For Haitians, Just Another Day of Broken Promises : Politics: Date for Aristide’s return from exile passes with military leaders and hard-liners vowing to defy U.N.

Saturday was to have been a day of promise for Haiti, of restoration, of celebration. It turned out to be a day of gloom, resignation and fear.

Instead of the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Saturday saw streets mostly emptied by fear. Instead of the restoration of democracy, there were more threats of yet another military-backed coup. Instead of action, it was a day of talk and more talk.

“I hoped Aristide would return,” said Joseph Leon, a grocery store clerk. “He was supposed to come back today. I think Haiti is lost.”

Under an agreement signed by Haiti’s military commander, Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, last July 3 at Governors Island in New York harbor, Saturday was the date for Aristide’s return after two years of forced exile.

But as they have almost constantly since the agreement was signed, army leaders and their civilian allies continued Saturday to defy all efforts and threats by the United Nations and the United States to force the return to power of Haiti’s first democratically elected president.

“This might leave the perception of momentum going their way,” a senior U.S. diplomat said about the military’s success so far in keeping Aristide out of the country. “But that would be a mistake.”

Perhaps, but the civilian groups that act politically for the military continued making plans to take over the government from pro-Aristide Prime Minister Robert Malval, either by arresting him or forcing his resignation.

On Friday, these organizations, led by the hard-line Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), demanded Aristide’s resignation. Faced with his refusal, they said Saturday they would declare the office vacant and name a provisional government.

“On Sunday morning,” said Reynold Georges, a tough-talking anti-Aristide leader, “we’re going to install our government in the National Palace.”

Prime Minister Malval told CNN Saturday night that “we have no means to prevent this, but it won’t take them very far in actually forming a government.”

FRAPH leaders said they would install a government under Article 149 of the Haitian constitution, which provides for filling a vacant presidency with the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the naming of a provisional prime minister and the setting of elections within 90 days.

To do so “would be a flagrant violation of the Governors Island accord,” said the senior U.S. diplomat. “It would not only be unacceptable but inadmissible.”

He and special U.N. representative Dante Caputo said the July 3 agreement remains the framework for ending Haiti’s political and economic agony. He added that they were pushing “all interested parties” to attend a meeting this week to get “Governors Island back in motion.”

But neither military nor parliamentary representatives who attended the New York talks last July had responded by Saturday night to Caputo’s call for talks.

In fact, Caputo moved the date for the meetings back from Monday or Tuesday to Wednesday or Thursday. “We are hoping for a response today,” one U.N. official said, “but if we don’t hear by the end of the weekend we’ll be in trouble.”

Although the U.S. diplomat talked tough in a background briefing for reporters, he offered no new threats or incentives to draw the military to the proposed talks.

“We rule out nothing,” he said when asked about an Aristide proposal for extending a current U.N. embargo choking off fuel and arms into a total blockade. But he acknowledged that the United States and most U.N. officials oppose such Draconian action for fear of destroying Haiti’s paralyzed economy.

Asked why he thought the military’s course now might be any different from its path after the Governors Island accord, he said only that the proposed talks “will give the military a chance to show good faith . . . to come to see that it is in their interest to move forward on this, that there simply is no alternative.”

Civilian groups allied with the military, meanwhile, continued to defy the international pressure against them.

FRAPH organized a voodoo ceremony Saturday in front of a Port-au-Prince restaurant that serves as a clubhouse for some of the most violent anti-Aristide gangs.

About 90 people took part, dancing and chanting to drums and rolling on the garbage littering the street, claiming to be possessed by voodoo spirits called on to protest Aristide, the U.N. embargo and the Malval government.

Then they marched a few blocks, chasing the few people on the streets into their homes.

It was one of the few signs of life in the city, which was turned into a virtual ghost town by a general strike Friday and a night of random gunfire from soldiers and armed civilians who roamed through neighborhoods harboring Aristide supporters.

“I am afraid to talk to you,” said one woman who peered suspiciously from her darkened doorway Saturday. “When reporters came before, a man who talked to them was beaten” by soldiers.