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Ex-president Preval makes gains as Haitians await initial election results

Two days after they cast their ballots, Haitians yesterday had yet to find out who their new leader would be, but former president Rene Preval, 63, scored major victories in the capital.

Partial results were unlikely to be announced before week's end, according to electoral authorities who cited difficulties in transporting tally sheets, sometimes by mule, from remote areas.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, international observers and Haitian officials hailed the absence of political violence during Tuesday's voting.

They also paid tribute to the patience of voters, who often had to walk for hours only to find long lines outside voting centers.

In some areas, voting started hours late, and four people died as furious crowds stormed the shuttered gates.

In Port-au-Prince, Preval garnered a huge and anticipated majority in some shantytowns, and got unexpectedly high support in a number of wealthier neighborhoods, according to tallies posted at voting centers.

He had more than 90 percent of the votes in a large center where residents of the notorious Cite Soleil slum cast their ballots, and about 70 percent at a school in the middle-class suburb of Petion-Ville, where his closest rivals were former president Leslie Manigat and industrialist Charles Henri Baker.

Manigat's wife Marylande, who is a senatorial candidate, said that Preval had a very strong lead in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas.

Preval once had close ties to Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's last elected president, who resigned and fled the country with US and French help on Feb. 29, 2004, as insurgents closed in on the capital.

A trained agronomist, Preval was president from 1996 to 2001 and had served as prime minister under Aristide for seven months in 1991. Like Aristide before him, he is often seen as a champion of the poor who make up 77 percent of the 8.5 million population.

Despite problems during the elections, which had been postponed four times since last November, observers hailed the fact that voting could be held in a country plagued by violence and poverty, and with a history of fraudulent elections.
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