18663: (Craig) Article: Amid Fear and Chaos, Haitian City Goes On (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>


Amid Fear and Chaos, Haitian City Goes On
February 15, 2004
By LYDIA POLGREEN

GONAIVES, Haiti Feb. 14 - When Roselene Guillaume saw her
husband's bullet-riddled body, she did not need to be told
what to do.

She packed up the few rags of clothing that her six
children - three sets of twins, ages 2 to 6 - could carry
and sent them on foot with her aunt to a village 20 miles
north of here. She wanted them out of this city, the heart
of a violent uprising aimed at overthrowing President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide that threatens to plunge the country
into chaos.

But Ms. Guillaume, 20, her belly swollen with her seventh
child, refused to go with them. She would not leave the
body of her husband, Chaolin, who was killed, she said, by
pro-Aristide militants as he tried to make his way home
here during the uprising.

"I have to bury my husband here, in his home, where
Aristide killed him," Ms. Guillaume said, her eyes vacant
as she stared into a street covered with a shimmering
carpet of ash and broken glass.

"But we are very afraid."

Political strife has gripped
the country since a disputed parliamentary election in
2000, and huge opposition marches over the past several
months intensified calls for Mr. Aristide to leave office.
Earlier this month the crisis boiled over into violence as
armed rebel groups attacked police stations in as many as a
dozen cities across the country. More than 40 people have
died in violent clashes.

But this city, where an opposition force wrested control
from the police on Feb. 5, is at the heart of the conflict.

Fear and chaos have become the way of life in Gonaives,
which sits at the center of Haiti's revolutionary heartland
and is a critical crossroads between the country's two
largest cities, Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien.

In recent days, the leader of the uprising here has
indicated that he has the support both of sinister figures
from this country's violent past.

It is unclear whether this support will actually
materialize, though some foreign journalists have reported
that they spoke with these men in Haiti in recent days. But
the possibility of their involvement, coupled with the
government's weak and chaotic security arrangements, could
take the conflict in Haiti, which has until now been
limited to uprisings by small armed groups in cities across
the country, to another level, experts say.

At this point the rebel group in Gonaives, which calls
itself the Artibonite Resistance Front, a more palatable
name than the Cannibal Army, as the group was formerly
known, appears not to have massed enough militants to take
on the police and pro-Aristide militants in other major
cities.

But with only a small police force and militant gangs that
sometimes serve as an auxiliary government force, Mr.
Aristide does not appear to have enough manpower to take
back Gonaives by force, though government officials have
said a plan to do just that is in the works. As a result,
Gonaives is likely to simmer in its current misery for some
time.

It was here in Gona?ves that the slaves who shook off
Napoleon declared their independence from their imperial
oppressors, leading to the founding of the first black
republic here 200 years ago. It was also here that the
revolt that overthrew the brutal dictatorship of the
Duvalier family began in the late 1980's. Haiti has
experienced 30 coups since its independence.

The man who has placed himself in charge of this city in an
effort to force Mr. Aristide from office is Butteur
Metayer. His brother, Amiot, once led a pro-government
gang, but they switched sides last fall after Amiot Metayer
was killed, and they accused the government of the killing.

On Feb. 5, the group repelled the police here, and Butteur
Metayer declared from behind his customary dark glasses
that the city had been liberated.

"We have freed Gonaives," Mr. Metayer said at an impromptu
news conference in a ramshackle schoolhouse at the edge of
the seaside slum that is his base.

"We have a plan to take St.-Marc," he continued, the smell
of rum heavy on his breath, referring to the port city 20
miles south of here that rebel groups and government forces
have now battled over for more than a week. "Then we will
march to the capital.

"And there is only one goal when we get to the capital: the
palace."

Mr. Metayer refused to say how many men he commands, but he
contended that reinforcements have arrived from the
Dominican Republic, led by two men feared for their
sinister roles in the army and police force in the past.

Louis Chamblain, a former soldier who led death squads in
the late 1980's and was accused of committing atrocities
after a 1991 military coup is gathering a force of men, Mr.
Metayer said. Guy Philippe, a former police chief whom the
government accused of trying to overthrow it in 2002, is
also on the ground near Gona?ves, he said.

"This is beginning to shape up to what I call an unholy
alliance," said Robert Maguire, an expert on Haitian
politics at Trinity College in Washington who is on cordial
terms with Mr. Aristide.

