4 Students, Radio Reporter Arrested as Protests Resume at Haiti Schools

Police arrested four students and a radio reporter Monday as anti-government demonstrations resumed in public high schools in the Haitian capital.

Schools reopened Monday after being closed last week because of protests demanding the return of Jean Bertrand Aristide, the elected president who was toppled in a bloody military coup last September.

Three girls were arrested at one school where plainclothes police officers scaled the wall and jumped into the courtyard. A boy carrying a photograph of Aristide was arrested by a plainclothes police officer who entered the courtyard of a second school.

Radio stations reported classroom demonstrations in all the capital’s public high schools. Students of the University Medical School demonstrated in favor of Aristide by beating on their desks.

Tensions have intensified in Haiti as the United States continues returning thousands of boat people.

At the Port-au-Prince harbor Monday, four U.S. human rights activists, carrying placards accusing President Bush of racism and prejudice, tried to block the gangway of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was unloading Haitians who had been picked up at sea.

All but 20 of the 366 boat people aboard the cutter had disembarked when the activists, who said they were affiliated with the Quixote Center in Hyattsville, Md., rushed the gangway.

Coast Guardsmen ordered them to leave and carried off one protester, who identified herself as Laurie Richardson.

The activists said they were protesting Bush’s new policy of returning Haitian boat people without giving them immigration hearings at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It was the first physical interference at the docks since the repatriation of some boat people began in November.