20144: (Chamberlain) Aristide lawyer calls on US to probe "kidnapping" (later story) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Jane Sutton

     MIAMI, March 9 (Reuters) - An attorney for exiled Haitian leader
Jean-Bertrand Aristide asked the U.S. attorney general on Tuesday to launch
a criminal investigation of what he called a U.S. kidnapping of the
president to carry out a coup in Haiti.
     Lawyer Ira Kurzban said the request was a first step to return
Aristide to power in Port-au-Prince.
     He wrote to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft seeking a
congressional investigation and the criminal prosecution of U.S. officials
he accused of engineering a coup in Haiti.
     Aristide left his revolt-torn Caribbean country on Feb. 29, urged to
quit by the United States and France as rebels closed in on the Haitian
capital. In exile in the Central African Republic, Aristide has accused the
United States of kidnapping him and forcing him into exile, which
Washington has denied.
     Kurzban said the United States refused to allow the U.S. security
company guarding Aristide to send reinforcements to Haiti in the days
before the Haitian leader left, and told Aristide that U.S. forces could
not protect him unless he signed a resignation letter.
     "They in effect, through threats and coercion, forced him to sign a
letter of resignation," Kurzban said.
     He said that in the early hours of Sunday, Feb. 29, Aristide thought
he was being driven from his home in Port-au-Prince to the National Palace
but was taken instead to the airport where he was forced onto a
U.S.-chartered plane.
     "It was a kidnapping," the lawyer said. "A democratically elected
president was taken out of the country against his will."
     Kurzban said the U.S. actions violated an international treaty
covering diplomats and other protected persons, who include Aristide and
his U.S.-born wife Mildred Trouillot Aristide.
     He also sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell saying
that if the United States did not prosecute those responsible, Haiti would
take the matter to the International Court of Justice, which Kurzban said
had jurisdiction under the protected persons treaty.
     In his first public appearance in the Central African Republic,
Aristide said on Monday he still regarded himself as Haiti's legitimate
leader and insisted he had been abducted by U.S. forces.
     Washington has denied Aristide's allegations of kidnapping, and said
it helped him leave Haiti but the decision to go was his own. But his
supporters have alleged that Aristide's resignation letter was invalid
because he wrote it under duress.
     In France on Monday, a lawyer for Aristide said Aristide planned to
sue the United States and France for allegedly kidnapping him.
     Kurzban said that lawyers would consider a lawsuit later once they had
collected evidence.
     Aristide, elected for a second term in 2000, had insisted until
shortly before he left that he would stay on until the term expired in
2006.
     A former Roman Catholic priest, Aristide was a champion of Haiti's
emerging democracy when he helped overthrow the brutal Duvalier family
dictatorship in 1986. But critics accused him of ruling autocratically and
tolerating corruption. Simmering tensions erupted into an armed revolt in
early February.