22681: (Chamberlain) Haiti ex-rebels threaten to take up arms again (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Joseph Guyler Delva

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, July 13 (Reuters) - A group of former rebels,
who helped oust Haiti's president in February, on Tuesday denounced a
government plan to disarm them and threatened to take up their weapons
again.
     Many of the rebels, who overran Haiti in a bloody revolt that forced
then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile, are former soldiers. They
want Haiti's disbanded army recreated.
     "The government cannot disarm the military that we are. We are
combatants; we know how to fight; we have fought Aristide, and we'll fight
again if necessary," former Col. Remissainthe Ravix told Reuters on
Tuesday. He claimed to lead a group of nearly 2,000 former soldiers.
     "If they think they can confiscate our weapons, They can try it, but
they'd better watch out," Ravix said.
     Treatment of the rebels has been a delicate matter for Haiti's interim
government and a United Nations peacekeeping force sent to the troubled
Caribbean country in the aftermath of the February rebellion, in which more
than 200 people were killed.
     The rebels easily overran Haiti's feeble national police force, which
the government is trying to rebuild.
     Rebel leaders said their fighters would lay down arms shortly after
Aristide left the country on Feb. 29. But they have, for the most part,
kept their weapons and no serious effort has been made to disarm them.
     The interim government of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue announced
this month that measures will be taken after Sept. 15 to disarm gangs and
other groups that possess illegal weapons. But the government announcement,
dated July 8, did not explicitly call on armed groups to hand over their
weapons.
     Aristide disbanded Haiti's army, a dreaded institution that supported
decades of dictatorship in the impoverished nation of 8 million, in the
mid-1990s. However, many ex-soldiers, who were left jobless and penniless,
contend he did so illegally.
     Ravix said his fighters would do everything in their power to foil the
government's disarmament plan and called on ex-rebels not to join the
police force.
     "We are a constitutional force just as the police. Why should we join
them?" he said.
     "If our weapons are illegal, the government is also illegal because it
is thanks to our weapons they are now where they are," Ravix said, calling
government officials "ungrateful."
     Relations between ex-rebels and Haitian police have grown tense,
particularly after rebels moved in recent months to carry out police
operations in several cities. The ex-rebels still control parts of the
country and have been accused of human rights abuses against Aristide
partisans.
     "Those former military (rebels) arrest and detain people arbitrarily,
abuse them, and the victims have to pay a ransom to be freed, and we,
policemen, can't even say a word," Julio Milien, a police officer in the
town of Mirebalais, said.