Haiti Frees Opposition Leader Dejoie, Briefly Detains Another

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti â€”  Military authorities freed one opponent from prison and briefly detained another Friday as election officials refused for the fifth straight day to make public the results of last Sunday’s presidential election.

Louis Dejoie II, a former presidential candidate and outspoken critic of the election, was released conditionally after being held for two days in the national prison on a charge of “provoking civil disturbances.�

He was freed on bail and still faces a trial on that charge, although no date has been set.

The arrest of Dejoie, 57, who had joined three other former presidential candidates in urging a boycott of Sunday’s voting, was condemned by the United States as “unwarranted and . . . ominous.� On Wednesday, a State Department spokesman had called for his immediate release.

Brief Detention

As Dejoie was being freed to the cheers of some 200 supporters, airport security officials were detaining Louis Roy, 70, one of the authors of Haiti’s new constitution, as he returned from a speaking tour of Canada, the United States and the Caribbean. After two hours of interrogation by security officers at the airport, Roy was told he was free to go, according to friends who witnessed the incident.

Supporters of both men charged that the government was attempting to distract public attention.

The release and the detention “were staged to draw the attention of the Haitian people away from the electoral farce,� said Lafantant Joseph, a Dejoie supporter.

Dejoie and Roy had made a series of public statements in Canada and the United States decrying the undemocratic nature of the government-engineered election, urging a boycott and calling on foreign governments to undertake a total aid and trade embargo as a means of pressuring the army-led provisional government of Lt. Gen. Henri Namphy into stepping down.

Few Participated

The election, boycotted by the great majority of voters, was ordered by the Namphy government after an attempt at an independently organized free election ended in a massacre at the polls last Nov. 29. Opponents and foreign journalists who observed Sunday’s voting estimated that less than 25%, perhaps less than 10%, of the voters participated.

The handpicked government Electoral Council, which was responsible for organizing the election and counting the votes, has refused to make public even unofficial tallies of the results. This refusal has given rise to widespread fear that officials may be using the time to rig the outcome in favor of a particular candidate and inflate the vote total in order to make the election appear more credible to the outside world.

One of the projected leading candidates in the election complained that the results are being rigged in favor of political scientist Leslie F. Manigat, who has been confidently predicting victory since the polls closed Sunday.

“It was a parody of an election (and it) is further destroying what was left of the unity of the country,� Gerard Philippe Auguste, an agronomist, complained Friday.

Aside from the low turnout, the election was flawed by numerous reports of lack of voting secrecy, loose security for ballot boxes, double voting, illegal voting by minors and vote buying.