20203: (Chamberlain) Slum-dwelling Aristide loyalists vow civil war (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Michael Christie

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 10 (Reuters) - Supporters of exiled
former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide vowed on Wednesday they would fight
a civil war and kill American soldiers if Washington does not allow the man
Haiti's poor see as a messiah to return.
     Largely unaware of the appointment of a new prime minister, and
dismissive of the news when told, slum dwellers in the crowded shantytown
of Belair said they feared their impoverished lives would worsen under
anyone but Aristide.
     "If they don't bring back Aristide, I'm going to kill the Americans,"
said an angry young man who gave his name as Sanson.
     He said U.S. forces killed his brother in 1994 when the United States
last dispatched Marines to the revolt-torn Caribbean country -- but that
time to help Aristide regain power. Aristide had been ousted in a military
coup three years earlier.
     "If the Americans stay in this country, we will make civil war,"
agreed Jur Teuba, a woman who led crowds at a Belair marketplace in a
spontaneous outburst of dance and song, chanting, "Our blood is Aristide's
blood."
     A former slum priest who preached that Haiti's poor majority had as
many rights as its tiny elite, Aristide went into exile in Africa on Feb.
29 as rebels and former soldiers who led a bloody monthlong revolt closed
in on the capital.
     Regarded as a champion of Haitian democracy when he helped drive the
Duvalier dictatorship from power in the late 1980s, the country's first
freely elected leader was accused in recent years of corruption and of
arming youth gangs to enforce loyalty.
     U.S. and French pressure also persuaded Aristide to flee, and U.S.
Marines now spearhead a multinational, U.N.-backed peacekeeping force,
while former Foreign Minister Gerard Latortue was named on Tuesday as the
new prime minister.
     But the efforts to put Haiti back on the path to a legitimate
government seemed to have little support in the sprawling Port-au-Prince
slums where Aristide's light shone brightest.
     In Belair, where up to eight families live in each small shack, people
sleep in shifts. A balcony, protected from the searing sun by a makeshift
wall of blankets, was home to a family with six children.
     An open sewer runs through the center of the slum, the stench of urine
and rotting garbage wafting through an open air market where women sell
cubes of chicken soup stock in packets of one.
     "You can see how we live, in misery and in hunger," said a man called
Jean-Marie. "We are born into misery and we die in misery. Aristide is the
only one who has ever cared."
     Several people, wearing T-shirts or carrying umbrellas emblazoned with
a photograph of Aristide, meekly asked visitors on Wednesday if they had "a
cassette with Aristide's voice."
     "We need to hear his voice to feed our spirit," said one man.
     In exile in the Central African Republic, Aristide said on Monday he
still saw himself as the country's president and urged supporters to
peacefully resist what he termed an "occupation" of the country.
     Fervent supporters of Aristide's Lavalas Family political movement,
the residents of Belair deny they have weapons.
     But their neighborhood, near the gleaming white National Palace from
which Aristide ruled, was where bullets were fired from last Sunday at a
crowd celebrating the president's departure. At least six people were
killed.
     "Don't they realize we are prepared to shed our blood for Aristide?"
said Jackson Francois. "He is our father. Without Aristide, there is no
peace."