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27055: Hermantin(news)2 foreigners abducted as election hopes fade (fwd)





Posted on Sat, Dec. 31, 2005
HAITI
2 foreigners abducted as election hopes fade

A pair of foreign election workers and one of their wives were kidnapped amid increasing violence that has forced another delay of planned elections.

BY JOE MOZINGO
jmozingo@MiamiHerald.com

Two officials with the Organization of American States working to prepare Haiti for elections have been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince, the OAS announced Friday, as violence surged around the capital and election officials conceded they would have to delay the vote for a fourth time. The Haitian electoral council was meeting Friday afternoon to discuss new dates for the first of two rounds of national elections, meant to restore democracy to Haiti following the armed rebellion that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the interim government in September that it must put a democratically elected government in the National Palace by a constitutional deadline of Feb. 7 in order to assure its political legitimacy. But infighting and disorganization kept pushing the dates back, from October to November to the most recently set date of Jan. 8. Now at least one council member says Feb. 7 is not even realistic for the first round.
''I think we need two or three months at least,'' said Patrick Fequiere.
The U.S. Embassy in Haiti declined comment.
Meanwhile, a wave of shootings and kidnappings for ransom is showing just how precarious the situation is in Haiti. Two OAS officials working to set up technical equipment for the election -- and one of their spouses -- were kidnapped Thursday. ''The OAS is working at the highest level with Haitian authorities and international partners to secure the safe and timely release of the kidnapped individuals,'' according to an OAS press release. Two of the victims were from Peru and Guatemala. The nationality of the third is unknown.

LAWLESS SLUM

Just last week, a Jordanian soldier and a Canadian police officer, both members of the U.N. peacekeeping mission, were shot and killed in a lawless part of Port-au-Prince surrounding the Cité Soleil slum. Peacekeepers have tried to seal the slum off, but checkpoints and shootouts with gangs -- fights that often wound and kill dozens of innocent bystanders -- have failed to curtail a rise in violent crime emanating from the area. Kidnapping victims are often held there, including a Haitian-American deejay and a documentary filmmaker from North Carolina who were snatched Wednesday from a wealthy hillside suburb. As of Friday evening, their families were still negotiating for their release. ''At this point, the wave of kidnappings is not a purely criminal activity and I am convinced this is politically motivated,'' Mario Andresol, director of the Haitian National Police, told the Associated Press. He did not elaborate, but many observers speculate that drug traffickers and various political groups are working to sow chaos to maintain a lawless environment.

ELECTION PROBLEMS

The election preparation has been dogged by problems and controversy from the start. OAS, which is responsible for the voter registration effort, had only distributed 1.4 million of 3.5 million vote cards by midweek, electoral officials said. At the same time, the group is trying to work out a problem in the registration database resulting in people being listed at wrong addresses. Poll workers are yet to be hired or trained for the 804 polling centers around the country. Gérard Le Chevallier, the U.N.'s chief electoral advisor in Haiti, said the workers have been identified, but they won't be officially hired and put on the payroll until two weeks before the election. To do that, he said, the date must be set. But Rosemond Pradel, secretary general of Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council, told the Associated Press that the new date might not be announced by the time the official date passes. ''In public, the date is still Jan. 8, but in private, everybody knows that this won't be the case, and that we probably won't even be able to announce a new date for the elections by then,'' he said.