20101: Esser: Mastermind tells how plot evolved (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. E s s e r <torx@joimail.com>

The Montreal Gazette
http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette


Mastermind tells how plot evolved
Former Montrealer leads political wing of group that overthrew Haiti's
Aristide
by SUE MONTGOMERY

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

The road to the Hibo Lele Hotel is a steep, pot-holed, narrow winding
path.

There is no light, save for that coming from the candle-lit shacks
along the way, the Jeep's headlights and a full, brilliant moon.
Outside the hotel, which has no doubt seen better days, brand new
pickup trucks dot the parking lot.

Inside, the four or five "guests" carry guns - over their shoulders
or tucked into their jeans.

One heavy-set man, dressed in a beige suit and tie and looking much
older than the rest, stands out among them. He is Paul Arcelin, a
former professor at the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), whose
political connections in Canada have been facilitated by his
sister-in-law, Nicole Roy-Arcelin, who served in former prime
minister Brian Mulroney's government.

Roy-Arcelin, who was first elected to the House of Commons in 1988,
is married to Paul Arcelin's brother, André - a doctor who went to
Canada in 1964.

After years in Canada, Arcelin has returned to his native land,
having joined a rag-tag group of rebels to overthrow president
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In his own words, he is the mastermind behind
what in effect was yet another coup d'état in this country that has
seen 32 in its 200-year tumultuous history.

"Two years ago, I met (rebel leader) Guy Philippe in Santo Domingo
and we spent 10 to 15 hours a day together, plotting against
Aristide," he said, in an exclusive interview.

"From time to time we'd cross the border clandestinely through the
woods to conspire against Aristide, to meet with the opposition and
regional leaders to prepare for Aristide's downfall."

The Front de Libération du Haïti, as they call themselves, have set
up temporary shop here at the Hibo Lele, a hotel once frequented by
movie stars and U.S. presidents. The interview with Arcelin is
conducted poolside. The rebels - they won't say how many they are -
arrived in a convoy of SUVs in the capital more than a week ago and
were greeted by cheering throngs of Haitians. Just the day before,
Aristide was removed suddenly, and unceremoniously, from the country
by U.S. forces, his hated regime in tatters and the country a
bankrupt, crumbling mess.

"My country looks like Hiroshima - dirty and destroyed like there was
a war," Arcelin said with disgust. "But there wasn't a war. It was
the destuction of the country by a president who was crazy."

The rebels are now reaping the rewards of their three-week
insurrection, denying they are interested in seizing power, but all
the same, basking in the glory heaped on them by the Haitian people.

Inside one sparsely furnished hotel room, Guy Philippe, the
self-declared military chief of the group, is sitting on a chair,
naked from the waist up, a thick silver chain around his neck. He has
a stubby bottle of beer in one hand and a cellphone to his ear. As he
speaks, he gazes adoringly at his image staring back at him from a
full-length mirror on the wall in front of him.

"Hello, my sweetie," he says to me, after finishing the phone call.
"What can I do for you?"

He looks much younger than his 36 years, and as he speaks, the name
Casanova springs to mind. He's wearing brand new Docksider shoes and
blue jeans. Around his right wrist is a leather strap with coloured
beads that spell out the word "Gucci."

Suddenly, a man wearing a white lab coat enters the room. The badge
clipped to the chest pocket says "Jimy, assistant hotel manager." He
drapes a black and white plastic cape dotted with musical notes over
Philippe's bare chest and shoulders, plugs in an electric razor and
proceeds to buzz cut the rebel leader's hair and give him a shave.

Philippe is asked what he thinks about the political situation in his
country, including the seven-member council that has been set up to
choose a neutral and independent prime minister, who will, it is
hoped, lead the unstable country toward democratic elections.

"If it's something that can help the Haitian people, then it's good,"
he said. "I really think the international community will help, but
it won't help through military guys, but through food and education."

Lurking behind Philippe is a handful of armed men, whose job it is to
use their fully automatic MP5s if necessary to keep the leader alive,
even though he claims all eight million Haitians love him.

"I get calls from people telling me to watch out, and they call my
family and friends, too," he said, his boyish face breaking into an
impish grin. "Everybody loved Jesus, too, but they killed him. They
killed Martin Luther King, they killed Gandhi."

Suddenly, Philippe dials another number on his cellphone. It's his
wife, Natalie, a Haitian-American real-estate agent in Wisconsin,
whom he says he hasn't seen since the family met up for Christmas in
the Dominican Republic. After flirting with her for a few seconds,
telling her he is being interviewed by a Canadian journalist, he asks
to speak to his son, 4-year-old Alec Guy.

"Hello, sweetheart, how are you?" he says in perfect English. "How's
your sister? Are you taking care of mommy and your sister?"

Then his daughter, 6-year-old Aisha, is on the other end of the line
and Philippe continues his show, partly for the benefit of his guest,
partly for his mirror image looking back at him.

"Hello, princess, how are you?

"I miss you, too. When are you coming to see Poppy?"

Later, Arcelin said Philippe is, quite simply, "brilliant."

"It's Guy's show, he's the star," Arcelin said. "He is the army head
and I'm head of the political arm of the rebels. In less than 25
days, we took control of two-thirds of the country and part of the
capital," the 60-something Arcelin said proudly. "We planned it in a
way that the world was surprised."

When the rebels took over Hinche - a central Haitian city - soon
after the Feb. 5 start of the insurrection, Arcelin said, he was in
Canada, sick. But he took advantage of the visit and the political
clout of his sister-in-law to meet with Health Minister Pierre
Pettigrew, whose portfolio once had included foreign affairs.

