Protesters violent over election results
Demonstrators want singer to lead Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Protesters enraged by the results of Haiti’s troubled presidential election set barricades and political offices ablaze, traded blows with U.N. peacekeepers and shut down the country’s lone international airport Wednesday, creating the social upheaval many have feared since the Jan. 12 earthquake.
The fallout from the Nov. 28 election, riddled by fraud, is violently shutting down cities across the impoverished country with gunfire and barricades when medical aid workers need to tackle a surging cholera epidemic.
Haiti’s Radio Metropole reported that at least one demonstrator was killed in the country’s southern peninsula.
The protesters back a popular carnival singer who narrowly lost a spot in a runoff election to Jude Celestin, a political unknown viewed as a continuation of unpopular President Rene Preval’s administration. The U.S. Embassy criticized the preliminary results Tuesday, saying Haitian, U.S. and other international monitors had predicted Celestin to be eliminated.
On Wednesday, demonstrators carried pink signs with the smiling face and bald head of their candidate, Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly. They decorated barricades with empty ballot boxes, used government campaign posters to start fires and challenged heavily armored foreign soldiers to near-theatrical confrontations.
Outside the provisional electoral council headquarters, a former gym in the suburb of Petionville, young men wearing their shirts as masks threw rocks at U.N. troops. The soldiers – Indians and Pakistanis working as a single unit – responded with exploding canisters of tear gas that washed over a nearby earthquake-refugee camp.
“We want Martelly. The whole world wants Martelly,” said James Becimus, a 32-year-old protester near the U.S. Embassy. “Today we set fires, tomorrow we bring weapons.”
Other protesters said they would continue to mobilize but do so nonviolently, as Martelly urged in a radio address Wednesday. He also told supporters to watch out for “infiltrators” who might try to incite violence.
“Demonstrating without violence is the right of the people,” he said. “I will be with you until the bald-head victory.”