UN forces open fire on Haitian protest

UN peacekeepers opened fire yesterday on Haitians protesting election results, killing at least one and wounding four, witnesses said as flaming roadblocks paralysed the capital.

Hundreds of screaming demonstrators elsewhere stormed into an upscale hotel housing an electoral office in the hills above Port-au-Prince and helicopters landed on the roof to evacuate guests. Journalists saw the body of a man in the street in the Tabarre neighbourhood, a T-shirt bearing the image of leading candidate Rene Preval soaked in blood.

Witnesses said Jordanian UN peacekeepers opened fire on them, killing two and wounding four. The body of the second victim was not at the scene.

Protesters have alleged the electoral commission is manipulating the vote count to prevent leading candidate Rene Preval, a one-time protege of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from winning a first-round victory in this battered and poor Caribbean nation.

Mr Preval, a former president, fell further below the 50% he needed to win the election outright as the count continued yesterday. Like Aristide, Mr Preval is seen as a champion of the Caribbean country’s poor masses, most of whom live on $1 a day, but he is distrusted by the small and wealthy elite.

“We are going to put one million people in the streets in the coming hours,” said John Joel Joseph, a community leader in the Port-au-Prince slums. “The people won’t take this.”

With 89.9% of ballots counted, Mr Preval’s share of the vote in last Tuesday’s largely peaceful but chaotic election had slipped to 48.7% by yesterday morning, the Provisional Electoral Council said.

When initial results were announced several days ago, Mr Preval held 61% of the vote, comfortably over the 50% plus one vote needed to avoid a run-off on March 19. Another ex-president, Leslie Manigat, had 11.84% and the main candidate for the business elite, industrialist Charles Baker, had 7.9%.

Mr Preval himself complained that a computer-generated graphic on the electoral council’s website had him at 52% of the vote at the time the director-general of the council was telling the media that Mr Preval only had 49%.

“Forty-nine percent, I don’t pass. Fifty percent, I pass,” Mr Preval said Sunday in his mountain hometown of Marmelade.

Two of the nine electoral council members, Pierre Richard Duchemin and Patrick Fequiere, also remarked on the discrepancy and said the vote tabulation was being manipulated.