Posted on Sat, Feb. 11, 2006


AP blog on Haiti elections


Associated Press

This is the fourth of periodic dispatches by Andrew Selsky, the AP's Chief of Caribbean News, who is in Haiti covering the first elections held since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a February 2004 rebellion.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

SATURDAY, Feb. 11, 6:06 p.m. local

It is four days after Haitians went to the polls to elect a new government.

Four days, and still no winner declared.

If it takes much longer, these elections will seem like elections in.....the United States. It took 36 days for President Bush to be declared the winner over Al Gore after the 2000 elections.

The people of Haiti are waiting for the results just as patiently as they waited in long lines for hours and hours to vote on Tuesday.

But will they remain patient?

Right now, leading candidate Rene Preval has 50.33 percent of the vote, with 1.28 million valid votes counted (and 105,450 nullified). No one has yet said how many people voted in all, or when the vote count will be completed.

This is a cliffhanger, because although Preval is far ahead of the pack, he needs 50 percent plus one vote to win outright and avoid a March runoff with the second-place finisher.

Preval is very popular among the poor. How long will their patience last? The poor have been ruled by brutal dictatorships through much of Haiti's history. If Preval dips below 50 percent, there is likely to be suspicion that someone monkeyed with the numbers. One voter told me on election day that heads would roll and buildings would burn if Preval didn't win.

It is a phrase that resonates in Haiti. Army Gen. Jean-Jacques Dessalines uttered those words when he led a rebellion against French troops and colonists in 1802. Many of the French were decapitated, their homes torched.

I've seen a lot of poverty around the world.

Yesterday, as the sun was sinking low, my colleagues Brennan and Evens and I went to the poorest part of the Cite Soleil slum.

I don't think I've seen worse. Not in Africa. Not in Latin America.

This fetid neighborhood was right against the sea. Kids were running around barefoot over trash that had decomposed and been flattened by thousands of other feet. It stunk. My shoes still carry some of the odor. I thought of all the cuts and infections the kids could get. The homes were miserable -- pieces of tin hammered together.

Haitians have a lot riding on these elections. They want to see their lives improve. If they improve just a tiny bit, it will make a huge difference, because so many Haitians have next to nothing now.

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WEDNESDAY, Feb. 8, 10:15 a.m. local

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

I was impressed by the huge turnout of voters who waited with incredible patience when many found their polling stations were not open on time, and then stood in neat lines for hours to fill out their ballots to elect a new government in Haiti.

There were some scuffles, some shoving, and in at least one polling station, the crowd of voters stormed into a polling station, overwhelming the few police officers there before order was restored.

Haiti is the only place in the world where slaves successfully rebelled and threw out their colonial masters, the French. But democracy has never fully taken root in Haiti, the most impoverished nation in all the Americas and the Caribbean.

Only one president, Rene Preval, has been elected and then finished his turn in office. The others have been ousted in military coups or rebellions.

But today, the people in Haiti have hope that their individual ballots will make a difference.

Not everyone could vote though. There were some foulups.

As I was standing amid lines of voters at a large polling station outside the Cite Soleil slum yesterday, an elegant woman was loudly complaining to no one in particular, her patience having finally boiled over.

Her name was Adrienne Francois, 53, who has six children and eight grandchildren. She was dressed in a blue satin-like dress. A wide-brimmed straw hat warded off the sun's rays. She had walked for miles, from one polling station to another, to vote. At each one, and she said she had been to five, she was told her name was not on the rolls and was directed to another polling station. At each polling station, she had to endure waiting in long lines before finding out she was not registered there.

"Every place I go, I'm getting the runaround," she told me. "I'm giving up."

She had walked such a distance - probably eight miles - that her open-toed shoes were coming apart. She had done a quick repair job on one with a safety pin, and the other with a piece of red plastic tied into a knot.

Like millions of other Haitians, this is what she wants for her country, and what she hopes a new leadership can bring:

"I'll be happy when there is security, so that when I'm sick in the middle of the night, the person that will take me to the hospital won't be afraid to drive me. If I'm sitting by the side of the road selling used clothes, I won't have anything to worry about. There won't be shooting or anything. I'll be in a place of peace."

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

MONDAY, Feb. 6, 9:52 a.m. local

Haiti is a visual feast.

Driving around the capital, down narrow, pitted streets lined with sidewalk vendors, your eyes dart everywhere - to the "tap tap" buses painted in a riot of bright colors, to baskets of tropical fruit for sale, to women carrying huge loads atop their heads, to children in school uniforms of clean white shirts and dark skirts making their way past vendors, heedless traffic, piles of trash and parked cars.

