5 Slain at Huge Haitian Rally

Gunmen presumed loyal to exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide ambushed a march Sunday by hundreds of thousands of Haitians celebrating his ouster, killing at least five people and wounding 20.

The violence was the worst such incident since Aristide fled to Africa a week ago, and the gunfire unleashed panic among the massive crowd, which had been chanting its hopes for a new Haiti in the parks and avenues surrounding the National Palace, Aristide’s former residence.

Marchers dropped their flags, placards and water bottles as they scrambled for cover in the walled side streets that lead to the sprawling Champs de Mars green downtown.

The killings, apparently committed by a small number of gunmen, were likely to intensify pressure on the more than 2,000 foreign peacekeepers in Haiti -- most of them U.S. Marines -- to disarm supporters of Aristide’s Lavalas Party. Sunday’s demonstration further testified to broad support for Aristide’s departure, despite his claims that he had been pressured to leave by U.S. and French officials.

Marines and French gendarmes had been patrolling the march route throughout the five-hour event, but they left the area where the shooting occurred about half an hour before the attack. Some of the shots came from balconies or rooftops in the volatile Bel Air neighborhood flanking the Champs de Mars, witnesses said. Neither foreign forces nor Haitian police responded immediately, and no one was arrested or detained.

“No one came to stop them. They had started walking along with us, and then they just opened fire,” said Almil Castell, still wearing his bloody green polo shirt after doctors bandaged a bullet wound in his left arm.

Marine Maj. Richard Crusan, speaking at the multinational force’s base at the Port-au-Prince airport, denied that the foreign troops had left the demonstration route before gunfire broke out. He later said three Marines at the National Palace about two blocks away had fired their weapons “in the direction from which the shots were being fired,” but had no other details.

The commander of the French contingent, Col. Daniel Leplatois, defended the security forces. “We’re not able to secure the lives of all of the demonstrators,” he said.

Among the dead was Ricardo Ortega, a New York-based correspondent for the Spanish Antena 3TV television network. Michael Laughlin, an American photographer with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper, suffered a bullet wound in his shoulder and was in stable condition.

On the grounds of the Canape Vert hospital, Aveny Joseph sat in his bloodstaine underpants on a cement retaining wall while a friend held his intravenous drip bag over his head. He said a U.S. medical unit showed up 10 minutes after a bullet hit his neck. His bare chest bore the medics’ triage report number in black marker: #5 P86 R20 124/70.

“I don’t know where the shots came from. I was walking and suddenly I was hit and I fell,” said the 26-year-old Joseph, who also had a gash on his head from the fall.

Ortega died at the hospital of a stomach wound. Minutes earlier, another victim brought in for treatment, student Cesar Milford, succumbed to his injuries, said Valcin Ricardo, who helped carry Milford to the emergency room.

The bodies of two other victims lay on the pavement outside the palace for at least an hour after the shootings. The grief-stricken widow of one of them, Josephat Lukner, knelt beside his corpse, keening. Another body lay a block and a half away, near a cinema.

The hospital was a scene of pandemonium, with students and other marchers arriving with the injured in their arms, having ferried them in the backs of trucks or on foot from the shooting scene a mile away. Relatives of the dead wailed, and leaders of the political groups that organized the march ranted at the remnants of Aristide’s government, accusing Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert of inciting street thugs to shoot the marchers.

“This was planned at the [prime minister’s office]. Neptune was there last night with Privert,” Charles Baker, a businessman and leader of the Democratic Platform alliance, said angrily outside the emergency room. Neptune issued a statement late Sunday saying that he condemned the violence and would work to catch the perpetrators, whatever their political affiliation.

An interim leadership panel, the seven-member Council of Sages named Friday, was being urged by Aristide foes to name a new prime minister swiftly to replace Neptune.

Sunday’s march began at 9 a.m. at a church plaza high in the hills of Petionville, more than five miles from the palace. Participants cheered Aristide’s departure and denounced the violence and corruption that marked the years since he was elected to a second presidential term in 2000 and his Lavalas Party gained a monopoly on power.

Halfway to the palace, an open-bed truck carrying Guy Philippe and about a dozen members of his Front for the Liberation of Haiti halted and disgorged the rebel leader. Philippe led a ragtag band of gunmen in an uprising that began Feb. 5 in the city of Gonaives, took control of the northern half of Haiti and threatened to storm the capital before Aristide left.

Youths watching from the parade’s sidelines swarmed to greet him, seeking autographs and shouting, “Guy Philippe, the nation is yours!”

With Philippe was Louis-Jodel Chamblain, who allegedly ran death squads under Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s dictatorship in the 1980s and was a leader of a paramilitary group that terrorized Lavalas supporters after Aristide was deposed in a 1991 coup.

Asked if he expected to find a place in the emerging Haitian leadership, Chamblain replied: “Haiti is for all Haitians now.” The rebels, who in previous public appearances had brandished assault rifles, appeared to be unarmed at the demonstration.

Students stopped to cheer wildly in front of the national television headquarters, where Aristide supporters had hurled rocks and fired gunshots at them two weeks earlier. A few demonstrators clambered up poles holding a three-story banner with Aristide’s portrait beside the words “Haiti is the mother of freedom,” pulled down the canvas and carried it two miles to the palace, where it was burned.

Estimates of the crowd’s size were difficult to make, as the torrent of humanity filled the six-lane expanse of Delmas Street for more than a mile, sweeping in onlookers as the procession advanced. But the crowd clearly numbered at least several hundred thousand -- the largest public outpouring in Haiti in years.

In the heady atmosphere that preceded the outbreak of gunfire, the demonstrators basked in what they thought was a newfound freedom from fear.

“He’s gone! He’s gone! He’s gone for good!” cheered activist Evans Paul, a former mayor of Port-au-Prince and Aristide ally until the 2000 parliamentary elections that observers deemed corrupted by Lavalas.

“It’s an extraordinary day. Unforgettable!” said Magguy Clerie, overcome with emotion as she described the feeling of relief when, four hours into the march, no violence had disrupted it.

“Send Aristide to prison! Send the chimeres to school!” the marchers chanted. Chimere is a Creole word that Haitians use to refer to the illiterates who the Lavalas Party organized into armed gangs to attack and disrupt opposition political events.

The gangsters, who anti-Aristide forces contend are paid by the Interior Ministry, spent much of the last week looting and burning businesses owned by prominent members of the Democratic Platform.

Aristide has charged that he was “kidnapped” by U.S. forces and made to sign a letter of resignation. U.S. officials have described those accusations as absurd. On Sunday, a statement from Aristide was read to reporters in Bangui, the Central African Republic’s capital, in which he said he was being well cared for.

Pro-Aristide activists had vowed to hold a rival demonstration Sunday, but it didn’t materialize.

On Friday, a couple of thousand supporters of Aristide marched on the U.S. and French embassies, shouting their anger at his ouster and hurling verbal abuse at Marines. A few shots rang out on the periphery of that protest, but the event quickly dissipated.

Emmanuel Joseph, a worried-looking 20-year-old watching the hordes advancing down Delmas Street on Sunday, said the former president’s supporters had decided to postpone their demonstration until today.