The international community appealed for dialogue and calm in Haiti on Saturday after a presidential and legislative runoff was put on hold indefinitely.
The UN, international election observers and foreign governments urged the volatile Caribbean country’s feuding political actors to negotiate a solution to an electoral impasse that threatens to soon become a constitutional crisis.
Haiti’s charter requires a new government to take power on Feb. 7, but election authorities said there is now no chance the country would meet that deadline to pick the next president. It is unclear whether an interim government will be set up, or another solution may be reached.
Photo: EPA
In a statement, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Haitians to work toward “peaceful completion of the electoral process without delay.”
Government officials have not addressed the impasse publicly since Friday afternoon, when Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council postponed the runoff a second time without naming a new date for the vote.
The splintering council cited what it called a “deteriorating security environment” to explain its decision, but there has also been widespread opposition to the vote on the part of civil society. The opposition presidential candidate had promised to boycott the runoff.
A day after protesters set fires and smashed windows, a few thousand anti-government demonstrators again took to the streets of Port-au-Prince on Saturday. Young men threw rocks and lit tire barricades on fire downtown, sending black smoke billowing into the air.
Many called for new elections and the immediate removal of Haitian President Michel Martelly.
Presidential candidate Jovenel Moise said he was mystified that electoral authorities would again postpone the runoff without immediately providing a new date. The vote was originally supposed to be held on Dec. 27 last year.
Moise, whose first-place finish in the first round prompted allegations of vote-rigging, told reporters he believes he is the people’s choice and called for the runoff to be held soon and peacefully.
Many Haitians are exasperated by the political infighting and disruptive protests.
Some Haitians blame the election mess on the international community and especially Washington, which they believe is far too involved in Haitian affairs.
“All of these so-called friends of Haiti are stopping us from moving forward,” mechanic Patrick Augustin said. “Martelly’s government is always taking dictation from the US.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of