Haiti heads for elections tomorrow

HAITI: Armed Haitian police kept apart boisterous supporters of rival presidential candidates in Port-au-Prince Thursday as the earthquake-hit Caribbean country heads for turbulent elections this weekend in the grip of a cholera epidemic.

Sporadic violence, including street clashes between protesters and U.N. peacekeepers in Port-au-Prince and the northern city of Cap-Haitien, has added the stench of burning tires and tear gas to the stink of squalor and disease from overflowing cholera hospitals and earthquake survivor camps.

Separate marches by backers of two leading presidential contenders — Jude Celestin, a protege of outgoing President Rene Preval, and popular musician “Sweet Micky” Martelly — clogged streets in the sprawling capital on Thursday but police armed with shotguns and pistols stopped them from clashing.

Sunday’s presidential and legislative elections are going ahead despite the huge challenges of holding a nationwide poll in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest state.

Haiti, its infrastructure already weak, is recovering from a devastating earthquake in January and battling a worsening cholera epidemic that has already killed 2,000 people.

The international community, represented by a 12,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti, is insisting the political and security risks of postponing Sunday’s elections are far greater than any current threats of violence or disruption.

“It is better to have elections as soon as possible than to delay them,” Edmond Mulet, the head of the U.N. mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), told a news conference in Port-au-Prince.

“If we don’t have elections now, when? ... Are we going to wait a year in Haiti to have elections? What will happen in the meantime? Vacuum of power, uncertainty, chaos?”

Mulet said the polls, to elect a successor to Preval who cannot stand again, a new parliament and a third of the Senate, were in line with Haiti’s constitutional electoral calendar.

Voting would pose no greater health risk, and perhaps even less, than a normal working day, he said.

Mulet brushed aside calls for postponement from four of the 18 presidential candidates and complaints of pro-government bias against local electoral authorities, saying the latter had showed themselves “up to the task”.

“The elections will not be perfect, will not solve all the problems, but they are a necessary path in the democratization process in Haiti,” the U.N. mission chief said, flanked by the heads of MINUSTAH’s military and police forces.

 PORT-AU-PRINCE, Friday, Reuters