19456: (Craig) NYT: Veterans of Past Murderous Campaigns Are Leading Haiti's New Rebellion (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>


Veterans of Past Murderous Campaigns Are Leading Haitis New Rebellion
February 29, 2004
By TIM WEINER and LYDIA POLGREEN

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 28 - The armed men trying to
seize power in Haiti are led by death-squad veterans and
convicted murderers, according to American officials and
human rights groups.

They are "the new Haitian army," said one of their
commanders, Remissainthe Ravix. They are also "thugs," said
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

They are men like Louis-Jodel Chamblain and Jean-Pierre
Baptiste - two leaders of Fraph, the Haitian Front for
Advancement and Progress. Fraph was an instrument of terror
wielded by the military junta that overthrew Haiti's
embattled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991. It
killed thousands over the next three years.

Mr. Chamblain, a former Haitian Army officer, was sentenced
in absentia to life in prison for the 1993 murder of
Antoine Izm?ry, an important Aristide supporter. Before the
trial, he fled to the neighboring Dominican Republic,
returning to Haiti in recent months to seek power.

Mr. Baptiste, also known as Jean Tatoune, was serving a
life sentence for murder, in connection with a 1994
massacre of Aristide supporters, when he was freed in a
jailbreak in August.

"Fraph is back," President Aristide said in an interview
with The New York Times last week. The question now is
whether these men will take power once again, and whether
American military force, in the form of a naval deployment,
may be necessary to stop them. Pentagon officials have said
marines could be called upon to evacuate Americans and
other foreigners and provide other assistance if the crisis
worsened.

"The Fraph and the Haitian Army are institutions with a
long and very dark history," said James Dobbins, President
Bill Clinton's special envoy to Haiti from 1994 to 1996.

That past is entwined with American history. United States
forces occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. They created the
modern Haitian Army, dissolved Parliament and imposed
martial law in those years. In the 1980's and early 1990's,
the United States Central Intelligence Agency had important
senior Haitian Army officers and Fraph members on its
payroll, according to American officials.

A decade ago, in 1994, the United States sent in 20,000
soldiers to reinstate Mr. Aristide after the Haitian Army
overthrew him. Mr. Aristide disbanded the army upon his
return to power. But he created nothing in its place beyond
a small, American-trained national police force - a force
now filled with no-show officers, commanded by the
president's cronies and corrupted by cocaine, according to
a recent State Department report.

Now Mr. Aristide has little with which to defend himself.
His power base has crumbled, leaving only the dissolute
national police and a rabble of street gangs. On Thursday,
he was accused in an American courtroom by a convicted
cocaine trafficker of taking drug payoffs.

"Aristide has been criticized, and with some justice, of
allying himself with forces that may be criminal or
corrupt," Mr. Dobbins said. "But in a society which has no
institutions, where all power derives from the use or the
threat of force, it's impossible to govern without those
alliances. It's the Haitian dilemma."

Broad-based alliances across Haitian society have lost
faith in President Aristide. The political opposition
includes victims of army power, like Evans Paul, a former
mayor of Port-au-Prince, and once Mr. Aristide's campaign
manager, who was arrested and tortured by Haitian military
officers in 1989.

Mr. Paul now says the president has two choices: to leave
"by the front door or the back door."

The political opposition in Haiti is united by its desire
to depose Mr. Aristide, and the armed opposition by its
hate for him.

Veterans despise him because he dissolved the army. Street
gangs detest him because they think he betrayed their
leaders. Guy Philippe, a former police chief leading the
rebels, says Mr. Aristide broke his promise to lift up the
Haitian people.

Mr. Aristide's supporters say the armed opposition seeks
power for power's sake, to seize Haiti's ports and their
cargoes of Colombian cocaine bound for the United States,
and to pay back Mr. Aristide for disbanding the army.

Mr. Philippe was trained by the United States military as
an army officer in Ecuador, according to a report published
Friday by Human Rights Watch, and earned a reputation as a
brutal police chief on the north side of Port-au-Prince. In
2000, suspected of plotting a coup, he fled to the
Dominican Republic.

Mr. Aristide, who rose from slum priest to president
preaching economic and spiritual deliverance, has made many
such enemies.

"When he was democratically elected in 1990 his support was
overwhelming and from the heart," said James Morrell,
director of the Haiti Democracy Project, who is among those
onetime Aristide supporters now calling for his ouster. Mr.
Aristide "made a lot of mistakes, the biggest of which was
that he demanded absolute power and absolute loyalty."

