Haitians Gird for Trauma of Sunday’s Election, Their First in 30 Years

Vividly recalling the psychological trauma he suffered as a child exposed to the bloodshed of Haiti’s last presidential election 30 years ago, a normally taciturn Port-au-Prince businessman described how he has prepared both his children and himself to endure the fear and violence that have grown here as a prelude to Sunday’s nationwide voting.

“For my children, I have cut off the television and stopped talking about the news every day. I keep them home as much as possible. They were going crazy telling me, ‘Oh, Daddy, did you hear they shot three more guys this morning?’

“I know what it means to a child to see those bodies every day on TV or, worse, in the streets. I still have terrible pictures in my mind of dead people lying in the streets when (Francois) Papa Doc Duvalier was elected in 1957. I don’t want my kids to live with those same images all of their lives.

“As for myself,” he added, “I’m going to go to the poll early Sunday morning and vote. Then I’m going home and lock my family in with me and sit there with my shotgun until it’s over. After all, this is Haiti. We’re going to have a lot of people killed before we get a real government elected in this country.”

24 Slain This Week

The educated businessman is not typical of Haiti’s 2.3 million registered voters, 80% of whom are dirt poor and illiterate, but his determination to vote regardless of election day violence is representative of the will of a vast majority, according to political, religious and civic leaders who have surveyed this most backward of Western Hemisphere nations during the past week, in which at least 24 people have been killed.

“The importance of casting a vote on Sunday has become almost sacred, a magic thing,” said a veteran human rights worker, explaining the spontaneous formation of tough neighborhood-watch brigades to counter renegade Duvalier followers who had tried to derail the election with random acts of terrorism. “People won’t tolerate anyone who tries to get in the way of their votes.”

For most Haitians, balloting for a president and national legislature is the essential high point of a dream that began Feb. 7, 1986, with the fall of the corrupt, dictatorial President Jean-Claude Duvalier, son of Francois.

U.S. Backed Idea

Following Duvalier, an army-led caretaker provisional government, which includes a number of former Duvalier officers and officials, pledged to step aside in two years to make way for a freely elected government. The United States and other countries backed it as the best hope of accomplishing a transition to democracy.

The provisional government has since shown either indifference or hostility to preparations for the transition. Politically inexperienced Haitians, however, have succeeded in a remarkably short time in drafting a constitution, overwhelmingly endorsing it by national referendum and establishing an independent Electoral Council to oversee electing a new government and installing it by next Feb. 7, the second anniversary of Duvalier’s flight into well-heeled exile in France.

The road to election day has been perilous, marked by terrorism and attempts by both government and disaffected Duvalierists to detour it to their own ends.

In August, Louis Athis, the prominent head of a minor political party, was hacked to death by peasants who had been inflamed by false accusations, reportedly from a local government official, that Athis was a Communist.

No Investigations

In October, a popular presidential candidate, Yves Volel, was shot twice in the head and once in the heart as he stood on the steps of Port-au-Prince police headquarters addressing a group of journalists who had come to hear him denounce official violence. His assassin was allegedly a plainclothes policeman. As in other incidents of pre-election violence, the provisional government of Lt. Gen. Henri Namphy declined to investigate the killing.

Since the Volel killing, other candidates, fearing for their lives, have campaigned cautiously or not at all. Their fears, and those of the men organizing the election process, appeared well-founded.

In June, after formation of the nine-member Electoral Council called for in the new constitution, Namphy and his generals tried to disband it and organize the election themselves. Days of bloody demonstrations in the streets, in which two dozen people died, accompanied by bitter protests from the United States and other countries, finally forced the generals to back down.

Early this month, when the nine “wise men” of the Electoral Council disqualified 12 of the 35 declared presidential candidates because of their ties to the Duvalier regime, the council’s headquarters and the hardware store of one of the councilmen were burned out. The unidentified arsonists reportedly were Duvalierists of the disbanded but still-armed Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier’s dreaded secret police.

6,000 Polling Places

Against this violent background and a renewed crescendo of election-week terror generally blamed on the Macoutes, the councilmen worked against the clock and their own fear to prepare 6,000 polling places and distribute 65 million printed ballots for the extraordinarily complex election.

