PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Haiti’s elections at the weekend were “fairly good” and were not derailed by the call for annulment made by a group of presidential candidates, two of whom later recanted, the top United Nations official in the country said yesterday.
“I’m more confident right now than I was two days ago,” Edmond Mulet, the head of the U.N. mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) told Reuters in his office near Port-au-Prince airport.
During voting on Sunday, 12 of the 18 presidential candidates, including several known frontrunners, shocked the U.N. and international observers by jointly denouncing “massive fraud” and calling for the cancellation of the polls.
The call, made amid protests in the capital against voting problems, created a credibility problem for the troubled elections in Haiti, which is in the grip of a deadly cholera epidemic and recovering from a devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.
This surprise move by a majority of candidates seemed to threaten the international community’s hopes that the elections, which may well go to a second round in January, could produce a stable, legitimate new government to lead the poor Caribbean nation’s recovery from the earthquake.
But in 24 hours, and facing heavy diplomatic pressure as their supporters took to the streets, Michel Martelly and Mirlande Manigat, both election frontrunners in the group of candidates rejecting the vote, changed their position and said they wanted the process to go ahead and counting to proceed.
“I think that the concerns and problems we were facing last Sunday are behind us and we’ll see what will happen in the next days,” Mulet said, adding he believed the situation had “stabilized” after the street protests and fears of violence.
U.N. peacekeepers were still escorting ballot papers and voting tallies in from around the country, an operation that would be completed late today, Mulet said. Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) was due to announce preliminary official results on Dec. 7.
Mulet said that from a logistical and security point of view, the contribution of the more than 12,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force in the country had been effective.
Despite protests and some clashes, there had been far less violence than initially feared.