Timothy Carney, a former United States ambassador to Haiti,
said Mr. Aristide spoke like a democrat but "displayed the
traditional predatory behavior of Haitian leaders,
including the idea that he is the embodiment of the state."

The revolt sweeping Haiti began on Feb. 5 in Gona?ves, the
city where slaves who shook off Napoleon's rule declared
this the first free black nation of the New World in
January 1804, 200 years ago.

A gang of embittered former Aristide supporters attacked a
police station, overpowered the officers and took over the
city. They believed that Mr. Aristide killed their leader,
Amiot M?tayer. Mr. M?tayer was known as a charismatic,
ruthless man. Butteur M?tayer, Amiot's brother, said he had
died because he knew about the Aristide government's drug
ties.

Butteur M?tayer revived his brother's group and named it
the Artibonite Resistance Front. Inspired by the front,
others rose up, burning police stations, looting and
plotting, setting off a chain reaction now reaching
Port-au-Prince.

Early on Saturday, a relative calm returned to the city.
Mr. Aristide spoke by telephone late on Friday on national
television, urging militants to stop the violence and
looting that has convulsed the capital.

"We should prevent ill-intentioned people from infiltrating
our movement and polluting it," Mr. Aristide said. His
remarks seemed to be a response to a statement by the
American Embassy here blaming the president for the
violence and demanding that he put a stop to it.

The public face of the rebel army is the smile of Mr.
Philippe, the former police chief. He is suspected by both
Haitian and United States officials of cocaine trafficking.

In an interview last week at a seaside hotel that his
troops are using as their base in Cap Haitien, Haiti's
second largest city, Mr. Philippe said he had no lust for
power.

"I am not ambitious," Mr. Philippe said, swigging a beer as
his men lounged by a swimming pool, machine guns cradled in
their laps. "What I want is a better life for the Haitian
people. What I want is democracy."

Mr. Philippe has few democratic credentials. In 2001, while
he stood accused of planning a coup, the government said he
masterminded a raid on the presidential palace that left
seven dead.

He is joined in this rebellion by Mr. Chamblain, the
convicted assassin from Fraph. (The acronym Fraph is a play
on the French word frapper, to hit.) Mr. Chamblain denied
in an interview that he or his group ever killed anyone, a
contention belied by overwhelming evidence.

"I was never paramilitary chief," Mr. Chamblain said. "I
was the leader of a political organization. Fraph helped
people and brought the Haitian people together."

He said he joined the revolt against Mr. Aristide because
the president had betrayed the principles of the men who
freed Haiti from France two centuries ago. "This fight is
to liberate the Haitian people under the regime of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide," Mr. Chamblain said.

Also along for the ride are former army officers like Mr.
Ravix, a 38-year-old former corporal.

"There is no such thing as the former Haitian Army," said
Mr. Ravix, a bull-necked, barrel-chested man, still bitter
about the army's dissolution. "Aristide made a big mistake
sending us home with our guns."

If this is indeed "the new Haitian army," as Mr. Ravix
says, it represents the revival of a force that has always
served Haiti's tiny elite, less than two percent of the
people holding at least half the nation's wealth.

The armed rebels are not a large force. They may number as
few as 500 trained fighters, American officials believe. It
is an open question whether a force that size could seize
this sprawling capital. But it has proved capable of
creating fear and havoc.

Their assault weapons and crisp camouflage uniforms suggest
the rebels have outside support. Mr. Philippe said his
force was receiving donations from Haitian exiles in the
United States and Canada. In a country where drug money
flows freely, government officials have accused the rebels
of financing their assault with money from Colombian
cocaine cartels.

>From the 1980's into the early 1990's, the Haitian Army and
its National Intelligence Service - an agency created and
financed by the C.I.A. - committed acts of terror and
trafficked in cocaine, according to American officials.

There is no known evidence that the United States has
supported the armed uprising against Mr. Aristide, although
the White House is strongly suggesting that he should step
down.

"We cannot allow these thugs to come out of the hills, or
even an opposition to simply rise up and say `we want you
to leave' in an undemocratic, nonconstitutional manner,"
Secretary Powell said on Feb. 19.

A senior administration official said Saturday, "We cannot
be in the position of going in to oust an elected leader."

But, by law or by force, the end may be near for Mr.
Aristide, the priest who came to power preaching democracy
in Haiti but delivered only its stillbirth.

"I think this is the end game for Aristide," said Mr.
Carney, the former American ambassador. "I think things
will move very fast. He will go. If he is so foolish as to
think he could stay, it will be feet first."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/international/29REBE.html?ex=1079044202&ei=1&en=88783f320441da8d
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company