18936: (Chamberlain) Faces from Haiti's bloody past lead revolt (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Carlos Valdez

     GONAIVES, Haiti, Feb 21 (Reuters) - His gunmen killed 3,000 people
when a military junta ruled Haiti with an iron fist.
     Now, at the head of a rebellion aiming to unseat President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, former death squad leader Louis Jodel Chamblain
speaks of democracy and constitutions.
     He does so wearing a camouflaged bush hat, pressed military uniform
and sidearm strapped to his hip.
     "When the people want us to come into Port-au-Prince, they will
accompany us all the way to the (National) Palace," Chamblain told Reuters
Television.
     A perpetual smile on his chubby face, Chamblain returned to Haiti from
exile in the neighboring Dominican Republic a week ago to join an armed
revolt against Aristide that broke out on Feb. 5 in the historic city of
Gonaives.
     The rebellion, begun by an armed street gang that once enforced
obedience to Aristide's Lavalas Family party but turned on him when its
leader was murdered, has spread to several towns and killed more than 50
people.
     That's small fry for some of the revolt's standard-bearers.
     An army officer accused of heading death squads during the last years
of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's dictatorship in the late 1980s,
Chamblain was suspected of taking part in a 1987 election massacre, in
which 34 voters were killed and a civilian-run ballot aborted.
     In 1993, he joined with Emmanuel "Toto" Constant to form the Front for
the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People, or FRAPH, which in
Creole sounds like the word "to hit."
     FRAPH brutally attacked Aristide supporters and set fire to whole
neighborhoods. It was blamed for 3,000 of the estimated 5,000 deaths that
occurred in the three years after a military junta ousted Aristide in 1991.
     FRAPH mobs even defied the world's superpower, turning back the USS
Harlan County when the warship tried to ferry U.S. and Canadian troops to
Haiti in 1993 to clear the way for Aristide's return to power.
     In 1995, Chamblain was convicted in absentia of the 1993 murder of
Antoine Izmery, a prominent businessman and Aristide backer who was dragged
from a church, forced to kneel and shot in the head.
     "I am ready, after Aristide goes, to face any kind of tribunal,"
Chamblain said in an interview on Friday in the rubble-strewn streets of
Gonaives, a city of 200,000 that was the birthplace of Haiti's independence
from France in 1804.
     "My hands are clean, my conscience is clean and my pockets are empty."
     Chamblain claimed to lead "5,000 soldiers, armed and well-trained."
     In public, he has been seen with about 25 disciplined, and
well-equipped former soldiers from Haiti's disbanded army.
     Chamblain, who such rights groups as Amnesty International say may
represent the greatest threat to human rights in Haiti in years, came back
from the Dominican Republic with another notorious former soldier, Guy
Philippe.
     Trained in the United States and Ecuador, and assigned to the police
after Aristide disbanded the army, Philippe was suspected of plotting a
coup in 2000.
     He was implicated in a mysterious attack on the National Palace in
December 2001, and arrested but released by Dominican Republic authorities
in 2003 after an investigation into a plot to launch a new coup in Haiti.
     "We are not a rebel army," Philippe said. "We are an army of the
people and we number nearly seven million."  The population of Haiti is 8
million.
     Philippe accused Aristide of murder and abusing the constitution. He
said the political opposition, which has staged months of demonstrations,
had done a good job.
     "But some of them are not willing to die for their country," Philippe
said.
     "Every day is a new day. Every day is a step closer to freedom."