Feb. 9, 2004. 01:00 AM
RODRIGO ABD/AP
A man makes off with a box containing a television yesterday after hundreds of frenzied looters stripped sea containers in the Haitian port of Saint Marc. The looters set empty containers ablaze a day after armed government opponents drove police out of town in an ever widening uprising against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Haitian militants extend rampage Looting frenzy as port city attacked Violence has killed 18, mostly police CAROL J. WILLIAMS SPECIAL TO THE STAR PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—Armed rebels seeking to oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide spread their rampage to a second port city yesterday, while the mainstream opposition appeared to pull back from association with four days of violence that has killed 18 people, mostly policemen. Attacks on government officials in Gonaives and Saint Marc have ravaged the volatile, impoverished cities on the Arcadian Coast since Thursday, when gang members once loyal to Aristide seized the Gonaives police station, freed 100 prisoners and torched the mayor's home. Calling themselves the Gonaives Resistance Front, the militants previously known as the Cannibal Gang held on to the city of 200,000 despite an assault by 150 heavily armed police sent in Saturday by authorities trying to restore government control. Haitian radio broadcasts said 14 policemen were killed in the daylong clash before the government forces retreated. Rioting broke out early yesterday in Saint Marc, on the coast between Port-au-Prince and Gonaives. Hundreds of frenzied looters stripped sea containers of televisions, radios and corn flour, and set the empty containers ablaze. "We're just waiting for Aristide to go," said Louis Andrel, a gang leader. "Step by step, town by town. When we have all the (districts), we'll go down to Port-au-Prince," he told Reuters yesterday. News agencies in Saint Marc reported residents were supporting the uprising And it's spreading — police headquarters were attacked in the cities of Trou de Nord, Listere and Grand Goave, independent Radio Metropole said. During the failed attempt to retake Gonaives, Cannibal Gang members lynched one policeman and crowds attacked other uniformed corpses with machetes and rocks. A government official circulated a picture of one policeman's mutilated corpse via e-mail, noting "these are the atrocities the opposition are celebrating." Police have symbolized power in Haiti since 1995, when Aristide disbanded the army, which had conspired with remnants of the 30-year Duvalier dictatorship to oust him in a 1991 coup. Aristide, a former priest who was the country's first popularly elected president after a tortured history of autocracies and coups, was restored to power in November, 1994 by a U.S. military intervention. Widely applauded by Haiti's impoverished masses when he returned from U.S. exile, Aristide and his Lavalas Party have since presided over a profound deterioration of Haiti, far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Unrest has been deepening since Aristide's party swept parliamentary elections in 2000 deemed by international observers to be flawed. Demands for Aristide's resignation or departure have intensified since September, when the body of Cannibal Gang leader Amiot Metayer was found slain execution-style along a roadway outside Gonaives. Metayer had threatened to expose what he said was Aristide's complicity in brutally dispersing opposition rallies. The key opposition forces, the Group of 184 and Democratic Convergence, had planned an anti-Aristide demonstration in the capital yesterday, but called it off "out of respect for the dead policemen," one member said. LOS ANGELES TIMES › Get 50% off home delivery of the Toronto Star.

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