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OAS SECRETARY GENERAL ATTRIBUTES SUCCESS OF THE ELECTORAL PROCESS TO THE HAITIAN PEOPLE

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, today expressed satisfaction with the fact that the elections yesterday in Haiti took place under normal conditions. He attributed the successful holding of elections to the civic spirit that led Haitians to go to the polls.

At the end of his trip to this Caribbean nation, during which he supervised the work of the OAS Special Mission and Electoral Technical Assistance Program in Haiti, Insulza underscored the importance of the way citizens had behaved, belying some analysts’ predictions of violence.

Insulza, who was accompanied by OAS Assistant Secretary General Albert Ramdin, said that calm deserved to be highlighted with as much emphasis as had been placed on earlier predictions of possible unrest.

“Yesterday, security was non-news,” Insulza maintained. “That in itself deserves to be underscored because it reflects the will of a people to progress toward institutional stability.”

As to when the results of the elections were likely to be announced, the Secretary General said the mechanisms for delivering the votes suggested that final results would not be available for two or three days. “The ballot boxes have to be transported over land to the vote-counting center, because there is no electronic network here for transmitting the results of each polling station via the Internet to the counting center,” he explained.

Insulza focused on the enthusiasm Haitians had shown as they made their way very early on Tuesday morning to the polling stations. “There were already groups walking to their polling station at 5.a.m. The polling stations were supposed to open at 6 a.m. Some did not open on time, which resulted in long lines of people, who waited up to five hours to be able to vote. Yet none of that triggered the disturbances or unrest or chaos that some media reported,” Insulza said, reasserting his view of how voters had behaved.

In his opinion, ideally the results would show a clear trend in favor of a winner in the first round, or a trend in favor of two candidates with sufficient votes to separate them from the rest, enabling them to proceed to a second round. “The reason that would be ideal is that five or six parties would then emerge, seeking points of consensus on how to bring about progress in the country,” Insulza said.

He went on to say: “Internally, that depends on the ability of the winner to convene the other parties and on the readiness of those parties to forge some points of consensus that can place the country on a better footing.”

“It is perfectly feasible for the government and the opposition to live together in harmony, provided certain basic agreements are reached to enable the country to progress. Stability depends on that,” he said.

Insulza stressed that Haiti’s future required the ongoing presence on the island of the international community. “I don’t think it would be right for international organizations to leave now. On the contrary, they must take advantage of the enormous enthusiasm expressed by Haitians for a return to normal life. The effort made by thousands and thousands of Haitians yesterday, who were willing to stand and wait for hours to cast their vote, must be construed as the desire of this people to see things improve and, by extension, the international community, too, must continue to help Haiti achieve this objective," the Secretary General said.

“What happened in Haiti yesterday,” Insulza concluded, “underscored the OAS contribution and showed a more balanced Organization, convinced that democracy in this hemisphere has to be plural, a place we all call home.”

The OAS worked closely with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), registering more than 3.5 million Haitian voters and building the voter registration list used in yesterday’s elections. Insulza and Juan Gabriel Valdés, the United Nations Representative in Haiti, together toured the city and voting stations several times yesterday and then gave a press conference jointly with the Haitian authorities of the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP).

During this electoral process in Haiti, the OAS did not participate as an observer. Instead, it was responsible for technical assistance to the national vote-tallying center. OAS technical staff designed the software used to tally the votes and taught CEP staff how to use it.

Reference: E-020/06