20899: (Chamberlain) Haiti rebel leader wants to kill enemy Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Simon Gardner

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 28 (Reuters) - A notorious Haitian
paramilitary leader who helped lead a bloody revolt that ousted
Jean-Bertrand Aristide says he will kill the former president if he ever
returns from exile.
     "If Aristide comes tomorrow I will have 15,000, 20,000 Haitians armed
to fight him and kill him as he killed my wife," Louis Jodel Chamblain,
accused of heading death squads during years of dictatorship and military
rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s, told Reuters.
     The former army officer convicted of murder said in an interview late
on Saturday at a plush, well-guarded hilltop retreat just outside
Port-au-Prince that he sees himself as a patriotic leader of the Haitian
people on a mission to stamp out Aristide's following.
     Chamblain, who returned from a decade in exile in neighboring
Dominican Republic to lead last month's uprising, accuses Aristide of
ordering thugs to murder his seven-months pregnant wife in 1991 and vows he
will never let another like him lead Haiti.
     "I came to fight to get rid of this criminal from power to put an end
to drug trafficking and terrorism (by Aristide supporters) in this
country," he added. "I will not let (gangs loyal to Aristide) terrorize my
people. I call on them to lay down arms."
     Marauding pro-Aristide gangs have started to hand over small caches of
weapons to police as part of a disarmament drive, but the vast majority
remain armed, fearing reprisals from right-wing Chamblain's rebels.
     Chamblain is suspected of taking part in a 1987 election massacre in
which 34 voters were killed. He was convicted in 1995 in absentia of the
1993 murder of a prominent pro-Aristide businessman who was dragged out of
a church service and shot in the head.
     The now defunct paramilitary Front for the Advancement of Progress of
the Haitian People he co-founded in 1993 was blamed for 3,000 of the
estimated 5,000 killings in the three years after a military junta ousted
Aristide in 1991.
     Chamblain laughs at Amnesty International's calls for his arrest,
accuses the rights group of a witch-hunt and says his conscience is clean.
     "I am ready to present myself before the courts when there is a
justice system in my country," Chamblain said, referring to courts and
police in disarray after the revolt in which more than 200 people died.
     "How many people did I kill? Where are the bodies? What did I kill
them with? Why didn't police arrest me at the time? Why didn't the courts
seek my arrest?" he said, sipping a soft drink as armed aides hovered
nearby.
     Chamblain and rebels in control of swaths of Haiti's rural north are
able to move around unhindered by a U.N.-backed multinational military
force and local police. New Haitian National Police chief Leon Charles says
detaining the likes of Chamblain is "over my head."
     But the rebel leader says he is working with the new government of
Prime Minister Gerard Latortue to integrate his cadres into the Haitian
police force given Aristide disbanded the army and there is no money to set
up a new one -- one of Chamblain's long-term goals.
     Aristide -- a champion of the poor majority but accused of corruption
by his opponents -- accuses the United States of forcing him into exile
against his will, and rights groups are up in arms at U.S. support for the
ouster of a democratically elected leader.
     "I say thank you very much to the American people, to French President
Jacques Chirac, to the Canadian people ... for seeing the situation Haiti
was in and taking on a historic responsibility," Chamblain smiled.