"You now have the real possibility of civil war, and you
have a government that is facing depleted capacity to
resist this because of the weakness of the police force."

With a demoralized police force of fewer than 5,000 men,
Mr. Aristide has struggled to retain control of the country
and relied heavily on armed gangs loyal to him to retain
control in places where the police have been unable or
unwilling to do so. The weakness of the police and the
violence of the street gangs have diplomats here concerned
that all order could breakdown very quickly.

"The police could melt away and he could unleash the
chimeres," said one senior Western diplomat in Port au
Prince, using the Haitian name for pro-government gang
members. "The government is more and more dependent on
gangs. It is a very fragile situation."

The armed uprising more than a week ago in this key seaside
city choked off a crucial north-south highway that links
Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien and has transformed Gona?ves
into a bubbling cauldron of misery, and thousands of the
city's 200,000 residents have fled.

The electricity has been out for more than a week. With the
road blocked by machine-gun wielding rebels, the price of
rice, the staple food here, has doubled.

Children fish gasoline out from the underground tank below
a bombed-out Esso gas station with tin cans attached to
wires, selling it for as much as $20 a gallon. Burned car
chassis and all manner of trash - baby carriages, tires and
bedframes - block roads throughout the city.

The hospital's bullet-riddled gates are open, but its
wooden doors are shut tight. The Cuban doctors who normally
staff it are afraid to show up for work, hospital workers
said. International aid agencies said they cannot safely
bring supplies to the city.

But it is a measure of the misery of life in Haiti even
under the best circumstances that people here say things
were not much better when the government was in control.

"Even before now we had no food, no money," said Dieuline
Menard, a 17-year-old student who has not been to school in
months because of the chaos gripping the city. "If Aristide
stays or goes, we still will not eat."

In a country where millions live on less than a dollar a
day, perched precariously on a knife-edge between survival
and utter despair, international aid agencies warned that
they are struggling to get food to more than a quarter
million people who rely on them to be able to eat in the
country's arid north.

There, in the areas around Cap-Haitien, farmers struggle to
coax crops from rocky bits of land between barren
mountains. Further instability could force the number of
people needing food to as many as 800,000, according to Guy
Gavreau, country representative for the World Food Program,
which plans to send a barge loaded with rice to the city of
Cap-Haitien to feed schoolchildren and pregnant mothers in
the countryside.

"These people are entirely dependent on food aid," Mr.
Gavreau said. "They are extremely vulnerable."

Opposition civic groups in Port-au-Prince have tried to
distance themselves from the violent uprisings,
particularly the one in Gonaives. But the government has
been equally forceful in asserting that the groups are
connected.

[In the capital on Sunday, hundreds of opposition
protesters took to the streets to demonstrate against the
government, in the first opposition march since the
uprisings began. A march planned for last Thursday was
called off when pro-government militants threw rocks and
menaced protesters as the police stood by.

[But on Sunday the police were out in force, keeping
opposition groups and government supporters apart to avoid
violent confrontations. Sporadic gunfire erupted in the
city and the march broke up shortly after noon when an
opposition leader went on the radio and told his supporters
to go home.]

In a news conference last week, Prime Minister Yvon Neptune
said the rebel group in Gonaives is "a group of terrorists
linked to the opposition," and that the city's population
"has been taken hostage by an armed group."

Jean-Claude Bajeaux, a longtime human rights advocate in
Port-au-Prince who supports the opposition, said the
government's contention is disingenuous given that the
uprising in Gonaives consists largely of former Aristide
supporters who say they received their weapons from Mr.
Aristide with instructions to control and intimidate
opposition civic groups there.

"Power that has fallen into delinquency wants to have its
own law," Mr. Bajeaux said. "It is for that reason that
Aristide lies and kills."

Indeed, the current crisis is in many ways one of Mr.
Aristide's making, said a senior western diplomat in
Port-au-Prince. By arming the rebel groups and politicizing
the country's police force by appointing political cronies
rather than professional managers to run it, Mr. Aristide
weakened the only legitimate defense he has.

"The chickens are very much coming home to roost here," the
senior diplomat said.

In Gonaives on Saturday, Mr. Metayer said very much the
same thing. "We are fighting Aristide with the weapons he
gave us," Mr. Metayer said. "He gave us guns to stop the
opposition, but now we oppose him."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/international/americas/15CND-HAIT.html?ex=1077884561&ei=1&en=b97b2a95b81a9c19
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company