18743: (Chamberlain) Haiti wants foreign help for police force (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Amy Bracken

    PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb 17 (Reuters) - The Haitian government
appealed on Tuesday for foreign help in the face of an armed revolt that
has spread to another city in the poverty-stricken Caribbean nation and
which threatens the rule of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
     Authorities were trying to re-establish control in the central city of
Hinche, but Haiti needed foreign technical assistance for its beleaguered
police, Prime Minister Yvon Neptune told reporters.
     He did not say what kind of help was needed or where it might come
from, but in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell all but ruled
out foreign police or military forces going to Haiti to quell the violence
and said his emphasis was on promoting a political settlement.
     Emboldened by the appearance of exiled fighters, rebels attacked
Hinche's police station on Monday.
     In Hinche, a foreign adviser to Haiti's police force said about 15
rebels carried out the attack. Police quickly ran out of ammunition and
were allowed to leave.
     He and other witnesses said the death of the Hinche police commander
and his bodyguard appeared to be an accident.
     The attack was the latest in a revolt against Aristide that erupted on
Feb. 5 in the western city of Gonaives and spread to several other towns.
Up to 50 people have been killed.
     The government blamed the Hinche attack on Louis Jodel Chamblain, a
former leader of a right-wing militia that terrorized Haitians in the early
1990s.
     Chamblain and an exiled former police chief, Guy Philippe, slipped
into the country at the weekend from neighboring Dominican Republic to join
the rebels in Gonaives.
     Neptune said former members of the military and paramilitary forces
have been able to return to Haiti because the Dominican Republic and the
United States took them in but did not ensure that they would not return to
Haiti.
     "We have let (foreign) governments house these ex-military members.
Most of them are drug traffickers and the governments knew about that,"
Neptune said.
     He added that with a small, undertrained, underfunded police force and
no military, the Haitian government was powerless to protect towns such as
Hinche from attack.
     Help from the international community was essential, Neptune said,
including technical assistance for the police.
     Aristide, who is midway through a second term that he has said he is
determined to complete, disbanded the army after U.S. troops invaded in
1994 to put him back in office, and restructured the police force with U.S.
help.
     The police, who number about 5,000 in a country of 8 million, have
been run out town in Gonaives and several other towns in the revolt.
     Neptune said he believed the United States could have prevented the
attack on Hinche by "providing more training for the police force and more
means so we could increase the number of police. Even having a helicopter
or surveillance of our shores and surveillance of our border," he said.
     Regarded as a champion of Haiti's democracy when he became its first
elected leader in 1991 after decades of dictatorship, Aristide has seen his
popularity fade. Critics accuse him of corruption, political thuggery and
failing to ease poverty.
     Simmering tensions exploded into open revolt after gunmen who once
supported the president took control of Gonaives. The crisis came on top of
a long-running dispute with the political opposition over parliamentary
elections in 2000 that has caused a freeze on most foreign aid.
     The attack on Hinche marked an escalation in the revolt after it
reached an uneasy stalemate. Rebels in Gonaives said on Tuesday they felt
strengthened by the arrival of exile fighters and planned to move on across
the country.