Protests shake Haiti after vote

Businesses and schools were closed, streets emptied of traffic, and the international airport was closed. Protesters set fire to the party headquarters of President Rene Preval’s chosen successor, and many hundreds marched on the Electoral Council offices, where United Nations peacekeeping troops repelled them with tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades.

Protesters barricaded streets with heaps of earthquake rubble and burned hundreds of tires, sending plumes of black smoke into the air. The marches and clashes interrupted an otherwise eerie stillness with chanting, drums, gunfire, and sirens. Haitian radio reported that four protesters had been killed.

The unrest was provoked by the national Electoral Council’s announcement late Tuesday that Preval’s protege, a former state construction company executive named Jude Celestin, had edged a popular singer, Michel Martelly, for a spot in a January runoff against Mirlande Manigat, a former presidential wife.

On Wednesday afternoon, Preval, whose leadership since the earthquake has been disparaged as ineffective, appealed for calm as the crisis showed no sign of abating. Preval, who is finishing his second term and is ineligible for a third, said the election should be challenged through legal means, not in the streets.

“It is not through disorder that we will find the true results,’’ he said.

The election results released Tuesday night showed Manigat, a university administrator admired for her intellect, with 31.4 percent of the vote, Celestin with 22.5 percent, and Martelly, seen as an anti-establishment candidate, with 21.8 percent. If the results withstand challenges, Manigat and Celestin would head into a runoff Jan. 16. (A candidate needs 50 percent of the vote to win in the first round.)

Even before the results were announced, Martelly had vowed to challenge them.

Reached by telephone Wednesday morning, Martelly declined to speak about how he would proceed. Later in the day, he publicly asked his supporters to demonstrate without violence.

In a surprising twist, the campaign manager for Celestin said in an interview that Celestin would also contest the results. Sitting in his car behind a windshield freshly shattered by protesters’ rocks, the campaign manager, Senator Joseph Lambert, argued that Celestin had won the vote outright with 52 percent.

Lambert asserted that “the international community’’ had pressured the Electoral Council to create “diplomatically engineered’’ results because they feared instability.

He also said Celestin’s Unity Party was doing its best to keep his supporters in the rough slum called Cité Soleil from pouring into the streets.

“If we cannot hold them back, prepare yourself for civil war,’’ Lambert said.

The Nov. 28 elections were marred by disorganization, voter intimidation, the ransacking of polling stations, and fraud. Preval said yesterday that the election had been deemed valid by international observers. But electoral observers from the Organization of American States and the Caribbean countries gave a less than resounding endorsement, saying they did not believe the “irregularities, serious as they were, necessarily invalidated the election.’’

Twelve of the 18 presidential candidates had called for the election’s cancellation even before the polls closed.

“The only possible other way we can get out of this mess is if Celestin retreats and lets Micky inside,’’ said one of the candidates, Leslie Voltaire, referring to Martelly by his band name, Sweet Micky.

Foreign countries and international organizations proceeded cautiously to question the election results while calling for an orderly resolution. The secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, voiced serious concern about election irregularities in Haiti, his spokesman said.

Shortly after the preliminary results were released, the US Embassy expressed its own skepticism about the “irregularities’’ of the election results and their inconsistency with findings of an independent Haitian group that had posted thousands of observers across the country. The group found Manigat and Martelly to be the front-runners.

Even Manigat, the front-runner, said she did not trust the election results. She said on Haitian radio that she believed she had received more votes than the Electoral Council had acknowledged.