18355: (Chamberlain) Haiti-Uprising (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By MICHAEL NORTON

   PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 9 (AP) -- Anti-government rebels had taken control
of at least nine towns in eastern Haiti Monday, and the death toll in the
violent uprising rose to at least 40, witnesses said.
   In the strongest challenge yet to the authority of President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, armed rebels began their assault Thursday in the
Gonaives, Haiti's fourth-largest city, setting the police station on fire,
driving police officers out of the town and sending government workers
fleeing for safety.
   "We are in a situation of armed popular insurrection," said opposition
politician and former army Col. Himler Rebu, who led a failed coup attempt
against Lt. Gen. Prosper Avril in 1989.
   The deaths were reported by the Associated Press, Red Cross official
Raoul Elysee, rebel leaders Wenter Etienne and Jean-Yves Marcisse, and
Haitian radio.
   At the weekend, the rebels took the important port city of St. Marc,
where hundreds of people looted TV sets, mattresses and sacks of flour from
shipping containers.
   Using felled trees, burning tires and cars, residents blocked entry to
several towns. Rebels blocking the road into St. Marc from Port-au-Prince,
the capital 45 miles away, told Associated Press reporters Monday that if
they entered the city there was no turning back to Port-au-Prince. They
only would be allowed to travel deeper into rebel-held territory.
   The main rebel group is the Gonaives Resistance Front, formerly a gang
of pro-Aristide toughs who terrorized government opponents but since have
turned on the Haitian leader. In Gonaives, they were joined by some former
soldiers of the disbanded Haitian army. The rebels are being supported by
residents who have formed neighborhood groups disgruntled by mounting
poverty, corruption and political crises.
   Anger has brewed in Haiti since Aristide's party won flawed legislative
elections in 2000 and international donors blocked millions of dollars in
aid. The opposition refuses to participate in new elections unless Aristide
resigns; he insists on serving out the term that ends in 2006.
   Aristide was elected in Haiti's first democratic election in 1990 then
ousted months later by the army. He was restored to power in a 1994 U.S.
invasion. He disbanded the army and replaced it with a small civilian
police force that is accused of being trigger-happy and partisan.
   In one the bloodiest clashes, 150 police tried to retake Gonaives on
Saturday but left hours later after a series of gunbattles, witnesses said.
At least nine people were killed, seven of them police.
   Crowds mutilated the corpses of three police officers, according to AP
reporters. One body was dragged through the street as a man swung at it
with a machete, and a woman cut off the officer's ear. Another policeman
was lynched, and residents dropped large rocks on his body.
   Meanwhile, before dawn Sunday an unidentified group of arsonists torched
a two-story building in northern Cap-Haitien city that housed the studio of
Radio Vision 2000, destroying it, the independent Haitian broadcaster said.
   Rebels continued to rule the streets of Gonaives on Monday, witnesses
said, though it was unclear how many armed militants were in the city of
200,000. St. Marc has a population of about 100,000.
   Calling the violence acts of terrorism, the government has vowed to
regain control, but it was unclear when police planned to return.
   Premier Yvon Neptune, in a Sunday interview with state television,
lashed out "The violence (which) is tied to a coup d'etat under way."