PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, May 13 (UPI) — Haiti’s new president, former musician Michel Martelly, will be inaugurated Saturday.
Workers were building wooden benches on the lawn of the National Palace, which was destroyed during last year’s 7-magnitude earthquake that killed an estimated 230,000 people.
“Everything is broken,” Daniel Supplice, head of Martelly’s presidential transition team, said in a Miami Herald report Friday. “But we don’t have a choice. The president has to be inaugurated either way. It has to be done. We have to see how it is done.”
The inauguration begins with the arrival of Martelly, parliamentarians and incumbent President Rene Preval. It ends with celebrations in all 10 of Haiti’s geographical political departments, said Fritz Jen-Louis, Martelly’s primary celebration planner.
Martelly, the former konpa star better known as “Sweet Micky,” was elected president after an election complicated by controversy, protests and diplomatic intervention, the Herald reported.
Former President Bill Clinton, co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, will lead the U.S. delegation at the inauguration. Kenneth Merten, U.S. ambassador to Haiti, and Thomas Adams, Haiti special coordinator in the State Department, will also attend the ceremony.
Source: UPI.com
MAY
2011
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