending their own rights. To her, the actions of thousands in the streets, happy or not, seemed appropriate.

And other people told me some version of the same sentiment: This is how people vote in Haiti when they cannot vote by other means. They vote in the streets.

A Day of Triumph for Martelly
At the end of the evening, I went to visit Martelly. In many respects, he emerged a victor from the days' events. The crowds along the roads in Port-au-Prince cheered for him and few others. According to polls in Haiti, Martelly was in third place this week.

Earlier in the evening, when Baker joined Martelly and Jean on the truck, I asked if he too was endorsing "Sweet Micky."

"No," Baker said with a smile. "We are [all] endorsing Haiti. It's [Martelly's] crowd, but I'm happy to be here." And he meant it.

As the evening wore on, at Martelly's house, a small group of friends and family surrounded the candidate. For hours, they sat in near-silence, listening to radio reports of the day's events and looking at their phones for news. When the radio reported something positive, they rose into a careful cheer. When it reported fraud, they argued with the radio DJ and turned to each other in disgust.

But eventually, the silence of the night turned to business. Martelly's political consultant, the clever and successful Antonio Sola from the communications group OstosSola, convened several conversations.

Sola is credited with helping Mexican President Felipe Calderon take office there in 2006. He told me Martelly's campaign has been very different, partially because everything -- every meeting, every conversation -- takes place at Martelly's house, somewhere between the kittens in the garden, the women in the kitchen and the empty pool.

As associates -- and sometimes, celebrities -- made their way in and out of the house throughout the evening, his family carried on, as usual. "Sweet Micky," the musical persona of Michel Martelly, has been an enormous figure in Haiti for years, and celebrity and politics converge at his house in a way that everyone is comfortable with already.

Life was like this, his family tells me. A life on the road, a life with intermittent gunfire. Last week, Martelly believes someone tried to kill him in Les Cayes. In the garden of his house, kids run around between the conversations of adults. Life is often about keeping up with, and watching, "Michel."

He says whatever he wants to, and he always manages to draw a crowd.

Lessons to Be Learned
If Martelly or the other candidates have a story to tell, or a lesson to teach, it is about perseverance in chaos. This month they taught me that if you want to become the president of Haiti, there are some unwritten rules.

The first rule is that you have to want to be president. You have to want it beyond reason, beyond reward. You have to want it because you have a dream of Haiti as it once was, or perhaps as it should be. And sometimes, when you look out into the crowds, or knock on doors, you have to allow yourself to see that Haiti, inside of this one.

The second rule to becoming president of Haiti is that you must be fearless. Because with all these foreigners around, and celebrities stopping by, it's easy to forget that Haiti makes her own decisions. When political change happens here, it's often by coups.

It may not be al-Qaida, but some second-rate terrorist is always ready to help a weak state fail. The Haitian Coast Guard has one boat, or maybe a few. Drug dealers love that.

The third, and final rule, is that you must win. And here, the ground shifts. Because winning in Haiti is often not about your dreams and strength alone. Winning is where politics and press conferences and posturing will fail. Winning is the purview of the few, and the very clever.

If you want to be president of Haiti, you have to shout and be quiet all at once. You have to become a hero to some, and an enemy to everyone else. This week will be unusual in Haiti, even for its veterans and purveyors of the unexpected.

You want to be president, that's one thing. To win? That's something else. To change Haiti? To make amends for the past? To give Haiti its future back?

For that, someone will have to fight.