Haiti Fears the Worst, Hopes for Best in Election : Caribbean: Calm and orderly voter registration marks a startling turnaround from the near chaos that engulfed the country just weeks ago.

Graffiti artists using human excrement as their medium of political expression smeared the malodorous slogan “Worst is still to come” on the walls of four voter registration offices in Haiti earlier this month.

“Next time we will use gasoline,” added one piece of graffito.

As the sloganeers suggested, Haiti’s upcoming national elections, now scheduled for Dec. 16, may turn dirty.

But to Haitians who have feared much worse after years of anti-democratic bloodshed and brutality, this relatively benign beginning to a three-week registration period for the country’s estimated 3 million voters was an unexpectedly upbeat sign that the long-postponed election of president, parliament and local officials is at last on the track.

“If they don’t shoot at people to scare them away from registering to vote, then the chances of actually having a free democratic election are very good,” exulted a Port-au-Prince businessman who had all but given up hope for a peaceful election process.

To political leaders and diplomats here, the mostly calm and orderly voter registration marks a startling turnaround from the near chaos that engulfed the country just a few weeks ago.

“We narrowly avoided a coup d’etat in late August and September,” said the leading centrist presidential candidate, Marc Bazin, referring to a moment when deep discontent with provisional President Ertha Pascal Trouillot led politicians of the extreme right and left to urge Army Chief of Staff Herard Abraham to depose her.

Bazin and other leaders said visits to Haiti by Vice President Dan Quayle, who sternly warned the military against even thinking about a takeover, and by former President Jimmy Carter, who talked just as firmly to Trouillot and the wavering politicians, influenced the surprising turnaround.

“The port was on strike, there was no fuel, power was shut down, trash was piling up and altogether the pressures were so great that people said, ‘OK, let’s put this election together,’ ” said a senior foreign diplomat. “Enough people in enough places decided this was it--they could just throw the cards up in the air or they could buckle down and make the process work.”

But with two months between registration and voting day, the potential for the kind of terrorism and social turmoil that derailed Haiti’s last attempt at free elections on Nov. 29, 1987, remains high, according to both political and military leaders. On that election day, after weeks of pre-election terrorism, army-supported thugs and assassins sent into the streets by followers of the deposed Duvalier family dictatorship shot and hacked to death at least 34 Port-au-Prince voters, forcing cancellation of the voting. Many still fear it will happen again.

“Some parties, because of their ideology, are incapable of winning power through elections,” said Lt. Col. Ramus Sainvil, the chief of army intelligence, who sits on a special four-man military committee for election security appointed recently to prevent a repeat of the army-approved outrages that destroyed the 1987 elections. “Although they say they support elections, behind the scenes they are doing things to destroy the elections, and we have proof of this.”

But Sainvil and his fellow security committee members, all young colonels who say they want to professionalize the army and erase its wretched record of corruption and brutality, said that attempts to spoil the December voting won’t work because the army is now committed to democracy.

“As we approach the election the level of anxiety will go up,” said Jean Casimir, a sociologist and secretary general of the nine-member independent Electoral Council that must organize and conduct the elections. But he expressed confidence that the council’s increasingly warm relations with the military security committee and other elements of the armed forces will forestall a repetition of 1987, when the Electoral Council itself was a target of army abuse.

In addition to the security committee, Trouillot has formed a civilian-military commission of the three top army generals and three Cabinet officers to police nationwide security measures.

“Acts of terrorism and sabotage are becoming increasingly difficult for the terrorists, given the sort of relations that have developed between us,” said Casimir. But he added, “The authorities have left too many weapons wandering around in the hands of God knows who, so I’m not going to say the bride is beautiful until after the wedding--election day.”

Close international scrutiny like that which calmed this year’s elections in Nicaragua also will put a brake on Duvalierists and others who might try to disrupt the process, said Casimir.

About 50 U.N. observers and 28 more from the Organization of American States and the Caribbean Economic Community already are on hand to give technical advice and observe the election campaign. By election day, the United Nations will have fielded between 300 and 400 poll watchers and 65 unarmed military security advisers, according to Reinhart W. A. Helmke, chief resident U.N. officer in Haiti.

The OAS expects its observer ranks to swell to about 200 by the time voters go to the polls, according to their Canadian chief, Pierre F. Cote, on loan from his regular job as chief electoral officer of Quebec province.

“Our well-marked jeep and our flag have created a big impression already,” Cote said. “It creates confidence. Because we are here, people believe there really will he an election.”

Other election observers will be sent by individual governments, including the United States and France, as well as by human rights and other non-governmental groups such as former President Carter’s Freely Elected Heads of Government, bringing the total to about 1,000.

“The more the merrier,” said Casimir. “Their purpose is to make it very difficult for anyone to disrupt the elections. They will give the population a feeling of security and they will give the results legitimacy.”

Yet a number of hurdles remain. The first will come during the first week of November, when the Electoral Council must decide which of the expected 20-odd presidential candidates and innumerable candidates for lesser offices are to be stricken from the list under a constitutional ban against politicians who had close ties to the 29-year-long Duvalier dynasty.

A bold challenge by the Duvalierists appears certain. Not long ago, a new Duvalierist political party, the Union for National Reconciliation, elected the former head of the Tontons Macoutes, notorious secret police of the Duvalier dictatorship, as leader and probable presidential candidate. He is Roger Lafontant, who returned from exile in July. Since then, President Trouillot has half-heartedly sought to have him arrested for crimes committed before onetime President for Life Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier fled the country in February, 1986.

Despite the arrest order, Lafontant has been campaigning openly and was reportedly surrounded during the Duvalierist political convention by both uniformed and civilian-clothed soldier-bodyguards, raising fears that the Duvalierists once again enjoy the protection of at least some elements of the military.

“Either the army takes Lafontant in or there is going to be trouble,” lamented Dr. Louis Roy, a father of the Haitian constitution and present chief of the quasi-parliamentary Council of State. “If they cannot arrest him, how are they going to enforce election security?”

“The Duvalierists are violent,” conceded Col. Sainvil, “but so far we have seen no signs of their violence, although we’re afraid we might see some when the Electoral Council disapproves candidates. . . . When they were rejected in 1987, there were brutal scenes of violence.”

But one of Sainvil’s colleagues on the security committee, U.S.-trained Col. Alix Richard Silva, appeared more sanguine.

“In 1987, the army did not fulfill its mission,” he said, “but this year we can assure you it will be 100% different.”

“We hope it will be a new start (for the army), a new beginning,” said Col. Raoul Cedras, commander of the military academy and president of the security committee.

Adding to pre-election uncertainties are two other figures from the past, former President Leslie F. Manigat, who returned to Haiti last week, and one-time army general and interior minister Williams Regala, who returned in July.

Manigat gained the presidency in January, 1988, in an almost totally boycotted election engineered by Regala, who was then the right-hand man of former army strongman Lt. Gen. Henri Namphy. He was ousted and exiled five months later after he tried in vain to fire his army sponsors. Since Manigat was widely perceived as a military puppet and became a figure of derision to many, it appears doubtful that he will have much impact at the polls even if his renewed candidacy is approved by the Electoral Council.

Regala is said to have no interest in the presidency, but his continued presence in Haiti, despite pressure from the U.S. Embassy and most pro-democracy groups that he return to exile, has been unsettling.

“He shouldn’t be parading around the streets,” complained Casimir, who said the former general’s mere presence as a symbol of a bloody past is alarming to voters. “He was the one who brought down the 1987 election.”