19270: (Chamberlain) Canada says Aristide should consider resigning (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By David Ljunggren

     OTTAWA, Feb 26 (Reuters) - The Canadian government, in a significant
hardening of its stance on Haiti, said on Thursday that President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide should consider resigning to help restore order to
his violence-torn country.
     Ottawa has so far insisted both Aristide and the opposition work
together to end an increasingly bloody crisis.
     But Foreign Minister Bill Graham said the president should now think
what course of action would be best for Haiti.
     "I did not say we wanted Mr Aristide to go. It's not a question of
putting pressure on Mr Aristide," he said.
     "But clearly Mr Aristide has to accept that the conditions in his
country are deteriorating. He also has to examine all the possible
(options) for the wellbeing of his people," Graham told reporters.
     Rebels battling to oust Aristide said on Thursday that an attack on
the capital, Port-au-Prince, was imminent as heavily armed U.S. forces
helped foreigners fleeing the country.
     France made it clear on Wednesday it wanted Aristide to quit and make
way for a transitional government of national unity. Last week Washington
said it was open to the president going.
     Graham said Canada would be prepared to contribute to an international
force to help restore order in Haiti if a government of national unity were
created -- either with or without Aristide's participation.
     "We are not in a position to be able to go into Haiti to support one
or other of the parties to this dispute internally. So nobody can go in and
support retention of the Aristide government," he said.
     Earlier in the day, officials said a group of 32 Canadians had been
flown out of Haiti overnight on a military plane but Ottawa had not yet
started a formal evacuation of the roughly 800 citizens left in the
country.
     The group was taken to the Dominican Republic by a Canadian forces
transport plane which had been used to bring in nine military personnel to
guard the embassy and ambassador.
     Defence Minister David Pratt said Ottawa could send another 120 troops
to help with an evacuation if needed.
     But he said Canada's military was so thinly stretched because of
commitments in Afghanistan and Bosnia that it would not be able to send a
big military force to Haiti.
     "Right now it's going to be very difficult to go beyond that in terms
of major commitments in another theater of operations," he told reporters
in Ottawa.
     He said Canada and the rest of the world may have made a mistake by
intervening militarily in Haiti in the mid-1990s and then "forget(ting)
about all the other institutions that contributed to the instability in the
first place."
     "So money that was spent in Haiti over the course of the last 10 years
-- people are feeling as though that really wasn't necessarily a good
investment in terms of the sorts of things that were focused on."

     (Additional reporting by Randall Palmer in Ottawa)