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.
---
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."
---
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.
---
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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