Exiled Haiti Chief Pleads for Help : Caribbean: 100 reportedly killed as terror and bloodshed rule nation. Cowed citizens hide indoors. U.S. and France cut off aid.

Haiti plunged haplessly on in terror and bloodshed Tuesday as ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide pleaded from a hasty exile for international help in restoring his presidency and his country’s shattered democracy.

Aristide was seized by army coup-makers who called him an “apprentice dictator” and forced to fly to Caracas, Venezuela, where he accused his captors of “spreading death like flies” and plotting further massacres.

“They have a long list of people whom they plan to kill,” the 38-year-old Roman Catholic priest-turned-president said in a statement sent from Caracas to Haitian diplomats in the United States.

He described the coup’s leader, Brig. Gen. Raoul Cedras, as “power mad” in another statement broadcast to Haiti by Radio France Internationale. In both statements, Aristide pleaded with his people to “hold on tight. Don’t let go. We’ve been shaken, but we haven’t fallen.”

But reports from Port-au-Prince described a cowed population hiding indoors to escape the random gunfire of troops roaming the capital’s streets in vehicles and on foot.

Since the army uprising began late Sunday with apparent mutinies at a suburban military base and a downtown police station, more than 100 people have been killed, according to the Caribbean Human Rights Network headquartered in Barbados. The Associated Press quoted Frantz LaMothe, a photographer who visited the morgue of Port-au-Prince General Hospital, as saying authorities told him there were 140 bodies there alone.

The military clamped down on the Haitian capital and claimed that its coup was necessary. Cedras, who had been Aristide’s interim army commander, went on state television Tuesday night and asserted that the coup was justified to halt human rights abuses and violations of the constitution by Aristide, whom he called an “apprentice dictator.”

International reaction to the coup was swift and blunt. The United States and France cut off their aid to the impoverished nation, and Canada and the European Community moved to suspend their Haitian aid programs.

“The United States government does not recognize this junta,” said State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler.

She said the Organization of American States will convene a high-level emergency meeting in the next few days, “and we will work in that forum and through other diplomatic activity for the restoration of constitutional rule in Haiti.”

OAS officials said late Tuesday that Aristide will attend an emergency meeting in Washington today to consider steps that might be taken against the junta.

The OAS said Aristide was personally invited by OAS Secretary-General Joao Clemente Baena Soares by telephone Tuesday.

Tutwiler said the Administration has impounded $66 million in economic assistance that was not yet spent for the fiscal year that ended Monday.

Those funds were the balance of $84 million in food and other economic aid and $1.5 million in military assistance that was appropriated for the year. The Administration had requested $88.6 million in economic and $2.2 million in military aid for the fiscal year that began Tuesday.

In the past, Washington has reacted to coups in Haiti by cutting off most aid but allowing food and humanitarian assistance to continue to flow. But the Administration went further this time, suspending all aid.

Tutwiler brushed aside suggestions that the food embargo would hit hardest at the country’s poor.

“This is action,” she said. “This is something that we feel strongly about. . . . We call for the immediate restoration of Haiti’s legitimate, democratically elected government. We also call on those who have assumed power to ensure the safety of all United States citizens that are there.”

Washington’s suspension of aid followed similar action by France, the former colonial power in Haiti, which suspended its own $36 million annual aid program. Canada, which planned to give Haiti $8.8 million in aid, put that money on hold.

The European Community’s Executive Commission was considering recommending that all 12 EC countries suspend cooperation with Haiti until Aristide is restored to power. Haiti was also entitled to about $150 million in EC aid under a five-year accord among the European Community and 69 African, Caribbean and Pacific nations.

In Port-au-Prince, the scene was grim.

There were unconfirmed reports that the national penitentiary had been emptied of all 1,000 prisoners, including Roger LaFontant, a former head of the outlawed Tontons Macoutes militia. There also was a report that LaFontant--jailed after leading a coup before Aristide’s February inauguration--had been killed during Monday’s coup.

Haitians reported that several former Tontons Macoutes who had been imprisoned at the penitentiary were seen walking city streets Tuesday.

American tourist Cathy Zimmerman, 30, of Berkeley, Calif., living in nervous temporary refuge at the rococo Olaffson Hotel where Graham Greene’s novel “The Comedians” was set, observed in a telephone interview that “the military doesn’t care what object they are shooting at. They’re just shooting to scare people,” she told the AP.

The new military rulers closed the international airport and clamped a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew on the capital city. Cedras had spoken on radio Monday, urging calm to create a “serene climate favorable to the next election.”

But the behavior of Cedras’ troops was anything but serene, leading to speculation that Cedras and two fellow junta officers, formerly considered to favor the Aristide government, were not in firm control.

A part-time Reuters correspondent in Port-au-Prince, Edwige Balutansky, said the junta’s relative silence suggested there might be a split in the military between longtime moderates such as Cedras and old-line officers who backed the Duvalier family dictatorship that ran the country for three decades.

Cedras and two other moderates, Col. Alix Silva and Col. Henri Robert Marc Charles, formed the junta.

It was unclear, however, whether they had plotted a coup or merely took advantage of an opportunity when rampaging soldiers stormed the presidential palace and seized Aristide. Balutansky quoted diplomatic and political sources in Haiti as suggesting that the three-man junta may be struggling to stay on top against the resistance of the Duvalierist officers.

Cedras and Silva won international acclaim last December for policing Haiti’s first free democratic election and preventing the kind of terror and political bloodshed that Duvalierist officers had employed to derail previous attempts at free elections.

Based on that record of seeming support for democracy, Aristide promoted them and a number of other like-minded young officers to replace older hard-liners who had previously led the 7,000-man armed forces.

But one of the reasons given by rebellious soldiers for their Monday rampage against the president was Aristide’s tentativeness in dealing with Cedras and others whom he appointed only to temporary slots in the high command, reserving permanent appointments as a kind of stick-and-carrot device to keep them under control.

Although France offered immediate asylum to Aristide following his early-morning flight to Caracas, his statements suggested that he plans to remain in Venezuela and fight for the restoration of his government from there.

“I am the elected president of the Republic of Haiti, and I am visiting Venezuela until I return to my country, and that will be thanks also to the (support of) the international community,” said the slight, bespectacled president at a news conference in Caracas.

Aristide likened his plight to that of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev after last month’s coup in his country.

“In Russia, the support of the international community permitted a legitimate government to return to power,” he said. “In Haiti, the support of the international community would be able to facilitate continuation of the constitutional mandate that is established. . . . It’s not only Haiti that is implicated but all foreign friends that in holding hands together helped us to organize the election of 16 December, 1990.”

Schanche reported from Miami and Kempster from Washington.