19396: Burnham: Globe and Mail:'Everyone here is ready to die for Aristide' (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: thor burnham <thorald_mb@hotmail.com>

'Everyone here is ready to die for Aristide'


By PAUL KNOX
Saturday, February 28, 2004 - Page A1

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- This is what it looks like when the end draws near.

Masked, helmeted gangsters roam the streets by the truckload, wielding
shotguns and automatic rifles.

Gunfire rattles through the deserted port. Frenzied partisans of President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide crowd around a vehicle, warning of the mayhem to
come.

"Everyone here is ready to die for Aristide," a rail-thin young man says. He
rattles off a list of weapons at his disposal: Galil rifles, 12-gauge
shotguns, revolvers. "It's impossible for them to kill the President."

Above, a blazing sun inches higher in the sky. "If they lay a finger on
Aristide's head," another man says, "we'll kill all the rich."

Market vendors stayed home this day. Their flimsy wooden stalls stand like
skeletons against faded, crumbling buildings.

Barricades of twisted scrap metal and rubble litter the streets everywhere.
There have been reports of looting, of gangland-style reprisal killings.

Banks, laundries, restaurants -- all are closed. Police, absent. "There's
less and less authority," says a man too scared to give his name. "Things
are getting worse. We're all afraid. We don't know what the situation is
going to be."

Ah yes, the situation.

To the north, beyond the bare brown mountains, Mr. Aristide's foes continue
their advance. Overnight Thursday they drove the police from Mirebalais,
just 40 kilometres to the northeast on one of two main routes leading to
Port-au-Prince.

Far away, in the gleaming capitals where they decide these things, Mr.
Aristide's fate is in play.

Only a week ago, senior officials and diplomats from Canada, the United
States, France and the Caribbean asked the President to share power with his
political opponents as the price of keeping his job. He agreed; they did
not.

Yet now it is Mr. Aristide who is being asked, in Washington and in Paris,
to "examine his position carefully," to weigh his "heavy responsibility" to
Haiti -- in effect, to do the right thing and resign.

There is talk of an international force to keep order after a political
agreement is signed. But it is only talk, because there will be no political
agreement as long as Mr. Aristide stays in power, and so far he is sticking
to his pledge to finish his five-year term.

And so there are two prospects for this frightened city: One, a pitched
battle in the squalid streets between Aristide loyalists and armed
insurgents. Two, a post-resignation rampage by the loyalists.

Or, as a foreign observer with a cautious turn of phrase puts it, a
"desperate feeling by Mr. Aristide and those around him that Haiti had been
abandoned by the international community, and it's time to grab what you can
and go."

That's why Patricia Dort will be leaving town today, back to the countryside
she came from.

"It's always the same thing," says Ms. Dort, who is 25 and is taking
training in English and computers. "He stays, he goes -- nothing changes in
this country."

She has little use for either the marauding pro-Aristide gangs known as
chimères (monsters) or the opposition Democratic Convergence. If it were up
to her, she'd bring back the U.S. troops who restored Mr. Aristide to power
in 1994.

"I hope the Americans come back into Haiti," she says. It would be a better
way to make us secure, because the chimères and the Convergence are giving
us all this trouble."

When they are not in Miami or Montreal or Paris, the rich in Haiti can
sometimes be found in Pétionville, a place you would think about calling a
tony suburb if it weren't for the garbage, the broken pavement and the
teeming markets.

At half past noon on a Friday, the Maxi Food supermarket is closing down
already, letting out the last few shoppers through a heavy iron door. A pair
of visitors asks about the early closing. Mathieu, the manager, looks at
them as if they're crazy. "There are no customers in the street, and there's
no security either," he says.

The cell phone rings. It's Montreal Gazette reporter Sue Montgomery, shaken
by a chimère encounter in Croix des Bouquets, on the road to Mirebalais. A
couple of dozen toughs fired shots over her vehicle, the last in a convoy of
three carrying foreign journalists.

Some said they wanted money. Some said they were looking for guns. One took
possession of a photographer's camera, then gave it back. Don't shoot me,
Ms. Montgomery pleaded -- I have two small children. (She learned the phrase
in Haitian Creole before leaving Canada.) Eventually the tension eased, and
the journalists were on their way.

In Jean-Pierre Buelinckx's Pétionville restaurant, a handful of Belgian
expatriates are chewing over the crisis that began with the first rebel
attack on Feb. 5.

Mr. Buelinckx has hired a few extra security guards, but he plans to keep
the restaurant open.

"It's better to have some people around you," he says. "It takes a little of
the stress away."

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