18745: (Chamberlain) Looters, rebels in Haitian city after police leave (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Michael Christie

    HINCHE, Haiti, Feb 17 (Reuters) - The charred remains of the police
station in the central Haitian city of Hinche drew crowds of onlookers on
Tuesday while looters took the opportunity to strip the derelict hospital
next door of its corrugated iron roof.
     "Well the police aren't here so the people are taking what they can,"
said local resident Fernando Garcia.
     The body of a prisoner, legs savaged overnight by a pack of dogs, lay
in a ditch by the wall outside the nearby jail.
     The man had been shot by police as he tried to escape during a
firefight on Monday at the Hinche police station, the latest attack by
rebels in an armed revolt against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide that
erupted on Feb. 5 in the western city of Gonaives and spread to other
towns.
     Bloodstains where the local police chief and his bodyguard were shot
dead were fading under the punishing sun.
     A foreign adviser to Haiti's police force said he was in the police
station, in a side building, when about 15 fighters attacked it about early
on Monday afternoon.
     "Suddenly there was gunfire and then all hell broke loose," said the
adviser, who did not want to be identified.
     He said police soon ran out of ammunition and were allowed to leave,
but the death of the local police commander and his bodyguard appeared to
be an accident.
     The commander was heading home for lunch when he ran into the rebels,
who pointed their guns at him, the adviser said. The commander raised his
hands, but his bodyguard made a motion to go for his gun and they shot him.
     "They (the rebels) said they don't want to hurt anybody, they just
want to get rid of Aristide," the adviser said.
     On Tuesday, the adviser was leaving town on bone-jarring dirt road
that crosses the mountains between the Central Plateau and the capital,
Port-au-Prince.
     "The police are gone, there's no more work for me to do," he said.
     Leading the rebels in Hinche, Louis Jodel Chamblain showed up on
Tuesday with about 25 well-armed men in a column of four-wheel-drive
vehicles.
     Chamblain is a former leader of a right-wing militia that terrorized
Haiti in the early 1990s. He slipped into the country at the weekend from
neighboring Dominican Republic to join the rebels in Gonaives.
     The men with Chamblain looked professional, carried rifles and wore
camouflage. Aristide disbanded Haiti's army in 1994 when he returned to the
country three years after being ousted in a military coup.
     Some of the men spoke good Spanish and said they had come over with
Chamblain from the Dominican Republic, Haiti's Spanish-speaking neighbor on
the island of Hispaniola.
     "I'm a Haitian soldier," said one of the men.