Under procedures set up by the Electoral Council’s nonpolitical business, church and civic figures, each voter will cast five ballots, each consisting of many parts. One ballot is for the voter’s choice among 23 presidential candidates, three are for district senatorial candidates, and one is for local candidates for the lower chamber of the national legislature.

Since most Haitians are illiterate, separate ballots have been prepared for each candidate, showing his picture, his name and his party symbol. Thus, for the presidential vote alone, each voter will have to sort through 23 ballot slips to find the one he wishes to place in an envelope with his four legislative votes and drop in the ballot box.

An adviser to the council, Dr. Louis Roy, said he has recruited 20,000 Haitian Boy Scouts to help voters who recognize neither their candidate’s picture nor party symbol to make their choices.

Just getting the ballot boxes and ballots to the polling places has been a major achievement. The Namphy government denied or ignored repeated requests for help in transporting election materials to rural areas accessible only by mule or helicopter.

Transportation Donated

Lacking even a truck of their own, the councilmen enlisted volunteers, mostly businessmen, who provided more four-wheel drive vehicles than the officials could use. On Friday, two chartered helicopters arrived from Miami to help distribute election materials after the government failed to provide one promised from the army.

In the total absence of government security, the council fortified its headquarters office with sandbags and posted volunteer guards with shotguns after two more attempts to shoot it up and burn it down this week.

Yet by Friday, the Electoral Council’s treasurer, the Rev. Alain Rocourt, a Methodist minister, reported that about 80% of the polling places were equipped and ready for Sunday. “The election will take place as scheduled,” he said with a sigh of satisfaction.

As Rocourt expressed relief over getting the job done, there were signs that the government might move over the weekend to ensure security for voters going to the polls. Troops of the 7,500-man army have been patrolling the streets of Port-au-Prince since Wednesday, ostensibly to quell terrorism and violence.

First Calm Friday

The army’s actions initially appeared to be aimed at the neighborhood watch committees that had reacted violently to the terrorism. But by Friday, they appeared to have put a crimp in terrorist action as well, because the capital remained calm for the first night of the week.

Few expect the voting to go smoothly. Despite the presence of hundreds of foreign journalists and more than 200 official and unofficial observers from governments and human rights organizations, officials and Western diplomats said they expect trouble at a few hundred of the 6,000 polling stations.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of interference at some polls, or of partisans attempting to influence the count if they sense that their candidates are losing,” a U.S. official here said Friday. But he expressed doubt that there would be enough such incidents to raise questions about the election’s results, which may not be known for a week or more.

With so many candidates, however, it is likely that the top two vote getters, who will face a runoff election on Dec. 27, will be so little ahead of the losers that there will be bitter and possibly violent protests.

Even the counting may present fearful problems, according to some officials, who foresee clashes among local poll officials and poll watchers over errors and invalidations.

Dark Roads to Travel

“There will be trouble just getting the ballots back to Port-au-Prince,” predicted the businessman who plans to spend Sunday at home with his shotgun. “After the polls close at 6 p.m., they’ll have to move the ballot boxes, and I guarantee a lot of them will disappear. There are a lot of dark roads to travel in Haiti.”

Because of the perils of the campaign, disorganization and lack of communication in much of the country, none of the 23 presidential aspirants appears to have gained a broad national following. But four have emerged as the leaders in the view of most observers. They are:

- Marc Bazin, 55, a Paris-trained lawyer and economist who spent 18 years at the World Bank and served briefly as minister of finance under Jean-Claude Duvalier, who sacked him when he attempted to collect unpaid taxes from the president’s father-in-law.

- Louis Dejoie II, 59, a building contractor and son of the man defeated by Francois Duvalier in the disputed 1957 election.

- Gerard Gourgue, 61, a lawyer and master of his own private high school, who was included in the original junta that became the army-led provisional government. Gourgue quit the provisional government because it was slow to enact human rights reforms.

- Sylvio Claude, 53, a Baptist preacher with a high school education and no discernible qualifications except that he stood up against the Duvaliers and was beaten, tortured and jailed as a result.