Peace Efforts in Haiti on Hold

International mediators trying to resolve a bloody rebellion in Haiti hit the same roadblocks Saturday that have ensnarled the country for nearly four years, drawing conditional promises of compliance from President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and no clear response from his political opposition.

Further complicating any resolution to the crisis, the mainstream opposition has dissociated itself from the rebels who have rampaged across much of northern and central Haiti, and has little or no ability to influence them.

The diplomatic delegation, including U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega and officials from more than a dozen other Western countries, pressed both sides in Haiti’s political standoff to sign onto a plan that would leave Aristide as head of state but name a new prime minister and set the country on the road to elections.

After a two-hour meeting at which the intermediaries made it clear that Aristide must accept their formula or face his armed and increasingly numerous enemies on his own, the besieged president agreed to accept the plan as a basis for negotiations -- with the proviso that he would “not go ahead with any terrorists.” Aristide uniformly applies that label to his mainstream opponents here in the capital as well as to the armed gangs and former junta figures controlling most of the key ports and provincial centers north of Port-au-Prince, the capital.

“The president agreed to proceed on the basis of the plan,” Bahamian Foreign Minister Fred Mitchell told reporters.

Representatives of political parties and civil society movements who demand Aristide’s resignation before they will negotiate on a new government were pressed to drop that condition or lose the international community’s support in ending the crisis. The opposition pledged to respond to the delegation’s take-it-or-leave-it peace plan by Monday night.

“Although we did not get a ‘yes,’ we did not get a ‘no,’ ” Mitchell said of the group’s talks with the opposition. Canada’s delegate to the peace mission, Minister for Francophone Affairs Denis Coderre, explained that Aristide’s opponents were granted more time to respond because of their more complex makeup, involving more than 300 political parties, unions, social groups and movements.

Since the rebels seized the historical port city of Gonaives on Feb. 5, the uprising has cut a bloodstained path across the north. Aristide has been unable to take back the seized towns and cities because Haiti has no army and the police force is demoralized and divided. With fewer than 5,000 police officers for this country of 8.5 million, the force has been decimated in recent weeks as small groups of the rebels move from city to city, terrifying the meager armed forces into fleeing their posts.

Cap-Haitien, the last major city in the north still nominally under government control, has withstood the insurrection so far because its street gangs have remained loyal to Aristide.

At least 60 people have died since the rebellion began, most of them policemen attacked as symbols of Aristide’s authority in provincial cities.

The rebels in Gonaives are thought to number only about 100, but they have been buttressed by machete-wielding townspeople fed up with the Aristide government and unrelenting privations. As poverty has deepened and unrest spread among the myriad factions of angry and disillusioned Haitians, gang loyalties have shifted in at least a dozen other cities, sending Aristide supporters fleeing.

When he was elected president in the first democratic vote in Haiti’s history in 1990, Aristide inspired passionate hope that he could lift Haitians out of their misery in this poorest of Western countries. But his arming of street gangs to cow political opponents and rampant corruption alienated many onetime supporters and prompted a cutoff of international aid.

The mediation mission Saturday included officials from the Caribbean Community -- known as Caricom -- as well as the Organization of American States and France, the last colonial power to rule Haiti until its slave rebellion triumphed in 1804. Their plan would leave Aristide to serve out the remaining two years of his term but would replace Prime Minister Yvon Neptune with someone acceptable to both sides.

The delegation’s plan bears much resemblance to earlier proposals from Caricom and an association of Haitian religious leaders that failed even before the crisis turned violent and Aristide’s opponents multiplied. Representatives of the mainstream groups opposed to Aristide say they fear that accepting the delegation’s plan would only fracture the peaceful elements of the opposition while leaving the militants to wreak havoc.

“The international community wants us to accept the plan as it is, whatever the cost. If we accept this plan without the departure of Aristide, we will disappear as an opposition,” said Rosemond Pradel of the opposition Konakon group.

Both sides struck predictable positions with the mediators. Aristide agreed to accept the terms of the peace plan with the apparent calculation that the opposition would refuse and he would never be held to comply with it. His political opponents bought time to consider the plan but are unlikely to come to any consensus. The mainstream challengers of Aristide succeeded, however, in convincing the delegation of their independence from the armed rebellion despite the two factions’ shared goal of ousting the president.

Asked if the diplomats were making a distinction between the legitimate political opposition and the rebels in the north, Charles Baker of the Democratic Platform uniting hundreds of opposition groups said they were.

When asked how the diplomats expected the mainstream factions to control the violent elements in the north, Baker responded: “We asked them the same question, but didn’t get an answer.”

Evans Paul, another leading opposition figure, said the diplomats’ plan has little promise of affecting the country’s crisis because it fails to change the status quo of a president unable to govern. As currently phrased, the proposal also offers nothing in the way of enforcement, he suggested.

Compounding fears that agreeing to negotiate with Aristide would discredit the political opposition was the possibility of a rebel assault on Cap-Haitien.

The city’s few police officers have been holed up in their headquarters for three days in fear of attack by a heavily armed faction led by the city’s former police chief, Guy Philippe, or Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a former death-squad commander from the military dictatorship that ruled after ousting Aristide in a 1991 coup. The former regime figures, both recently returned from exile in the Dominican Republic, have vowed to take Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city.

A U.S. military security team was in Haiti this weekend to assess conditions at the U.S. Embassy. Hours after the team’s arrival, the State Department ordered all nonessential diplomatic personnel and their families out of the country.