19138: Lemieux: Reuters: Trouble brews in Haiti as rebels advance (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>


  South African News Agency/Reuters



  Trouble brews in Haiti as rebels advance

February 24 2004 at 01:57AM



By Alistair Scrutton

Cap Haitien - Rebels said they would be in the Haitian
capital within days and Washington sent marines to protect
its embassy on Monday after the country's second-largest
city fell in a bloody armed revolt.

Rebel leaders said after seizing control of the northern
city of Cap Haitien on Sunday they were ready to take the
entire country and liberate it from President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide's "slavery."

"We will be in Port-au-Prince in a few days," rebel leader
Guy Philippe said on local radio.

'We will liberate Haiti from the slavery of Aristide'
About 50 United States marines flew in on a C-130 Hercules
transport plane to the airport in Port-au-Prince on a
mission to protect the US Embassy and other US facilities
in Haiti.

France, whose rule Haiti shook off in 1804, joined several
other foreign governments and told its citizens to leave
Haiti.

Aristide's government said it was sending reinforcements
north and repeated a plea for international help for its
beleaguered police, hopelessly outgunned in the revolt that
erupted on February 5 and has killed about 60 people in the
poorest country in the Americas.

Seizing their biggest prize so far, a ski-mask-clad rebel
force of 200 on Sunday overran Cap Haitien, a city of about
500 000, putting anti-Aristide forces in control of much of
the north.

At least 10 people were killed during the attack, including
several rebels, government spokesperson Mario Dupuy said.

Looters struck in Cap Haitien after the rebel advance. A
mob hit a World Food Programme warehouse on the outskirts
of the city, taking about 800 metric tons of food valued at
nearly $740 000.

Other parts of the city appeared calm a day after the
rebels struck. Cows ambled by the side of the runway at the
airport and people on bicycles went about their business.

Joking and relaxed, a rebel leader said his comrades would
soon take over the rest of the country.

"We will liberate Haiti from the slavery of Aristide," said
Louis Jodel Chamblain. "So far, the only resistance we've
encountered has been with machetes," Chamblain told Reuters
at the city's airport.

Chamblain, a former leader of a militia that terrorised
Haitians in the early 1990s, was surrounded by about 50
rebel fighters dressed in military fatigues and some armed
with automatic rifles. The rebels wore riot gear and dark
glasses with gas masks tied to their belts.

The relative ease with which the rebels took Cap Haitien
heightened fears in the capital, where Aristide still has
plenty of supporters. Some set up barricades in streets
around the teeming city to deter the rebels.

"Aristide was sent to us by God," said Reginald Hommage,
who called himself a loyalist of Aristide's Lavalas Family
party.

Prime Minister Yvon Neptune repeated a government plea to
foreign nations to send help for the Haitian National
Police, a poorly trained group of perhaps 4 000 officers
created in the mid-1990s when Aristide disbanded the feared
army.

"The National Police is not an army and cannot make a war
against terrorists," Neptune told a news conference.

The assault on Cap Haitien came as opposition parties,
which want Aristide gone but have distanced themselves from
the rebels, faced a Monday night deadline from foreign
mediators to decide if they would accept a power-sharing
deal that would leave the president in office.

Even if they did agree to the deal, it was far from clear
that would halt the advances of rebels who have mounted a
more serious threat to Aristide.

Aristide championed Haitian democracy in the 1980s and
became its first freely elected leader in 1991, but is now
accused of corruption and political thuggery by his
opponents. He has vowed to stay on until his second term
ends in 2006.

The revolt, which erupted in the western city of Gonaives,
was begun by an armed gang that once supported Aristide and
turned against him. It has been joined by others, including
Chamblain and ex-soldiers from the army Aristide disbanded
when he returned to power in 1994 after being ousted in a
coup months after first taking office in 1991.

Tensions have simmered in the country since flawed
parliamentary elections in May 2000.



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