Haiti votes on Sunday

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Anchor Katy Clark speaks with Trenton Daniel in Gonaives, Haiti, about this Sunday’s elections in a nation gripped by cholera and still recovering from last January’s earthquake.
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KATIE CLARK: I’m Katie Clark and this is the World.  The campaign season that ended a few weeks ago in the U.S. focused on voter anger over a range of issues.  They included unemployment, the deficit and healthcare reform.  Those concerns are serious to be sure but some perspective helps.  There will be presidential and legislative elections in Haiti this Sunday, and the problems there make ours pale by comparison.  The Miami Herald’s Trenton Daniel is in Gonaives, Haiti.Trenton, from here it seems incongruous. You have more than a million people living in terrible conditions and camps.  You have cholera sweeping through the country and then happy campaign floats and glad handing candidates.  What does the campaign look and feel like to you?

TRENTON DANIEL: In Port Au Prince and cities outside of the capital, you see plenty of candidates running around with banners and they’re throwing out pouches of water and there’ve been jingles on the radio and through this [inaudible] mood.  But, obviously, it comes at this dire time in Haiti.  I mean, as you mentioned, there are about 1.3 million people still living in the camps and more than 1600 people have died of cholera since late October. It’s certainly a strange contrast but I think what a lot of people feel, certainly the international community, is that these elections do indeed need to happen and the sooner that a new president can be installed, the sooner that the reconstruction efforts can happen.  You know, many of the international donors who’ve touch billions of dollars of reconstruction efforts have taken a wait and see approach to whether or not they’re going to fulfill their pledges.  And I think that after the elections there should be some signs that reconstruction here in Haiti will start to happen.

CLARK: Well, you have spent a lot of time in Port Au Prince.  Now, you’re in Gonaives in the Artibonite Valley and the Artibonite was spared direct damage from the earthquake but that is where cholera first hit.  What are some of the differences in the two areas on the eve of the election?

DANIEL: Well, in Port Au Prince, obviously, it’s just filled with camps.  And you see many of the candidates going into the camps trying to get people to vote.  Yesterday, for example, the candidate, Michel Martelly, stood on the stage in front of several hundred people in one of the largest camps in Haiti and his supporters threw out bags of water.  That is, I think a typical scene in Port Au Prince and the provinces such as in Gonaives.  The candidates have certainly come out and toured the cities and the countryside but that hasn’t been quite the same. And here in Gonaives, obviously, cholera is a big concern.  Many of humanitarian workers have set up hand washing stations in the voting polls and they also plan on to continue distributing information to voters to let them know what else they can do to keep cholera at bay.

CLARK: And, of course, there have been reports of some campaign related violence with fights breaking out between supporters of rival candidates.  Two people have been killed.  Are these seen as isolated incidents?  And I’m wondering how likely they are to affect the vote?

DANIEL: So far they seem to be isolated cases.  I think what’s surprising about the violence we’ve seen so far is there’s been so little that has happened.  When you look at elections in the past here in Haiti, many of them have just been marred with bloodshed and political violence.  What we could see is unrest after election day if one side is not happy with the results because few people take to the street and protest.

CLARK: Another factor that seems likely to affect the vote is documentation.  So many people lost their national ID cards in the earthquake earlier this year.  I’m wondering have enough people been able to get their replacement IDs to make this a legitimate vote?

DANIEL: So far, I mean there are lines in Port Au Prince and in the countryside where people are trying to get their voter registration cards replaced.  They’re trying to distribute 413,000 voter cards.  But it appears there’s probably less than half of those have been distributed.  I imagine that not everybody is going to receive their voter registration card and as a result we’ll probably see a low voter turnout.  And I just think there’s a lot of apathy and cynicism with the whole political process.

CLARK: Trenton Daniel is a reporter with the Miami Herald joining us from Gonaives, Haiti.  Thank you, Trenton.  Nice to talk with you.

DANIEL: Yes.  Thank you.

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