Tense Haiti Awaits Vote; Soldiers Patrol Streets

Armed soldiers patrolled the streets of the Haitian capital Thursday after a fourth night of violence that has taken 21 lives since Monday, as a hard-pressed independent Electoral Council raced against time and official indifference to get polling places ready for Sunday’s crucial presidential and National Assembly elections.

Angry members of neighborhood self-protection groups who felt the brunt of overnight military actions charged that the soldiers were called out not to suppress terrorism but, in the words of one, “to make the streets safe for terrorists.” Eight men, most of them said to be members of the self-protection groups, were killed by machine-gun fire.

A number of hand grenades also were thrown during the night, apparently without injuring anyone. In Haiti, only the military and the Tontons Macoutes, still-armed members of former President Jean-Claude Duvalier’s disbanded secret police, have such weapons.

Troops Finally Called Out

The troops were called out Wednesday night--their first appearance in force since election campaigning began--ostensibly to “maintain public order and security” after three days of random terrorism by Duvalier followers who apparently resorted to fright tactics in an attempt to derail the democratic election process.

Neighborhood self-protection groups called “vigilance brigades” with membership numbering in the thousands had sprung up in Port-au-Prince and two other cities to counter the terrorists, who election officials said were Tontons Macoutes. Two suspected Tontons Macoutes wearing civilian clothes, one firing a pistol and the other carrying an incendiary device, were killed Tuesday night by the vigilantes. Both were later identified as officers of the police force, which in Haiti is a branch of the army.

The caretaker, army-led government reacted to the killings of its own men by putting troops on the streets. It was unclear Thursday whether the soldiers’ mission was to prevent further terrorism or simply to frighten the vigilante groups into inaction.

‘Safe for Terrorists’

“The people are saying they (the army) didn’t intervene to protect us because their own people were killed,” said Dr. Louis Roy, head of the Committee to Defend the Constitution, the document that he helped to draft. “By doing that, the streets are safe for the terrorists.”

“Now the army protects the Tontons Macoutes,” charged Dr. Ernst Mirville, president of the independent Electoral Council, which was established under the new constitution to conduct Haiti’s first presidential election in 30 years. “They are a power group protected by the official army.”

Meanwhile, Mirville’s Electoral Council worked feverishly with the help of 20,000 volunteers to deliver ballots and ballot boxes to 6,000 polling places around the country. Jean Angus, 54, a businessman and a volunteer with the council, said about 70% of the ballots had reached nine central distribution points Thursday and would be transported to outlying polling stations by Saturday, in time for voting to begin at 6 a.m. Sunday.

Lagging in Remote Areas

Another volunteer, Max Bayard, 48, said that most polling places will be supplied on time but that “some of the most remote places in the mountains might be without boxes and ballots on election day.” The preparations have been hampered by government indifference and failure to make good on pledges of helicopter and ground transportation to distribute the voting materials.

“This is a ‘mission impossible’ situation,” said Bayard, an American-trained engineer-businessman.

Mirville and other members of the nine-man Electoral Council said the election would be considered valid even if some polling places were not able to function. “It is better to have an imperfect election than no election at all,” said Roy, who works as an adviser to the council.

Asked if he feared that the army might use the fear of terrorism as an excuse to intervene and stall or cancel the election, the Rev. Alain Rocourt, a Methodist minister who serves as treasurer of the council, said, “The consequences would be disastrous, with chaos all over the country.”

‘No One Can Steal Election’

“The signal has gone out from the population that no one can steal the election from them,” he said, citing the spontaneous formation of the vigilante neighborhood groups.

The Haiti Conference of Catholic Bishops, meanwhile, issued a strongly worded appeal for an end to the violence and exhorted the provisional government to help the Electoral Council bring off a successful election.

“There is no conscious person who can observe these things without condemning them, without shouting that it is enough,” the statement said. “What are the authorities waiting for to stop all these acts of brigandage? What are they waiting for before they support the Electoral Council?”

In another protest action Thursday, a Paris-based Haitian businessman chained himself to a bronze military statue near the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince. Jean Pierre N. Gaetjens, 53, general manager of a soft-drink cooler company, vowed to remain chained to the statue of a hero of the 1803 war against France until election day, but police broke his chains and led him away after only 30 minutes.

Likening the Haitian people to David facing Goliath, Gaetjens said he was protesting attempts to impede the election. “You can murder me . . . you can murder many of us . . . but you will never be able to murder all of us,” he proclaimed in a statement prepared before he was arrested.