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Haiti postpones elections again

PORT-AU-PRINCE(Haiti): Haiti has postponed legislative and local elections for a third time in four months, citing voter registration problems, election officials said on Friday.

The country's electoral body announced the postponement but did not give a new date for the elections, which had been scheduled for March 19, with a run-off vote on April 30.

The postponement was the latest hitch in efforts to hold the first elections in the Caribbean nation in three years.

Voter registration had been meant to be completed by Friday, but that was delayed for two weeks.

"The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has announced that because of the numerous difficulties the election process has undergone ... the Provisional Electoral Council has decided to delay voter registration until March 15, 2000," said Roland Sainristil, spokesman for the CEP.

"The new election date will be published as soon as possible," he told reporters.

The CEP cited problems with voter registration such as loss of film and camera batteries, theft and misuse of laminated materials to make voter cards, as the reason they had postponed the election.

Elections were originally due to take place on Nov. 28, 1999, then postponed to Dec. 19. Election officials had vowed that elections would definitely be held on March 19, with run-off elections on April 30.

The elections are to fill 10,000 empty elected posts nationwide, including two-thirds of the senate and the entire Chamber of Deputies which make up Haiti's parliament. Some 29,000 candidates are running.

An opposition party denounced the latest postponement as incompetence and political manoeuvring by President Rene Preval.

"If the president can't put together an election, and this is his third try, then he must recognise his incompetence and resign," Sauveur Pierre-Etienne, spokesman for the opposition Organisation of People in Struggle (OPL), told Reuters.

"We are ready for elections. For us in OPL the delay of the March 19 date is part of the Lavalas strategy to try to stay in power." He was referring to Lavalas family party, the party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Haiti has not held elections since April 1997. Only five percent of voters turned out to vote then and the results of that legislative vote were annulled because of widespread fraud.

Preval has been ruling by decree since he dissolved parliament in January 1999.

Meeting the election calendar had been in doubt for weeks amid voter registration problems and only hours before the postponement was announced, the U.N. Security Council on Friday urged Haiti not to delay the balloting.

"It is the view of the Security Council that prompt, free and fair legislative and local elections are essential for the restoration of the national parliament," said the current council president, Anwarul Chowdhury of Bangladesh.

"The members of the council urge Haitian authorities to hold as closely as possible to the current election timetable," he said after a closed-door session of the 15-member body.

"Timely, free and fair elections are crucial to democracy in Haiti," Chowdhury added.

The Western hemisphere's poorest nation, Haiti has struggled to shake off decades of dictatorship since 20,000 U.S.-led troops ousted a military regime in 1994 and restored then-President Aristide, its first freely elected president, to power.

When Aristide's term ended in 1996 he handed power to his protege, Preval. His term has been scarred by a government crisis since the 1997 legislative election.

The Security Council met to consider Haiti as a U.N. civilian police force was completing its assignment in the Caribbean nation, where it trained Haiti's national police.

The foreign police, remnants of a six-year old U.N. peacekeeping venture, will leave Haiti by March 15.-Reuters