Haiti candidate to challenge elections results

The violence is a fresh threat to the stability of the country, in the wake of the devastating recent earthquake and the subsequent outbreak of Cholera ravaging both the country's rural areas and the capital.

Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly urged backers to non-violently protest results from the 28 November presidential elections. Demonstrators claim the election was rigged. His campaign manager later said they would formally challenge the tallies released late yesterday to Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council.

Carrying pink signs with the smiling face and bald head of Martelly, supporters built street barricades, challenged heavily armoured foreign soldiers, and used government campaign posters to start fires.

"Demonstrating without violence is the right of the people," Martelly said. "I will be with you until the bald-head victory."

Outside the electoral council headquarters in the suburb of Petionville, young men wearing their shirts as masks threw rocks at UN troops. The soldiers — Indians and Pakistanis working as a single unit — responded with exploding canisters of tear gas that washed over a nearby earthquake-refugee camp, sending mothers running from their tarps with their crying, coughing children in tow.

Protesters also set fire to the headquarters of outgoing President Rene Preval's Unity party, traded blows with UN peacekeepers and shut down the country's lone international airport.

Preval had earlier urged the candidates to call off the protests. He acknowledged there had been fraud in the election, but said it was typical of elections around the world. "This is not how the country is supposed to work," he told demonstrators in a live radio speech. "People are suffering because of all this damage."

The fallout from the fraud-riddled shut down cities across impoverished Haiti at a moment when medical aid workers need to tackle a surging cholera epidemic that has claimed more than 2,000 lives.

Haiti's Radio Kiskeya carried an unconfirmed report that claimed at least four demonstrators were killed — three in Les Cayes, about 193 kilometers west of Port-au-Prince in the country's southern peninsula, and one in the northern city of Cap-Haitien.

Martelly, a popular carnival singer, narrowly lost a spot in a runoff election to Jude Celestin, a political unknown viewed by supporters and detractors alike as a continuation of Preval's administration.

The US Embassy criticized the preliminary results Tuesday, saying Haitian, US and other international monitors had predicted that Celestin was likely to be eliminated in the first round.