Rebel Leader in Charge of Haitian Town, Haitian Crisis Options

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Rebel Leader in Charge of Haitian Town

Tue Feb 17, 4:52 PM ET


By Michael Christie

HINCHE, Haiti (Reuters) - A prominent rebel leader paraded through the streets of the central Haitian city of Hinche on Tuesday, a day after his gunmen kicked out the local police force in an escalating revolt against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

As the prime minister appealed in the capital for foreign help for the outgunned police, Louis Jodel Chamblain, wearing a floppy hat and a bullet-proof vest, rode into Hinche in a column of four-wheel-drive vehicles, accompanied by around 25 well-armed men in camouflage uniform.

Those residents who did not run away cheered and clapped.


Haitian rebel leader Louis Jodel Chamblain (L) patrols a street of Hinche, in Haiti, February 17, 2004. A prominent rebel leader paraded through the streets of the central Haitian city of Hinche, a day after his gunmen kicked out the local police force in an escalating revolt against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Daniel Aguilar/Reuters)

Chamblain is a former leader of a right-wing militia that terrorized Haitians in the early 1990s. He and an exiled former police chief, Guy Philippe, slipped into the country at the weekend from neighboring Dominican Republic to join the rebels in Gonaives and further pile pressure on Aristide.


The attack on the police station at Hinche, which left the city in rebel hands on Tuesday, was the latest incident in a revolt that erupted on Feb. 5 in the western city of Gonaives and spread to several other towns.


Up to 50 people have been killed in the violence.


In Port-au-Prince, Prime Minister Yvon Neptune said authorities were trying to re-establish control in Hinche, but Haiti needed foreign technical assistance for the police.


He did not say what kind of help was needed or where it might come from, but in Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) all but ruled out foreign police or military forces going to Haiti to quell the violence and said his emphasis was on promoting a political settlement.


France said on Tuesday it was ready to offer humanitarian assistance to its former colony but was non-committal about whether it would send a peacekeeping force.


MILITARY GEAR


Chamblain's men wore military gear from head to toe. Some spoke fluent Spanish and said they had come over with Chamblain from the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. The two countries share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.


"I'm a fighter here to defeat Aristide," said one.


A helicopter was heard earlier and one soldier told Reuters they had come by helicopter.


Chamblain simply smiled when questioned by journalists.


"They (the rebels) told the population not to be afraid of us," said a local teacher, Joseph Clodin, adding the rebels said it was Aristide who should be feared.


A foreign adviser to Haiti's police force said about 15 rebels carried out Monday's attack on the police station, but Clodin put the number at 45 to 50.


Police quickly ran out of ammunition and were allowed to leave, witnesses said. The foreign police adviser and other witnesses said the death of the Hinche police commander and his bodyguard appeared to be an accident.





The attack marked an escalation in the revolt after it reached an uneasy stalemate. Rebels in Gonaives -- who are members of an armed gang that once supported Aristide but have turned against him -- said they felt strengthened by the arrival of exile fighters.

The government has bitterly condemned the development.

Neptune said former members of the military and paramilitary forces have been able to return because the Dominican Republic and the United States took them in but did not ensure that they would not return to Haiti.

He added that with a small, undertrained, underfunded police force, which numbers only around 5,000 in a country of 8 million, and no army, the government was powerless to protect towns such as Hinche.

Aristide disbanded the army after U.S. troops invaded in 1994 to put him back in office following a military coup three years earlier. (Additional reporting by Amy Bracken in Port-au-Prince