THUMBS UP, HALFWAYS

By Kevin Fedarko

The power may have been cut in Cap Haitien, but the air in Haiti's second largest city on the evening of June 24 crackled with electricity. Within 12 hours, nearly every elective position in the country would be up for grabs as more than 10,000 candidates vied for 2,195 local offices and 101 seats in the legislature. That accounted for the scene outside the town's election center, where thousands of empty ballots were in trucks, waiting to be delivered to the polls. The ballots, however, weren't going anywhere because workers had already made their feelings plain; they weren't going to be caught on the streets after dark.

One could scarcely blame them. When Haiti tried something like this in 1987, marauding army-backed death squads attacked voters with guns and machetes. The Cap Haitien workers knew, of course, that much had changed since then. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned last October by the U.S. military after spending three years in exile. The military officers who ousted him had been driven into an exile of their own. And now a new civil society was taking root, nurtured by 6,000 U.N. peacekeepers, a host of relief groups and $1.2 billion in foreign aid.

Still the officials in Cap Haitien wouldn't budge, so international observers were forced to unload the ballots and wait until morning. At 5 a.m. a convoy of trucks careered through the streets in a last-minute distribution dash. The display was typical of the chaos that beset voting stations across the country. Ballot boxes turned up in the oddest places: stacked on street corners, stashed beneath poll workers' beds, tossed into ravines. But such irregularities are one thing; the gunshots, screams and sirens that have traditionally attended mass action in Haiti are another, and they were notably absent from this election. In a country that had known only dictatorship and political bloodshed for 200 years, something heartening had occurred: a peaceful exercise in democracy. Only after the voting took place did violence erupt, when one candidate shot and killed his opponent.

The Clinton Administration views the results with measured pride and optimism -- and no doubt relief. When the President sent the troops to Haiti to accompany Aristide, who had been ousted in a military coup, thoughts of the debacle in Somalia were still fresh in the minds of critics and supporters. But the U.S. has taken only two casualties, and so far the intervention appears to have been a success. Accompanied by American and U.N. power, Aristide has been able to maintain peace while disbanding the army and driving political thugs either into exile or underground. Even the U.S. "exit strategy" seems to have worked. The American presence has been reduced to 2,400 soldiers taking part in the U.N. force.

There were several reasons why this time around the elections went off so peacefully. Certainly, the presence of U.N. troops played an important part, and perhaps they brought an artificial tranquillity. But it is still significant that the troops did not have to be called on; and even if the peace was partially imposed, the U.N. soldiers at least gave the Haitians the chance to get some practice with their new institutions. Probably the biggest reason for the lack of violence was Aristide himself. The concerns about his leftist opinions and volatile personality, which have long jangled nerves in Washington, have so far proved groundless as he preached reconciliation. He also displayed every intention of keeping his promise to step down when his term ends in December. It appears that his party, the Lavalas Political Organization, won the election in a landslide, but results may not be known for weeks.

All that doesn't impress U.S. Republicans. The party's international-elections monitoring arm pronounced the polling a disaster a day before it started, declaring that it failed to meet "minimally accepted standards." In Washington, Jesse Helms, head of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, decried the $235 million Clinton has pledged to Haiti for 1995 and said, "It's time for the President and his advisers to stop playing beach-blanket bingo with Aristide." Helms also said that his committee would soon hold hearings examining the "countless irregular activities."

In Haiti too politicians agreed something was amiss. Sixteen of the nation's political parties petitioned for the election's annulment, forcing Aristide to call two meetings last week in an attempt to salvage the result. In the meantime, he has other problems. Using his nickname, a sign outside the National Palace asks a common question: "Titid, where is the job you promised?" The Haitians do not even have the expertise to spend the aid they have been offered in ways that foreign lenders approve, so most of the money sits idle. The justice system is such a shambles that in the past seven months not a single felony has been tried. And the country must survive the withdrawal of the U.N., scheduled for February 1996, after the presidential election. That is all daunting. But last week Haiti faced the first test under its new dispensation, and it passed.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Washington, Bernard Diederich/Port-au-Prince and Tammerlin Drummond/ Cap Haitien

With reporting by HANNAH BLOCH/WASHINGTON, BERNARD DIEDERICH/PORT-AU-PRINCE AND TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND/CAP HAITIEN