But perhaps more significantly, Pettigrew's riding of Papineau-Saint
Denis has a large Haitian community. About the same time, Denis
Coderre, Canada's minister responsible for the Francophonie, was at
the Montana Hotel adamantly telling journalists the international
community would never negotiate with the rebels. He called them
rebels without a cause, criminals and terrorists.

"I explained the reality of Haiti to him," Arcelin said, pulling
Pettigrew's business card out of his wallet. "He promised to make a
report to the Canadian government about what I had said."

Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, the international community's
attitude toward the rebels began to shift, with the U.S. embassy
softening the rhetoric by referring to them as "armed elements of the
north."

Arcelin returned from Canada to "somewhere," and slipped into Hinche
from Cap-Haïtien, a port in the very north of the country, after they
had been taken.

"From there we went to Gonaïves, and I was crying like a child seeing
the destruction of my country by (Aristide's) Lavalas regime,"
Arcelin said, his Parisian accent still strong from the days he
studied international relations in Paris in the 1960s. "When I went
to Saint-Marc, I spoke to the inhabitants who were telling me about
the crimes committed by the chimères (Aristide's armed gangs) like
burning houses and more than 60 people dead.

"When we came to the capital on Monday, where the people were
welcoming us like heroes, we went from being called rebels to being
the army."

"People were yelling 'Vive l'armée! Long live Philippe!'"

Philippe, who is fifth in a family of 11 children, grew up in Pastel
in the southern part of the country. He claims he has a law degree
from Ecuador and studied medicine in Mexico for a year. He was in the
army when Aristide was overthrown in 1991, just eight months after
becoming the nation's first democratically elected president.

After the coup, Philippe fled to Ecuador, where he received training
from U.S. Special Forces as part of the U.S. campaign to reinstate
Aristide. Once that was accomplished in 1994, Aristide disbanded the
army and Philippe became part of the new National Police Force,
eventually being named chief in Cap-Haïtien. By many accounts, he was
one of the best.

His career was cut short, however, in 2000, when the government
accused him of plotting a coup with other police chiefs. He fled to
Ecuador once again, before heading to the Dominican Republic, which
shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

It was there that his path crossed with a grandfatherly gentleman who
had spent most of his adult life in Quebec.

Arcelin arrived in Canada from his studies in Paris in 1966, with the
help of his brother - a doctor who personally knew Jean Marchand, a
close friend to then prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

He worked at a community centre in the Montreal suburb of St.
Laurent, helping immigrants. He married psychologist Jocelyne Savard
(they are now divorced) and they had two children - Katia, who is a
doctor at the Notre Dame Hospital in Montreal, and Stéphan, a lawyer
with the Canadian federal justice department.

With a master's degree from the University of Ottawa in
administration, Arcelin got a job teaching French and administrative
psychology at UQAM.

Then came the downfall of the brutal Jean Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier
regime in 1986.

"I came back to help my country," he said. "They named me ambassador
to Santo Domingo because I had done my PhD at McGill University and
UQAM on the economic integration between the Dominican Republic and
Haiti."

He lost that position with the downfall of president Prosper Avril
but stayed on in Santo Domingo. With time, he became a presidential
candidate for a total of 15 days against Aristide, before the
electoral college rejected his candidacy.

For the next decade, he travelled back and forth between Canada,
Haiti and the Dominican Republic, writing a book called Circueil sur
mes bras - Coffin Under My Arm.

"The title means I am always willing to die for my country," he said,
smoking a cigarette and sipping a Pepsi.

In the young, dashing Philippe, Arcelin had found a protegé, and the
plotting began.

They already had huge arm caches around the country - hidden after
the army was disbanded by Aristide in 1995. More financial support
and weapons came from the opposition, which had been calling on
Aristide to step down since parliamentary elections in 2000 that are
largely seen as having been rigged. On Feb. 5, the order - whether
from Arcelin and Joseph, or from the opposition, Arcelin did not make
clear - came to head to the capital, taking cities along the way and
convincing about 70 per cent of the outnumbered and outpowered police
force to join them.

After their jubilant and peaceful arrival in the capital more than a
week ago, the rebels announced they were laying down their arms and
would respect the democratic process now in place to lead the country
to elections.

"Which means we aren't unarmed, but we aren't taking them out and
shooting them," Arcelin said, adding that he is the only rebel who
doesn't carry a weapon.

When a peaceful victory demonstration turned violent Sunday, killing
at least five, including Spanish television reporter Ricardo Ortega,
and seriously wounding 38, Arcelin was outraged.

"As you have witnessed, the people didn't embrace the army of the
international community like they did the rebels," he said. "Because
they don't feel they came to protect them from the chimères.

"People are asking if the international community came here
especially to protect the chimères from the rebels."

With such a heavily armed population, Arcelin said he worries his
country will become another Somalia, where peace is an illusive dream.

After Sunday's bloodshed, the rebels vowed to retreat to their
stronghold in the north and re-evaluate their strategy, but before
leaving, Arcelin dropped by the Montana Hotel to say goodbye,
introducing himself at the front desk as the Canadian ambassador.

Asked whether he will fight to the death here, or return to Canada,
Arcelin replied: "It's difficult to say what will happen.

"I would never say I'm going back to Canada, although I love Canada:
The best years of my life were there," said Arcelin, who never gave
up his Haitian passport to become a Canadian. "But it's such an
organized country compared to Haiti and I feel I owe my life to the
poor and needy of my country. I am here for the rest of my life."

smontgomery@thegazette.canwest.com

© Copyright  2004 Montreal Gazette
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