Carter to Visit Haiti to Push Vote : Caribbean: Former President hopes to reinforce ‘free and fair electoral process.’

Former President Jimmy Carter, hoping to build on his success in helping secure the return of Haiti’s elected president, said Wednesday that he will visit the country next week to lend his support to oft-postponed parliamentary elections.

“We will explore ways in which we might be helpful in reinforcing a free and fair electoral process,” Carter said in a statement issued by the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Parliamentary elections, originally scheduled for late last year, are now expected in April or May. A presidential election to pick a successor to Jean-Bertrand Aristide is scheduled for late this year.

In September, Carter negotiated the deal that cleared the way for Aristide--the only freely elected chief executive in the Caribbean nation’s 200-year history--to regain the office he lost in a coup three years earlier. Carter persuaded Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the military dictator, to step aside, defusing a crisis in which the Clinton Administration was ready to use U.S. military force to restore Aristide to power.

Carter will be accompanied on his Feb. 23-26 trip by Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Both were members of his delegation last September.

George Price, former prime minister of Belize, will also be in the group.

Price is a member of the Carter-organized Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government, a group of 25 current and former presidents and prime ministers of Western Hemisphere governments. Aristide is also a member.

In Port-au-Prince, Aristide said he plans to discuss the parliamentary election process with Carter.

“He will be here at a moment when the country is paving the way to have elections,” Aristide said, according to the Associated Press. “Soon we will have the electoral law, and soon we will have a date for the elections.”

Carter and his council of government leaders provided observers who certified as free and fair the December, 1990, election won by Aristide.

“Building democracy and developing the economy will require a safe and secure environment,” Nunn said. “I welcome the chance to return to Haiti to assess the election plans and the security situation in advance of the turnover to the United Nations mission in Haiti.”

About 8,000 U.S. troops are now deployed in Haiti.

They are scheduled to be replaced March 31 by a 6,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force. About half of the U.N. contingent, including its commander, will be Americans.