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Rebels set sights on Haitian capital Mon 23 February, 2004 22:00
By Alistair Scrutton CAP HAITIEN, Haiti (Reuters) - Rebels says they will be in the Haitian capital within days and Washington has sent Marines to protect its embassy after the country's second-largest city fell in a bloody armed revolt. Rebel leaders said after seizing control of the northern city of Cap Haitien on Sunday they were ready to take the entire country and liberate it from President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's "slavery." "We will be in Port-au-Prince in a few days," rebel leader Guy Philippe said on local radio on Monday. About 50 U.S. Marines flew in on a C-130 Hercules transport plane to the airport in Port-au-Prince on a mission to protect the U.S. Embassy and other U.S. facilities in Haiti. France, whose rule Haiti shook off in 1804, joined several other foreign governments and told its citizens to leave Haiti. Aristide's government said it was sending reinforcements north and repeated a plea for international help for its beleaguered police, hopelessly outgunned in the revolt that erupted on February 5 and has killed about 60 people in the poorest country in the Americas. Seizing their biggest prize so far, a ski-mask-clad rebel force of 200 on Sunday overran Cap Haitien, a city of about 500,000, putting anti-Aristide forces in control of much of the north. At least 10 people were killed during the attack, including several rebels, government spokesman Mario Dupuy said. Looters struck in Cap Haitien after the rebel advance. A mob hit a World Food Program warehouse on the outskirts of the city, taking about 800 metric tons of food valued at nearly $740,000 (400,000 pounds). Other parts of the city appeared calm a day after the rebels struck. Cows ambled by the side of the runway at the airport and people on bicycles went about their business. Joking and relaxed, a rebel leader said his comrades would soon take over the rest of the country. "We will liberate Haiti from the slavery of Aristide," said Louis Jodel Chamblain. "So far, the only resistance we've encountered has been with machetes," Chamblain told Reuters at the city's airport. Chamblain, a former leader of a militia that terrorised Haitians in the early 1990s, was surrounded by about 50 rebel fighters dressed in military fatigues and some armed with automatic rifles. The rebels wore riot gear and dark glasses with gas masks tied to their belts. 'SENT TO US BY GOD' The relative ease with which the rebels took Cap Haitien heightened fears in the capital, where Aristide still has plenty of supporters. Some set up barricades in streets around the teeming city to deter the rebels. "Aristide was sent to us by God," said Reginald Hommage, who called himself a loyalist of Aristide's Lavalas Family party. Prime Minister Yvon Neptune repeated a government plea to foreign nations to send help for the Haitian National Police, a poorly trained group of perhaps 4,000 officers created in the mid-1990s when Aristide disbanded the feared army. "The National Police is not an army and cannot make a war against terrorists," Neptune told a news conference. The assault on Cap Haitien came as opposition parties, which want Aristide gone but have distanced themselves from the rebels, faced a Monday night deadline from foreign mediators to decide if they would accept a power-sharing deal that would leave the president in office. Even if they did agree to the deal, it was far from clear that would halt the advances of rebels who have mounted a more serious threat to Aristide. Aristide championed Haitian democracy in the 1980s and became its first freely elected leader in 1991, but is now accused of corruption and political thuggery by his opponents. He has vowed to stay on until his second term ends in 2006. The revolt, which erupted in the western city of Gonaives, was begun by an armed gang that once supported Aristide and turned against him. It has been joined by others, including Chamblain and ex-soldiers from the army Aristide disbanded when he returned to power in 1994 after being ousted in a coup months after first taking office in 1991. Tensions have simmered in the country since flawed parliamentary elections in May 2000.
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