Gonaives, Haiti – Mules laden with sacks of ballots were led into Haiti’s countryside Monday to reach a remote village on the eve of elections aimed at putting Haiti’s experiment with democracy back on track.
Hours before polls open today, thousands of U.N. peacekeepers fanned out to guard against heavily armed gangs, some loyal to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the president ousted in a rebellion two years ago.
In his northern hometown of Marmalade, presidential front- runner, Rene Preval, said he was satisfied with his campaign.
“I’m tired, but I am happy,” Preval said Sunday night. “It is an important election for the Haitian people.”
Authorities urged Haitians on Monday to turn out in large numbers and rejected the possibility that fraud could taint the results.
“Haiti’s future depends on this vote,” Jacques Bernard, director general of the electoral council, said in Port-au-Prince, the capital of this nation of 8 million people. “Good elections are the only solution to saving our nation.”
He defended a decision not to put voting stations inside the sprawling seaside slum of Cite Soleil, a base for armed gangs.
Residents of Cite Soleil accuse officials of trying to disenfranchise them, but officials say they can vote at polling stations just over a mile outside the slum.
Bernard said Cite Soleil, an area that even heavily armed U.N. peacekeepers using tanklike vehicles have not fully penetrated, is too dangerous for election workers.
“It’s a moral question. I couldn’t ask an election worker to go into an area that I myself wouldn’t go,” he said.
Underscoring the difficulty of holding elections in a country with a ruined infrastructure – including roads – mules transported some election materials to areas where U.N. helicopters were unable to land. The vote has been postponed four times since October because of security problems and trouble distributing elections materials.
At dawn Monday, a dozen U.N. peacekeepers from Uruguay loaded five mules with sacks stuffed with ballots, ballot boxes and other election materials in the rural town of Archaie, just north of the capital. The mules trotted off on a seven- hour mountain trek.
