New PM: Only fair elections can save Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: Haiti’s new prime minister, Gerard Latortue, believes only free elections can save his traumatised homeland. A former UN official who served in Africa and as an international business consultant in Miami, Latortue was chosen Tuesday to head a transitional government and organise elections in a country that only once in its 200 years of independence had a democratic election. “He’s a pacifist. He’s a good person. He’s a man of compromise,” Leslie Voltaire, a Cabinet minister in the government of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, said of Latortue. “The plan was asking for an independent prime minister and (one) competent at a professional level. I think he is both.”

He said Latortue’s extensive knowledge of international organisations, in particular the United Nations, would prove invaluable once the world body takes over the US-led force in Haiti. Latortue will head a government of former enemies — Aristide’s Lavalas party and an opposition coalition — who for years have been at loggerheads. And he will have to pacify disparate armed factions: pro-Aristide loyalists and the rebels who helped oust him. Some fighters told The Associated Press they were not happy with the choice of Latortue. Former coup plotter and Haitian army Col Himler Rebu said the council made a “tactical mistake” by not choosing former army chief-of-staff Gen Herard Abraham, who was on a shortlist of three candidates.

Aristide was accused of using police to oppress and kill his opponents. Latortue served as Haiti’s foreign minister in 1988 to President Leslie Manigat, who was installed by the military. Latortue lost his job in one of the 32 coups Haiti’s army fomented. “Our country is bankrupt,” Latortue wrote in a French-language paper for a conference in Washington DC, in March 2003. “The entire nation opens its arms to those who can and want to help us organise viable, free and fair elections, to install a lawful state, as well as justice and security for all, and to disarm the gangs.”