After three days of meetings, the chief of a regional mission is hopeful, but not necessarily confident that Haiti’s political crisis can be resolved before the scheduled end of the president’s term this weekend.
At outgoing Haitian President Michel Martelly’s request, the Organization of American States (OAS) authorized the special mission to Haiti following the indefinite suspension of a runoff election to choose a successor before the Sunday constitutional deadline for him to leave office.
Since arriving on Sunday last week, the OAS representatives have met with Martelly and officials of his administration, lawmakers, judges and others.
Photo: Reuters
Ronald Sanders, an Antiguan diplomat who is the leader of the mission and chairman of the 35-nation OAS’ permanent council, said he was impressed with the “remarkable intelligence” of the Haitian officials, but he would not go so far as to say he was confident that they would agree on a workable solution in the next few days.
“If I am to believe what people have said to us about their determination to save their country and to take it forward, then I believe there’s great hope that they will reach a solution,” he said on Tuesday in an interview.
Sanders said Haitian senators have proposed a plan that would see Martelly step down on schedule on Sunday. The presidency would remain vacant for a short term, with a consensus prime minister running the country until a new president could be elected.
He said he heard that 10 people were being considered to be the caretaker leader.
However, some opposition figures are eager to derail any agreement that involves Martelly.
“Martelly has no role he can play. The proposition being discussed is like something in a game by playing children,” said Samuel Madistin, who finished 10th in the opening round of the presidential election.
Madistin now acts as spokesman for an opposition alliance that includes Jude Celestin, who came in second and won a spot in the suspended runoff against Martelly’s preferred successor, first-place finisher Jovenel Moise. Celestin was boycotting the runoff.
The opposition alliance wants a transitional government led by a Haitian Supreme Court leader to ensure a commission verifies disputed election results from rounds in August and October last year.
Madistin has also said the OAS mission was “not welcome” in Haiti.
Haiti had been scheduled to hold a presidential and legislative runoff vote on Jan. 24. However, the electoral council canceled it, for a second time, amid violent protests and allegations that the first presidential round was marred by fraud favoring Moise.
Haitian Prime Minister Evans Paul remained in his post late on Tuesday after a day of contradictory media reports about whether he had resigned to make way for an interim government.
He is reportedly one of the leading candidates to become the short-term caretaker leader, although various opposition factions would refuse to accept him.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS