The end of Haiti’s annual five-day Carnival festivities appeared to signal an end to the eerie calm prevailing in Port-au-Prince in recent days while an armed uprising spread like wildfire across the country’s northern provinces, known as departments. The United Nations ordered the evacuation of all non-essential personnel and their family members from the country, and some of the 50 U.S. Marines who arrived in Haiti on Monday escorted a U.N. convoy heading toward Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport at midday. In Washington, President George W. Bush promised to encourage the international community to provide a strong “security presence” amidst the deteriorating political crisis in Haiti but did not give any further details. To date, the Bush administration has limited its diplomatic efforts to support for a multinational initiative that would convene new legislative elections and create an Aristide-led government of national unity that would include representatives of the unarmed political opposition.
But opposition political parties, prominent business leaders and other Aristide critics showed no sign of relenting on their unconditional demand for his removal as president. In a two-page statement issued to the news media on Wednesday morning, the Democratic Platform coalition described Aristide’s permanence in power as “the source of the problem” and called on the international community to devise a mechanism that would facilitate his “timely and orderly departure.” Opposition leaders have accused Aristide of corruption and of rigging parliamentary elections in 2000 in favor of his ruling Lavalas Family party. Elected president for a second time in a vote held after the legislative balloting, Aristide has nearly two years left in his term and has repeatedly asserted his determination to stay in office until the winter of 2006. Some opposition leaders made no secret of their desire to see Washington play a more active role in hastening the 50-year-old Aristide’s exit. " We have asked him to leave because too much is too much," said Andy Apaid, a U.S.-born businessman who heads a collection of anti-Aristide organizations and community leaders known as the Group of 184. “[But] nothing gets done without Washington.”
Apaid and other leaders of the government’s so-called democratic opposition have been accused of having links to the motley crew of gang members and ex-soldiers who now control many of the principal towns and cities north of Port-au-Prince. At least 70 people have been killed–including an estimated 40 policemen–in fighting since the rebellion erupted in the seaport of Gonaives on Feb. 5. The latest town to fall before the antigovernment onslaught was Port-de-Paix, where a group of unidentified gunmen torched a police station and other buildings Monday night. The country’s second-largest city, Cap-Haitien, was captured by rebels Sunday and their acknowledged leader Guy Phillippe told reporters that he has made “informal” contact with the unarmed opposition centered in the capital. A former police chief of Cap-Haitien, Philippe has been implicated in two unsuccessful coup attempts against Aristide and his predecessor as president in 2000 and 2001, but democratic opposition leaders adamantly denied having any ties to Philippe and his armed supporters.
There is a whole cast of unsavory characters who have surfaced in the ranks of the Philippe-led rebels as they prepare to stage a final assault on the capital city. The head of the rebel troops is Louis Jodel Chamblain, a cofounder of the notorious FRAPH paramilitary squads set up by the military regime that toppled Aristide in 1991, only months after his first election to the presidency. In 2000, Chamblain was convicted in absentia of mass murder in connection with the 1994 massacre of at least 26 people living in a Aristide stronghold in the city of Gonaives. Another top lieutenant in the rebel forces is Gilbert Dragon, a former police chief in the town of Croix-des-Bouquets who received training from U.S. military forces in Ecuador in 1993-94 and fled with Philippe to the Dominican Republic following a failed coup attempt in October 2000. Another former FRAPH member named Jean Tatoune has been spotted in Gonaives since the city of 200,000 fell into rebel hands earlier this month.
Merchants shuttered their shops early and workers scurried home under a hot tropical sun as pro-Aristide toughs took to the streets of Port-au-Prince today, relieving motorists of cell phones, jewelry and other valuables at hastily erected roadblocks. A team of Canadian troops arrived to help evacuate some of the 1,000 Canadian nationals believed to be living in Haiti. A group of stone-brandishing pro-Aristide youths known as chimeres (French for ghost) set ablaze a stack of tires and warily paraded outside the entrance to the legendary Grand Oloffson Hotel, a onetime favorite among jet-set celebrities that was immortalized in Graham Greene’s acclaimed 1960 novel “The Comedians.” The sudden appearance of the chimeres brought a gaggle of gawking hotel employees and foreign correspondents to the perimeter of the hotel grounds before the masked youths moved on, heading toward the city center.
