20678: (Chamberlain) Nigeria-Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By JOHN MURRAY

   ABUJA, March 22 (AP) -- Nigeria has agreed to a request by Caribbean
leaders to grant former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide temporary
asylum, the nation's presidency said Monday.
   The request came from the 15-nation Caribbean Community, known as
Caricom, Nigerian presidential spokeswoman Remi Oyo said in a statement
late Monday.
   The statement did not say whether Aristide had requested -- or even
agreed to -- asylum in Nigeria.
   Aristide fled Haiti on Feb. 29 as rebels were closing in on the Haitian
capital, Port-au-Prince. He arrived in Central African Republic on March 1
and stayed there with his wife and two bodyguards until March 15, when he
flew to Jamaica to be with his two daughters.
   Caricom, "under the leadership" of Jamaican Prime Minister P.J.
Patterson, "requested Nigeria to consider giving former President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti 'a staging post' for a few weeks until his
movement to another destination," said the presidential statement, issued
in the capital, Abuja.
   "After receiving the Caricom request, Nigeria undertook widespread
consultations with African leaders, the leadership of the African Union,
the U.S. government and other concerned parties," the statement said.
"Nigeria has agreed to grant the request."
   Oyo declined to comment further when reached by telephone. Other
Nigerian officials were unavailable for immediate comment.
   Interim Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, the United States and
others have criticized Jamaica for accepting Aristide, saying his presence
in the Caribbean would raise tensions in Haiti. Jamaica is about 100 miles
from Haiti.
   A spokesman for Latortue, Minister Robert Ulysse, welcomed Nigeria's
offer.
   "We didn't want any destablization so its good news if he can find a
place" outside the region, he said.
   There was no immediate comment from Patterson's office in Kingston or
from officials of the Caribbean Community based in Georgetown, Guyana.
   It would not be the first time Nigeria granted asylum to an ousted
leader. Former Liberian president Charles Taylor traded in his seaside
palace for a squat lodge in the Nigerian jungle city of Calabar after he
resigned last August as rebels shelled Monrovia, the Liberian capital.
   Taylor's one-time Liberian rival, former warlord Prince Johnson, was
given refuge in the commercial capital of Lagos in the late 1990s and
another rebel faction leader, Roosevelt Johnson, took asylum in the central
city of Jos.
   Ousted Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who left his nation starving
and in anarchy when he was forced from power in 1991, spent the final years
of his life in Lagos, where he died in 1995.