The buses are called tap taps because the passengers signal the driver they want to get off by tapping against the sides of the bus with their knuckles.

In a country as poor as Haiti, there are messages all over reminding people to cherish what they have, and telling them things are OK. The tap taps often bear positive messages painted onto their flowery sides.

"Everything is good," says one.

"God gives love," says another.

My AP colleagues Brennan Linsley, Evens Sanon and I drove into a poor neighborhood to find a church and see what the pastor had to say about the elections coming up on Tuesday, and whether Haitians should be hopeful a new government can help make their future brighter.

We found a church in Savanne Pistache neighborhood, next to one of Port-au-Prince's ubiquitous smoldering garbage dumps on a hillside overlooking the sea.

Pastor Yves-Innocent Louis welcomed us inside the unpainted cinderblock church. Next to it is an orphanage that Louis runs: the Life is Wealth Orphanage (yet another positive message, pointing out that you still have something, life, even if you do not have a mother and father).

Louis says the parents of the 60 orphans died of AIDS and other diseases and that some were killed by the "chimeres," or ghosts, as gangs loyal to then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were called.

Louis says the message of hope is a mainstay of his sermons.

"When I'm preaching, I usually ask the people to believe that one day things will change, and I preach to them that hope will make you go a long way," Louis says.

Hope - or "lespwa" in Creole - is also the name of the party of Rene Preval, a former president who is the front-runner among three dozen presidential candidates. A plane towing the one word, with Preval's name alongside, has been flying over Port-au-prince in recent days.

Hope springs eternal in Haiti.

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SUNDAY, Feb. 5, 8:30 a.m. local

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Villa Creole Hotel

Petionville is the upscale neighborhood of the capital of Haiti. Petionville, which sits on a hillside with a sweeping view of Port-au-Prince, is not West Palm Beach by any means.

Even a middle-class American suburb would look downright ritzy compared to Petionville, where street vendors sell stalks of sugar cane in front of a mishmash of shops, a few art galleries and French restaurants.

But Petionville is luxurious indeed compared to Cite Soleil, a wretchedly poor neighborhood controlled by gangs armed with M-16s and 9mm pistols.

As you drive down the hillside from Petionville on Port-au-Prince's narrow, traffic-clogged streets, the neighborhoods become poorer. At the end of the line is Cite Soleil, near the sea.

Cite Soleil's shacks aren't made of sheets of corrugated tin, like you find in many other slums around the world. They are made of fragments of corrugated tin - rusty pieces, their edges as sharp as knives.

There are no bathrooms. Kids and everyone else use the outdoors, often near canals where raw sewage flows.

Blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeeping troops have made only a tentative incursion into the slum of 200,000, fearing that many civilians will die if the troops and gangs engage in open warfare in its streets and alleyways.

Back in 1994, U.S. Army troops arrived in Haiti with rifles at the ready to reinstate President Jean-Bertrand Aristide - who had been ousted in a coup. I visited Cite Soleil then as U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters buzzed overhead. The people were overjoyed. They had just lived through an awful period, when death squads linked to the military dictatorship went on nighttime killing sprees in Cite Soleil, which was hugely loyal to Aristide, a former slum priest and liberation theologist.

International news photographers would drive at the crack of dawn to Cite Soleil to look for the carnage. Bodies were sprawled in the streets, hands tied behind their backs, with bullet holes in the head or chest of the victims. One day, outside Cite Soleil, I was attracted by a group of people standing on an overpass, staring down at a mound of garbage. I joined them and looked down. There was a pig rooting around the trash, tugging at a burlap sack. Staring harder at the sack, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was full of severed heads - the heads of men who had perhaps been tortured and executed at a nearby police station.

So when the U.S. troops arrived in 1994, the people of Cite Soleil were overjoyed. They gathered in groups as the choppers swooped overhead, cheering and laughing with sheer joy.

Aristide came back from exile a few weeks later. But during his second term in office, he fell victim to another rebellion amid accusations he used gangs to attack his own opponents and was corrupt. A U.S. plane flew him out.

The other day, I came across an 18-year-old shoeshiner who had just been shot by U.N. peacekeeping troops in Cite Soleil, according to witnesses and the man's own account. AP photographer Brennan Linsley, translator Evens Sanon and I arrived quickly after Evens spotted a makeshift Red Cross ambulance rushing somewhere, and followed it.

George Alain Colbert, the wounded man, would have been around six years old when the U.S. troops arrived in 1994. He may have been one of those kids I saw turning cartwheels in joy back then.

Now, he's in a hospital, wounded in his heel and groin by a U.N. peacekeeper, a force that has caused civilian casualties as it tries to control criminal gangs.

Things haven't gotten any better for the people of Cite Soleil.

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