Haitians Angry Over Election Take to Streets

Mobs Paralyze Cities, Block Major Roads

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 13 -- Haiti's hopes for a peaceful presidential election exploded Monday in a torrent of violence as mobs overturned cars, set piles of tires ablaze and built elaborate roadblocks across major highways, protesting delays in the vote count and alleged fraud in last Tuesday's balloting.

Demonstrators paralyzed cities across the country, from Cap-Haitien in the north to this impoverished seaside capital, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand that Rene Preval -- a former president and favorite of this city's poor -- be named president.

Haiti's distinctive "tap-taps," the colorfully painted trucks that ferry hundreds of thousands of passengers a day, were effectively stilled by roadblocks, set up by armed thugs demanding bribes, on the major arteries connecting cities.

In Port-au-Prince, at least one protester was killed, a luxury hotel was occupied by demonstrators and the international airport was closed. There were reports that U.N peacekeeping forces had shot into the crowds, but U.N. officials here said they had fired only into the air.

U.N. troops did not intervene when a boisterous crowd burst into the Montana Hotel, where election results were being prepared, and ran through the halls and jumped into the pool.

Hoping to quell the unrest, Preval -- who is far ahead of all rivals with 90 percent of votes counted -- flew to the capital late Monday on a U.N. helicopter from his home town in a remote mountain village. Preval had urged calm in recent days, but he had also stoked emotions among followers by accusing Haiti's electoral commission of lowering his vote total to force him into a runoff and by mockingly singing, "They're stealing our votes," on his porch.

"We have questions about the electoral process," Preval told reporters late Monday after meeting with the top U.N. official in Haiti and ambassadors from the United States, France, Canada and Brazil. "We want to see how we can save the process."

Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue also appealed for calm, saying in a nationally broadcast address: "People, don't stay in the streets. I'm asking you to go home. . . . The transitional government is not stealing your vote."

Transportation between cities almost completely stopped with more than 100 roadblocks on main roads between Cap-Haitien and Port-au-Prince. Thousands of Haitians walked for hours along this nation's pitted highways. Others idled at roadblocks, arguing politics and trying vainly to squeeze their pickup trucks or cars past the barriers. Some of the roadblocks were marvels of rapid-fire construction, with stacked stones and looping chains. In other places, protesters dragged the rusted frames of buses and trucks into the roadways, piled logs or set fire to old tires.

The chaos flourished in the almost total absence of law enforcement, except for selected areas of the capital. Political protest gave way to economic opportunism in many rural areas, as young men with pistols stuffed into their belts collected tolls at roadblocks and set up byzantine systems for ushering those who were willing to pay from one checkpoint to the next.

"That's Haiti," Melais Dieujuste, 40, said dejectedly at a roadblock in St. Marc, a small town west of Port-au-Prince. "Everybody does anything they want. They kill people, block the road, anything."

Smoke was already rising above the mountains before dawn Monday near Preval's home in Marmelade, where he had been monitoring the vote count for almost a week. At a crossroads less than an hour's drive from Preval's home, a lanky teenager named Pierre Jacky thrust his fist into the air as another pile of tires went up in flames.