Port-au-Prince, Haiti – One person died here Monday in protests by supporters of presidential candidate Rene Preval, who are angry about results showing that he did not garner a majority in last week’s balloting.
Witnesses said that a young man wearing a Preval T-shirt was killed when Jordanian members of the U.N. peacekeeping force opened fire at protesters trying to erect a barricade in the north Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Carrefour Fleuriot.
But a spokesman for the U.N. mission, known as Minustah, insisted that the peacekeepers only fired warning shots into the air.
Minustah’s David Wimhurst told EFE that “there are weapons” among the demonstrators, suggesting the fatal shots came from one of the thousands of Preval supporters who took to the streets of the capital after learning their candidate apparently fell short of an absolute majority Feb. 7 and hence faces a runoff, tentatively set for March 19.
Shortly after the deadly shooting, a crowd burst through a cordon of U.N. troops to occupy the Hotel Montana, site of the election council’s press center.
As U.N. helicopters hovered overhead, hundreds of angry Preval partisans filled up the hotel’s central courtyard, but they were quieted by an appeal from South African Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu, who addressed the throng from the window his room at the Montana.
The former Anglican prelate arrived Saturday in Port-au-Prince on a mission of “peace and national reconciliation,” undertaken at the behest of the Organization of American States and Haiti’s major religious denominations.
Though many Preval followers remained inside the Hotel Montana, the security detachment was able to restore order and no one was injured.
Not long after Tutu asked for calm from his hotel window, Haitian musical star Jacques Sauveur Jean, a member of Preval’s campaign team, went on local radio – the principal information medium in this largely illiterate nation – to disseminate the same message.
“We are the voice of peace,” Sauveur said in a statement aired on several stations. “We have given proof of our patience,” he added, referring to the absence of violence during last Tuesday’s chaotic balloting.
“We ask the people to go home,” he said, while at the same time advising Preval’s supporters to keep their “eyes wide open.”
Demonstrators in the streets of several neighborhoods demanded Monday that Preval, a 63-year-old agronomist and former president, be immediately designated as president-elect.
Hailing mainly from the capital’s poorest quarters, the protesters burned tires and blocked several main thoroughfares.
Preval, standard-bearer of the Lespwa (Hope) Party, had 48.7 percent with just over 90 percent of the ballots tabulated, the electoral council said at its Web site.
Leslie Manigat, also a former head of state, had just 11.8 percent, followed by Charles Henri Baker with 7.9 percent.
Thirty-three candidates vied for the presidency in the elections, and 129 congressional seats were also up for grabs.
Postponed four times, the elections were called by the provisional government installed in February 2004 after the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, now living in exile in South Africa.
Preval, a one-time political protege of Aristide, has made efforts to distance himself from the controversial former priest. Preval was appointed prime minister by Aristide in 1991 and was then democratically elected president in his own right five years later.
In the election race, Preval enjoyed widespread support in Cite Soleil, Port-au-Prince’s biggest slum and a stronghold of armed groups loyal to Aristide.
Since the election, Preval has been keeping a low profile with close aides at his residence in the northern city of Marmelade. But on Sunday he told journalists that his would be a “transition” presidency and that his first objective would be for “security and peace” in Haiti, the hemisphere’s poorest nation, to attract foreign investment.
