19467: Esser: The men behind Haiti's rebellion (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

The San Francisco Chronicle
http:// www.sfgate.com
    
The men behind Haiti's rebellion
Infamous leaders wield bravado to build insurgency

Steven Dudley, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, February 29, 2004

Cap-Haitien, Haiti -- In just three weeks, the National Resistance
Front, the rebel group that is threatening to topple the government
of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has swept through northern Haiti
with ease.

Last week, it captured several more towns without facing down a
single bullet and is now within miles of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
As word of the rebel approach reaches towns, Haitian police officers
are simply shedding their uniforms and disappearing into the hills.

Yet the insurgents' swift victories and rising popularity may have
more to do with their bravado and the reputations of their leaders
than with military prowess. Western diplomatic sources estimate their
numbers at no more than a few hundred men, even with the new
volunteers in Cap-Haitien and in villages, but the rebel commanders
have well-known checkered pasts as army and police officers, drug
traffickers and death squad leaders.

"The people are happy," the Front's nominal leader, Guy Philippe,
told reporters last week as he listened from the balcony of a plush
hillside hotel headquarters in Cap-Haitien to a group of people in
the shantytowns below singing. "Here in Cap-Haitien, we have more
than 100 young people ready to die for the cause, ready to die for
the country."

Philippe is a former army lieutenant and police captain. The front's
second in command, Gilberto Dragon, is a former military officer and
police major. They trained in Ecuador together and both are cited in
numerous Haitian government and diplomatic reports for their
involvement in drug trafficking and racketeering.

The Front's strongman, Louis Jodel Chamblain, is a former army
officer who later headed the Front for the Advancement of the Haitian
People or FRAPH, a paramilitary organization responsible for
thousands of murders of Aristide followers in the early 1990s.

Other former FRAPH members, including Jean-Pierre Baptiste, alias
Jean Tatoune, have also joined the insurgency. Baptiste and Chamblain
were convicted in absentia for massacring 25 Aristide supporters in a
seaside slum known as Raboteau in the northern city of Gonaives in
1994. In 1995, Chamblain fled the country and has been residing in
the neighboring Dominican Republic ever since. Baptiste was sent to
prison for life for his role in the murder of Aristide supporters. He
joined the revolt after former Aristide loyalists broke him out of a
Gonaives jail in 2002.

Early on Saturday, the capital remained relatively calm, despite a
burst of bloody chaos the previous day. Aristide, appearing on
national television, called for an end to the bedlam, saying "looting
is bad." He also urged the government's 46,000 employees to go back
to work on Monday and called for schools to reopen.

Pro-Aristide armed gangs were still out in force in Port-au-Prince on
Saturday, but so were more police, although their numbers were still
small.

Cap-Haitien, the country's second largest city, fell into rebel hands
in a matter of hours last Sunday. Philippe is promising the capital
will be next, although he said Saturday that his troops would hold
off for now, in response to U.S. Ambassador James Foley's appeal for
peace.

"We always give peace a chance here, so we'll wait to see for one or
two days," Philippe said in Cap-Haitien. "We will keep on sending
troops, but we won't attack Port-au-Prince until we understand what
the U.S. means."

So far, about 100 people, about half of them from the poorly equipped
police force that is the government's only defense, have died in the
insurgency against Aristide, a former priest who became Haiti's first
freely elected president in 1990.

As they approach the National Palace, the rebels say they don't
intend to govern Haiti. "We don't have any political platform,"
Philippe said. "We are fighting for a better country. As soon as
Aristide leaves, we are ready to give our weapons to, I don't know,
the new government."

Philippe, Dragon and Chamblain all said they were fighting for the
restitution of the army, which Aristide disbanded in 1994.

"The army was demobilized. Now the army has been remobilized and is a
constitutional army," said Chamblain, a husky, serene man. "Aristide
has two choices: prison or execution by firing squad."

Chamblain's fight with Aristide is personal as well as political.
After the military ousted Aristide following just seven months in
office, violence ensued, during which, Chamblain said, pro-Aristide
militias clubbed his pregnant wife to death in their home. "It's very
hard," he said of the memory. "It gives me more (incentive) to fight."

Chamblain helped form FRAPH, which he claims was a political
organization. But rights groups say the paramilitary group employed
systematic rape and torture against its enemies.

"Given the horrendous human rights records of some of the leaders of
the armed rebellion, we are extremely concerned that the rebel forces
will take advantage of the opportunity to settle scores," said Joanne
Mariner, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Americas Division.

"These men, notorious for killings and other abuses during the
military government, must not be allowed to take violent reprisals
against government loyalists."

The repression of civil society sparked an exodus of refugees, and
the United Nations authorized intervention, but the military stepped
down before U. S. troops occupied the country. Once back in office,
Aristide disbanded the army and replaced it with a small 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.

Both Philippe and Dragon were part this new police force. They and 10
other officers soon took on the name "Latinos," because they'd
trained together in Ecuador, spoke Spanish and stuck together. "We
lived in the same house for years," Dragon explained in the rebels'
Cap-Haitien hotel headquarters. "And we were loyal to the military
institution."

In Ecuador, Philippe became the undisputed leader of the group. And
in Haiti, he kept in close contact with his team, even as they rose
through the ranks in different parts of the country. Philippe became
the police chief of Cap-Haitien; Dragon, the commisaire of an
important area in Port-au-Prince. Throughout, they maintained their
esprit de corps. "We're not former military; we are military,"
Philippe said. "We are soldiers."

They also began collecting bribes for the drugs that easily pass
through this nation of 8 million people. Internal reports from
foreign observers found that the "Latinos" routinely gave gifts to
politicians and once squeezed the government into exiling its
inspector general after the seizure of more than three-quarters of a
ton of cocaine implicated the men. Philippe, who trained with U.S.
Secret Service in 1995, fled Haiti in 2000, after he and the
"Latinos" were tied to a coup plot. He denied that he or the
insurgent group he now leads had anything to do with coup attempts or
drugs. "I'm an open book, " he declared.

Philippe studied medicine in Puebla, Mexico, before joining the
military. While he was in Ecuador he met and married a woman from
Wisconsin. His heroes include U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush. "I like tough guys. The guys that protect their
country," he said.

Chronicle news services contributed to this report.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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