27596: (news) Chamberlain: Haiti-Elections (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By JOSEPH B. FRAZIER

   MARMELADE, Haiti, Feb 9 (AP) -- Early returns show that Rene Preval -- a
popular former president and a one-time protege of ousted leader
Jean-Bertrand Aristide -- may have gotten enough votes to win Haiti's
presidential election outright, a rival said Thursday.
   Leslie Manigat, a 75-year-old candidate who was president for five
months in 1988 before being ousted by the army, said early returns from his
party's representatives monitoring the count showed Preval with a wide
lead.
   "There is a tiny chance that we will have a second round, but I fear
Preval has made a clean sweep of the votes," Manigat told The Associated
Press.
   He said the returns showed himself coming in second, followed by Charles
Henri Baker, 50, a wealthy garment factory owner.
   Though no official results have been released, Manigat's comments were
the latest sign that Preval appeared to be heading toward a first-round
victory. If no candidate wins a majority, a runoff between the top two
vote-getters will be held March 19.
   Jacques Bernard, director general of Haiti's electoral council, said
Wednesday that only a small percentage of balloting results had reached the
capital. Many of the ballot counts were still being ferried from remote
polling places by plane, truck and mule.
   Partial results may be released Thursday.
   "By Friday night or Saturday noon, we will have a clear idea of the
results of the election," said Jacques Bernard, the council's director
general.
   Tuesday's elections were the first since the government of Jean-Bertrand
Aristide was ousted in a bloody revolt two years ago, and officials said
collecting and tabulating the results would take several days. But some
polling stations posted unconfirmed local results outside -- and these
showed strong early support for Preval.
   Preval, a 63-year-old agronomist and former president widely supported
by Haiti's poor masses, was the front-runner among 33 presidential
candidates heading into the vote. Shy and soft-spoken, he is the only
elected leader in Haitian history to finish his term.
   Preval is also a former ally of Aristide, who remains in exile in South
Africa. That country's foreign minister on Thursday said Aristide can
remain there as long as he wants.
   Preval's political adviser, Bob Manuel, said Wednesday that preliminary
calculations show the former president having won 67 percent of the
nationwide vote, with 16 percent of votes counted.
   While that could not be verified, unconfirmed results taped to columns
at a polling center near the huge slum of Cite Soleil showed Preval winning
about 90 percent of the votes there.
   Across the city in Petionville, home to many of Haiti's wealthiest
citizens as well the poor Haitians who serve them, Preval took slightly
more than 70 percent of the vote at a polling station, according to posted
results.
   Preval, in his rural hometown of Marmelade, emerged from his family home
once, briefly dancing along to a band playing outside and waving to
supporters. He didn't speak to reporters.
   More than 50 percent of Haiti's 3.5 million registered voters were
believed to have cast ballots, said David Wimhurst, a U.N. spokesman,
adding that a precise figure wasn't yet available. He also said that the
United Nations has not received any reports of fraud or other major
irregularities.
   Haitians eagerly awaited the first returns Thursday as scores of U.N.
peacekeepers patrolled quiet streets in the capital, Port-au-Prince. The
voting, guarded by a 9,000-strong U.N. force, was fraught with early delays
but largely free of the violence that has plagued the capital since
Aristide fled.
   "I think no one can deny the legitimacy of this process, because people
really participated," U.N. special envoy Juan Gabriel Valdes told AP
Television News.
   However, he conceded that polls opened too late and "some people were
not even able to vote."
   The elections were deemed vital to avoiding a political and economic
meltdown in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. In the aftermath of
Aristide's ouster, gangs went on a kidnapping spree and many factories
closed because of security problems and a shortage of foreign investment.
   ------
   Associated Press writers Michael Norton, Andrew Selsky and Stevenson
Jacobs in Port-au-Prince contributed to this report.