PORT-AU-PRINCE (Haiti): When word leaked out in the powder-keg streets of Port-au-Prince that former President Rene Preval’s lead was shrinking, his supporters took to the hills. By the thousands, they stormed up to the hilltop Hotel Montana, where they believed the overseers of the Haitian presidential vote were holed up, clambering over the luxury compound’s gates and overwhelming its meagre defences.

But electoral council officials hadn’t shown up at the Montana that Monday. Neither had those administering the vote tabulation at the Sonapi industrial park near the airport. Although workers hired to input voting data had made it to the industrial park, they had been sent home for their safety.

It had been nearly a week since 2.2 million voters crushed into overwhelmed polling places on February 7 in Haiti’s first elections in six years. Initial returns had given Preval 61 per cent, but further counting had whittled that lead to just over 50 per cent, and the percentage kept going lower.

Suspicious that their votes were being stolen, Preval’s supporters were spoiling for a confrontation.

The top United Nations diplomat in Haiti, Juan Gabriel Valdes, summoned peacekeeping commanders and officials of Haiti’s interim government to an emergency meeting early Monday afternoon at the operational compound of the UN mission, which is known by its French acronym, MINUSTAH.

A decision was made to send a helicopter to Preval’s remote hometown, Marmalade, to bring the man at the centre of the spiralling unrest to the capital to calm his supporters. When Preval disembarked the UN helicopter, he said only that he had come to try to save the election.

Preval’s camp was crying foul, pointing to the large number of blank ballots — nearly five per cent of the total — as suspect. Haitians hadn’t walked for miles and stood in unruly lines for hours to cast ballots for none of the 33 presidential choices, his aides argued. They wanted the blank ballots removed from the count or redistributed proportionate to each contender’s vote share, either of which would boost Preval’s percentage above the simple majority needed for victory.

Meanwhile, diplomats from the United States, Canada, France, Brazil, Chile, the United Nations and the Organization of American States gathered at the National Palace to meet with interim President Boniface Alexandre.

“We felt what was needed was a big brainstorming. We thought we should try to find a way to smooth things over,” said Brazil’s ambassador to Haiti, Paolo Cordeiro de Andrade Pinto, whose nation commands MINUSTAH forces and contributes the largest contingent.

“There was a Latin American perception that the way the blank votes were handled here is completely different from the way they are considered in any other country,” Cordeiro said.

As tension mounted, political analysts blamed exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide for orchestrating the unrest and raising the spectre of violence — a tactic remembered from his two truncated presidencies.

Preval emerged on Tuesday morning to say he had not summoned the crowds to the streets and did not have the power to recall them. But in an address carried live on nationwide radio, he urged his supporters to keep up their demands for a fair vote count but to do so “peacefully, intelligently and with respect for private property”.

Immediately, the roadblocks were lifted and Preval’s supporters turned to festive marches to press their demands that he be declared the presidential victor.

Tuesday night, another political bombshell exploded. The Telemax TV station, privately owned and seen as a pro-Aristide bastion, carried footage of thousands of marked ballots and election material dumped atop a sodden trash heap. The roadblocks reemerged. The vote-counting remained suspended.

The interim government announced an investigation, but by midday Wednesday, the volatile city crackled anger.

Officials of the Provisional Electoral Council, a nine-member body named before Aristide’s February 2004 departure and composed mostly of his political opponents, locked themselves into a suburban villa at 11am to hash over compromise proposals.

Preval’s opponents, noting that he lacked a clear majority, wanted a second round of voting to be held on March 19. But Preval refused to submit to a runoff, warning of chaos as his supporters were certain that only fraud could have deprived him of a first-round win.

“They thrashed through the different proposals and eventually settled on a formula for handling blank votes that is applied in Belgium,” said David Wimhurst, a MINUSTAH spokesman who said the council’s decision was made behind closed doors and solely by its members.

The Belgian Option, as the compromise has come to be known, met the technical requirement of the Haitian election decree that unmarked ballots be counted, Cordeiro said. Along with Chilean Ambassador Marcel Young, he convinced counterparts from the United States, France and Canada that insistence on a runoff risked an explosion of violence.

“The deal cut was under the lead of Brazil and Chile. Washington and Paris reluctantly accepted it,” said a source involved in the palace brainstorming.

One observer described the US role as “pretty silent” amid more active roles by the South American diplomats whose countries contribute the bulk of MINUSTAH’s forces.

Cordeiro confirmed that with more than 1,200 Brazilian troops in Haiti, his government felt a responsibility to search for “creative solutions” in the face of the mounting threat of violence.

Timothy M. Carney, former US ambassador and acting charge d’affaires, said he did not know whether the subject of Aristide came up during the council’s deliberations because neither he nor the other diplomats spoke with the Haitian officials during their 14 hours of discussions, which ran until early Thursday.

“But there has never been any doubt about the US position on Aristide’s return since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was here last autumn and said he was a man of the past,” Carney said.

The council’s 3am announcement that the blank vote redistribution had pushed Preval over the victory threshold inspired joyous celebrations throughout the country.

As congratulations poured in from around the world, Preval’s election became a fait accompli.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times News Service