AFP - Haitian President Rene Preval turned to the international community for help in resolving a tense election stalemate that has imperiled earthquake and cholera relief efforts.
Preval asked the Washington-based Organization of American States to send experts to assist in a planned vote recount and unravel the complex legal challenges arising from the disputed November 28 presidential elections.
"Faced with difficulties resulting from the first round of the elections and in the hope of reassuring all the actors, the president of the Republic asked the OAS to send two technical missions," Preval's office said in a statement.
The two separate teams -- one to assist the vote recount and the other to help with the legal challenges -- are to arrive in the capital Port-au-Prince to begin work on Wednesday.
Days of deadly street protests erupted when official results showed popular singer Michel Martelly, 49, losing out on a place in the January 16 run-off to Preval's handpicked protege by less than 7,000 votes.
There were widespread allegations of fraud on a chaotic election day in which thousands of survivors of January's devastating earthquake either couldn't get the necessary papers to vote or weren't on the register.
The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has said it will recount the tally sheets in the presence of the three main candidates, but Martelly and Manigat have refused to participate in the process.
Martelly, who accuses Preval of orchestrating the rigging of the elections in favor of his chosen candidate -- 48-year-old Jude Celestin of the ruling Unity party -- called Tuesday for a new one-off poll with all 18 candidates.
"The simplest solution in my opinion would be a single round, supervised by international and national organizations," Martelly told a press conference, suggesting the person with the most votes wins, pure and simple.
But Mirlande Manigat, a 70-year-old academic and former first lady, came out clearly on top of the first round and both she and Celestin are unlikely to suddenly accept the whole field back in the race again.
Despite the deadlock and the threat of renewed violence, life has quickly returned to normal on the streets of Port-au-Prince, a city whose recent past has been plagued by dictatorship and political upheaval.
"Since three days the political and social atmosphere has dramatically improved," Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive told a quake meeting co-chaired by former US president Bill Clinton in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
"The meeting today sends a strong signal to the people of Haiti from the international community that we are all dedicated to the recovery and development of Haiti," Bellerive said.
"It is important work that rises above the politics of the day and we go forward no matter who is the next president," he told the Santo Domingo meeting of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, via videolink from Port-au-Prince.
"It's important that the outcome of these elections is legitimate and supported internally in Haiti and by the international community," Dominican President Leonel Fernandez told the meeting.
Fernandez was supposed to host Preval separately on Tuesday but the visit was apparently canceled at the last minute, possibly because the president is nervous about leaving home at such a time of political uncertainty.
Clinton, who was the United Nations envoy to Haiti even before a devastating earthquake 11 months ago that killed 250,000 people, has been chairing regular meetings of the IHRC.
The commission was set up in the wake of the quake to oversee the massive reconstruction effort which is to be funded by up to 10 billion dollars pledged by the international community.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned this week that American patience over the deadlock in Haiti is running out as the political crisis is also impinging on the quake reconstruction effort.
She described a call by influential US senator Patrick Leahy to freeze American aid to the Haiti government and deny travel visas to its top officials as a "very strong signal that we expect more and we're looking for more."
Adding to Haiti's woes is a cholera epidemic that since mid-October has claimed the lives of nearly 2,200 people, overburdening an already fragile health system heavily reliant on foreign NGOs.
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