ARTICLE - PROTEST AGAINST ELECTIONS

PROTEST IN HAITI CAPITAL DEMANDS RERUN OF ELECTIONS
(Reuters) - By Joseph Guyler Delva and Allyn Gaestel

PORT-AU-PRINCE - Around 2,000 protesters marched in Haiti's capital on Thursday demanding a rerun of Sunday's elections they said were skewed by fraud, as the jittery Caribbean nation awaited results expected next week.

The march, in which demonstrators waved red cards calling for the immediate exit of outgoing President Rene Preval and his protege, presidential candidate Jude Celestin, was watched by riot police and was boisterous but saw no serious violence.

In the game of soccer, the referee uses a red card to expel players who commit fouls.

The protest was led by a group of presidential candidates -- excluding the three main front-runners -- who are calling for the annulment of Sunday's vote, accusing Preval's government of trying to manipulate the elections in Celestin's favor.

It was the latest in several days of simmering unrest over the troubled presidential and legislative elections, which were roiled by confusion and fraud charges and held in the midst of a raging cholera epidemic killing dozens of Haitians each day.

The international community has funded and backed the polls to try to create a stable, legitimate government in the Western Hemisphere's poorest state to lead recovery from a devastating January 12 earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people.

United Nations officials say the protests and sporadic violence, though worrying, are less than the electoral turmoil seen in previous years in Haiti and they and international monitors have endorsed the polls as generally acceptable.

In a politically charged atmosphere, Haiti's electoral authorities are due to release preliminary results from the November 28 polls on Tuesday. But there is widespread expectation that the open presidential race will have to go to a deciding second round vote, provisionally expected on January 16.

"We see that the elections were fraudulent, so we are asking for cancellation and that they do another election in three months," said one of the march leaders, Charles-Henri Baker, a prominent businessman and presidential candidate who finished third behind Preval in the last 2006 elections.

He led Thursday's march along with other candidates, such as former two-time prime minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis and lawyer Jean-Henry Ceant, who is seen as the contender backed by supporters of exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

CREDIBILITY CONCERNS
"Arrest Preval!" and "No to the first round!" the demonstrators shouted. The march swelled as it passed poor city slums and finished at the downtown offices of Haiti's electoral authority. Some protesters barricaded a street and threw stones at U.N. peacekeepers' vehicles.

Baker, Ceant and Alexis were among an initial 12 of the 18 presidential candidates who denounced "massive fraud" on Sunday while voting was still under way, and demanded annulment of the U.N.-supported elections. The move shocked the U.N. mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and threatened to derail the polls.

But after 24 hours of intense pressure from U.N. officials and other foreign diplomats, two presidential front-runners, opposition matriarch Mirlande Manigat and popular musician Michel Martelly backed down and said they wanted the vote to be counted, saying they expected to be the election race leaders.

Haitian electoral rules prohibit the publication of any nonofficial results before the Provisional Electoral Council makes its December 7 preliminary announcement, but one Caribbean news website, Caribbean360, reported Martelly and Manigat finishing ahead of Preval protege Celestin.

Neither of the front-runners are seen obtaining the more than 50 percent of the votes required to win outright in the first round, so the January run-off seems the most likely.

Preval, whose mandate ends on February 7, has repeatedly rejected accusations that he has used his influence to meddle in the electoral process in favor of Celestin, the pick of Preval's Inite (Unity) platform.

In October, a group of U.S. Democratic lawmakers expressed concerns over the impartiality of the Haitian electoral authorities, saying if the international community backed unfair elections this could be a "recipe for disaster."

A prominent U.S. Republican Senator, Richard Lugar of Indiana, voiced similar concerns, citing "numerous reports of irregularities and fraud" in Sunday's elections.

"Political uncertainty now threatens to exacerbate the human suffering in Haiti," Lugar told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday.

(Writing by Pascal Fletcher in Miami; Editing by Jane Sutton and Jackie Frank)