18856: (Chamberlain) Haiti rebels set up ``country,'' Aristide vows to fight on (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Amy Bracken

     GONAIVES, Feb 19 (Reuters) - An armed gang and former soldiers who
seized control of a Haitian city declared themselves an independent country
on Thursday and named a government and president.
     Up to 20,000 people watched in the main square of the western city of
Gonaives, or from slum rooftops, as a former supporter turned embittered
foe of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Buter Metayer, arrived for a
rally. He jogged in like a boxing champion with his arms in the air.
     Wearing a white suit and gold glasses, he led the swarming, cheering
crowd in chanting, "Alone we are weak, together we are strong, together we
are the resistance." The rebels declared themselves the independent country
of Artibonite, the name of the rice-growing region around Gonaives.
     They named a government with Metayer, who drove police out of Gonaives
this month, as president.
     In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said for the first
time that the United States was open to the possibility of Aristide
stepping aside as a way to resolving a long-running political impasse that
erupted in full-blown armed revolt on Feb. 5.
     Reluctant to quell the rebellion by sending police to the impoverished
Caribbean nation, but apparently unable to mediate an end to the chaos,
Powell said Aristide's departure was not currently part of any possible
peace plan.
     But he added in an interview with ABC radio, "You know, if an
agreement is reached that moves that in another direction, that's fine."
     The U.S. Department of Defense said it would send a military team of
three or four people from U.S. Southern Command, based in Miami, in the
next two days to assess security at the American embassy in Haiti.
     But Aristide, a diminutive former parish priest, who led Haiti into
democracy after decades of dictatorship but now faces accusations of
political violence and corruption, made it clear he had no intention of
going.
     "There is no doubt that I would be willing to die if that is what it
takes to defend the country," Aristide told hundreds of police officers at
a ceremony for more than a dozen dead police in the National Palace in the
capital, Port-au-Prince.
     Up to 50 people have died in the revolt.
     Aristide told the police that with "peaceful force, moral force, civic
force, constitutional force and democratic force," they would defeat the
rebels.
     "War costs a lot. Peace may cost even more," Aristide said.
     In Gonaives, Metayer's men drove out police on Feb. 5 after months of
violence triggered by the killing of the gang's original leader, Metayer's
brother Amiot.
     Guy Philippe, a former police chief of Haiti's second-largest city,
Cap-Haitien, whom Aristide once accused of fomenting a coup, became chief
of the armed forces.
     Philippe, who with former death squad leader Louis Jodel Chamblain
returned during the weekend from exile in the neighboring Dominican
Republic, had up to 50 former soldiers with him, a Reuters Television
cameraman saw.
     One former soldier said he and the others had come back to "liberate
the country."
     He said he had fled Haiti when Aristide disbanded the army after being
restored to power by a 1994 U.S. occupation. Aristide was ousted in a
military coup three years before, shortly after becoming Haiti's first
democratic leader.
     He was re-elected in 2000 in a ballot that the opposition boycotted
over flawed parliamentary elections the same year.
     The rebels have vowed to take Port-au-Prince, but many doubt they have
the firepower despite outgunning the country's 5,000 police in the towns
that have taken.
     Many believe Haiti faces a lengthy period in which the rebels control
the north. Aristide may hold onto Port-au-Prince with the support of party
loyalists and armed gangs that control its sprawling slums, while the
political opposition continues to protest.

     (Additional reporting by Michael Christie in Port-au-Prince)