ARTICLE - RIOTS SPREAD IN HAITI AFTER RESULTS

RIOTS SPREAD IN HAITI AFTER DISPUTED ELECTION RESULTS
(Toronto Star) - By Jennifer Wells, Feature Write

PORT-AU-PRINCE—Through the swirling Père Lebrun smoke the UN officer locked eyes.

Blue helmets. Guns at shoulder height. The very white UN tanks rumbled up the main Delmas road Wednesday morning in the wake of a presidential election that has left Haiti locked in crisis.

The Père Lebrun, or burning tires, remain the signature feature of Haitian protest, the name adopted from a long-ago tire merchant in Port-au-Prince, their presence appearing now to mark every major roadway.

The tires shot flames into the sky of the capital. Protesters threw rocks against tin fences, the sound reverberating like cannon fire, the detritus from the Jan. 12 earthquake providing a ready arsenal. Enormous garbage containers, dragged into the streets, served as barricades and the conventionally insane Haitian traffic was all but non-existent. Shops stayed closed and street merchants were largely absent.

And then, the shots. Staccato and frightening. A young woman huddled against me in the crook of a concrete wall as if I were any protection.

Pap, pap, pap. And the officer locked eyes.

When asked what the soldiers were shooting and why, UN military spokesperson Barbara Mertz responded, “I have no information on that at this time.” Later reports that UN peacekeepers shot and killed two protesters in Les Cayes on Haiti’s south coast were unfounded, says UN spokesperson Vincenzo Pugliese, who added that those deaths were attributable to “different party militants.”

By late Wednesday afternoon the peacekeepers were deploying tear gas and rubber bullets outside the provisional electoral council in the capital.

As forewarned, the match has been lit. The election that put former first lady Mirlande Manigat in first place with 31 per cent of the vote has offered predictable chaos and no predictable outcome, with second place finisher Jude Celestin ahead of Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly by just 0.64 per cent.

American Airlines has cancelled flights into the capital. The United Nations imposed travel restrictions. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon urged “all political actors to address irregularities in accordance with Haitian electoral law.”

It seems, as it often does in Haiti, that an obscure play is being dramatized.

The words of protest, however, are crystal clear. “We won’t lose the battle,” said Andre Ense, a Martelly supporter, leaning against a trashed tap-tap minibus on Avenue Jean-Jacques Dessalines. “The ground will shake again.”

And it did. Late Wednesday morning we stood and watched flames leaping out of the roof of Celestin’s campaign headquarters on Ruelle Rivière, the ground littered with campaign literature, the dense odour of gasoline filling the air. Rock throwers had been shot by security guards, a local gathering of residents said, and the headquarters had been ignited in retaliation.

It has been an incendiary interregnum to what was expected to be a clear two-way run-off to success President Réne Préval.

“The election was obviously rigged and plagued with massive fraud,” Damian Melo from the Martelly campaign communicated via email. “The U.S. Embassy statement was very clear [the] results are inconsistent with preliminary results. We have our legal team preparing all appeals and challenges.” He was referring to an embassy release Tuesday that the preliminary results were inconsistent with those forecast by the National Election Observation Council.

In a news conference from his home Wednesday, the phantomesque president appeared at moments near catatonic and offered little in the way of clarity. “The candidates have ways to contest the results,” Préval said, adding that the numbers were only preliminary. “We knew the elections were not perfect. There were some irregularities.”

It was a moment to disabuse anyone of the notion that having the president speak would introduce an environment of calm resolve.

Violence, Preval warned, would only bring more trouble, and barricaded streets would only serve to hamper the cholera response. “Right now, planes cannot land with medicines. Investors won’t want to come if things stay like that.”

The president has only himself to blame as he has done alarmingly little to pull the country together.

Edouard Paultre, head of the Haitian Council of Non State Actors, told the Star that frauds and irregularities observed by his group included ballot box stuffing and coercion backed by threat of violence. He added that the council estimates that between 30 and 50 per cent of eligible voters did not get the chance to cast a ballot because they could not find their names on the poll roster.

But Paultre also said a three-way second round cannot be countenanced. “The law is clear,” said. “That cannot happen.”

Not surprisingly, Celestin backers made themselves scarce on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

Celestin himself remained mute. At day’s end, Joseph Lambert, chief co-ordinator of Celestin’s Inite (Unity) Party, said the party could not understand how the vote count fell so far below the 52 per cent result the party believes it had landed, and suggested that improperly discounted ballots were to blame. He urged the party to remain “calm, vigilant, available and mobilized.”

In the end Sweet Micky himself was best placed to soothe the populace. His handlers say attempts to hold a news conference were scuppered for security reasons, and Karibe Hotel owner Richard Buteau confirmed he had been advised against allowing Martelly to appear at his usual locale.

Instead, Martelly went live on radio with a surprisingly terse speech. Thanks for the love, he said. Be on the watch for “infiltrations” that could result in his party being held responsible for violent acts not of their own making.

“Watch to your left, watch to your right. I am with you and will be all the way to victory. Tét kale.”

It was not a message to sing the country to sleep. It was a rallying cry.