GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) – Mules carried ballots into the Haitian countryside yesterday to reach a remote village on the eve of today’s elections, aimed at putting the country’s democracy back on track.

Yesterday, thousands of UN peacekeepers fanned out to guard against attacks by heavily armed gangs, some of whom are loyal to former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, ousted in a rebellion two years ago.

Speaking Sunday night in his northern hometown of Marmalade, presidential front-runner Rene Preval said he was satisfied with his campaign.

“I’m tired but I am happy,” Preval said in an interview with AP Television News. “It is an important election for the Haitian people.”

Authorities have urged Haitians to turn out in large numbers to vote, and rejected the possibility that fraud could taint the results.

“Haiti’s future depends on this vote,” Jacques Bernard, director general of the electoral council, told a news conference in Port-au-Prince, the capital. “Good elections are the only solution to saving our nation.”

He defended a decision not to put voting stations inside the seaside slum of Cite Soleil, home to some 200,000 people and a base for armed gangs blamed for many kidnappings in the capital.

People in Cite Soleil say they have been disenfranchised by the move, but election organisers said they can vote at polling stations set up two kilometres (1.2 miles) outside the shantytown.

Bernard said Cite Soleil, where even heavily armed UN peacekeepers in armoured personnel carriers have not fully penetrated, is simply too dangerous for election workers.

“It’s a moral question,” he said. “I couldn’t ask an election worker to go into an area that I myself wouldn’t go.”

Underscoring the challenge of staging elections in a country with poor infrastructure, authorities had to rely on mules to haul election materials to areas where UN helicopters were unable to land. The elections have been postponed four times since October because of delays in distributing election materials and security problems.

At dawn yesterday, a dozen Uruguayan peacekeepers in the town of Archaie, just north of the capital, loaded the mules with sacks stuffed with ballots and other voting materials. The mules trotted off on a seven-hour trek to a polling station in a remote mountain hamlet.

The presidential election features 33 candidates, including two former presidents, a rebel leader in the armed insurgency that forced Aristide from office, and an ex-army officer accused in the death of a leading Haitian journalist.

If no candidate wins a majority of votes, a March 19 run-off will be held between the top two candidates.

Hundreds of candidates are also running for 129 parliamentary seats.

The election has been billed as a move to restore democracy. But it is a daunting task to build up a country that has little to build on.

After decades of capital flight and corruption, the hemisphere’s poorest nation needs more than a quick electoral fix, experts say.

Haiti, where peasants have cleared so many trees to make charcoal that it is now one of the most deforested places in the world and much of the remaining soil is no longer arable, has urgent needs that would defy any fledgling government.

Robert Rotberg, a Haiti specialist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, suggested that one solution would be to enlist even more help from the UN and the Organisation of American States.

But even in a teeming marketplace in the northern town of Gonaives, where women hunkered over small piles of fruit, bags of salt and chili peppers, people had hope.

“I hope the elections go in a good way and that the president changes the country,” said Rosseleine Jeanbaptiste. “We don’t want to keep living like this.”

. Dominican Republic puts military on alert

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) – Hundreds of Dominican soldiers have been mobilised against possible unrest, officials said yesterday, as neighbouring Haiti prepared for elections to restore democracy in the hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Haitians go to the polls today, two years after a bloody revolt ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Elections have been postponed four times due to organisational problems and escalating violence.

“The Dominican Armed Forces have to be prepared along the border because anything could happen during the elections in Haiti,” said Defence Secretary Adm Sigfrido Pared Perez.

Military officials, citing national security, would not specify exactly how many soldiers were being mobilised, nor would they say how many troops were already on the border.

The 240-mile (390-kilometre) border has long been the scene of chaos and violence, straining relations between the two countries which share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.

About one million Haitians, many of them illegal immigrants, live in the Dominican Republic, home to 8.8 million people. The Dominican Republic has relied on Haitian labour for decades to cut sugar cane and harvest coffee.

But in December, Dominican villagers burned about 20 shacks occupied by Haitian migrants in reprisal for their alleged involvement in the killing of a businessman.

Last May, at least 2,000 Haitians were deported after the killing of a Dominican woman. No one was arrested for the murder, but Dominicans went on a retaliatory rampage, beheading two Haitians.