Aristide’s Stronghold Faces Terror From Opposition : Haiti: Residents of fetid Cite Soleil are being targeted to thwart any organizing on behalf of ousted president.

It has become part of the early morning ritual, like going to get water or opening a stall for business. The people who exist in this fetid slum head out at daybreak to count the bodies.

For weeks and months, mutilated bodies have turned up regularly, almost daily, at 15 Soleil, the address of the half-square-mile garbage dump located inside the slum, sometimes two and three at a time, all with multiple bullet wounds.

Many have been sliced open, and the faces of several have been horribly disfigured, as unspeakable reminders to Cite Soleil’s 200,000 residents of who is and will remain in control of Haiti.

According to U.N. officials, diplomats and independent human rights organizations, there is no question about who that is, of who the executioners are--”the Haitian army and its paid following of civilian-dressed thugs,” in the words of one diplomat.

The United Nations said at least 53 people were killed in and around Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in March by the military or its civilian allies, mostly by a group calling itself the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, or FRAPH. More than 30 of those bodies were discarded in Cite Soleil, which sits on a mud flat adjoining the capital.

The toll in February was 58, also mostly from Cite Soleil.

“Of course,” said Colin Granderson, a tall, elegant diplomat recruited from Trinidad’s foreign service last year to head the U.N. operation here, “there have been more since, and we can only guess at how many have been killed in the countryside” where there are no human rights monitors.

All told, according to various human rights organizations, as many as 3,000 people have been killed since the Sept. 20, 1991, coup that overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

“People are still being targeted, followed, arrested and killed,” one resident said. “Only now they are shot and taken out of the city. . . . They (the military and its civilian following) are trying to avoid the publicity.”

Not all victims are taken out of Cite Soleil. On Thursday just after midnight, four armed men broke into the shack of Louis LeDeffe, a 25-year-old former soldier who had deserted when Aristide was exiled.

He was shot in the head in front of his wife and sister-in-law, and his body was left for the neighbors to see. Human rights activists said they suspect that FRAPH and the army are targeting former military personnel to thwart any organizing activity on behalf of the ousted president by anyone with army training.

But this appears to be a phantom fear rooted more in paranoia than in reality. There is no real evidence that anyone in Cite Soleil--an enclave of 200,000 residents that is the stronghold of Aristide’s popular support--has the resources to stage an armed uprising.

The barbarism is widespread and indiscriminate, Granderson said, “aimed at cowing the entire population, not just the supporters of Aristide.”

Women routinely report rapes by soldiers and armed civilians, and shootings and fires terrorize a country already reeling from fear, hunger and hopelessness.

Bloodshed and brutality always have been part of Haitian politics and society, but the current wave has reached a level that equals, if not surpasses, the murderous record of longtime ruler Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier.

“This is worse than under Papa Doc,” said Father Antoine Adrien, a Roman Catholic priest and the most prominent surviving leader of the movement supporting Aristide, who was run out of the country after only seven months in office.

Duvalier and his successor son, Jean-Claude, a dictator in his own right until he was overthrown in 1986, were considered nearly unparalleled butchers who, with their personal army called the Tontons Macoutes, ruled Haiti with guns, machetes and religious fear.

“But there were limitations then,” said Adrien, who was forced by the Duvaliers into a 14-year exile. “The Duvaliers targeted only individuals who opposed them or were seen as specific enemies.

“Now, everyone is a target; young men, children, women, anyone seen talking to two other people. It doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t do anything,” Adrien said during an interview in one of the many houses he uses to evade the military.

“What they are after is to intimidate the entire population,” he continued. “To say this situation is awful, terrible, is to understate reality. Haiti has reached its lowest point.”

The focus of this horror is the ironically named municipality of Cite Soleil--City of the Sun--where the air is thick with a gag-inducing stink and the streets are so filled with refuse that four-wheel drive jeeps slide almost out of control. Some of the poorest people in the world live here.

But as oppressed and impoverished as Cite Soleil is, and as unlikely an incubator for rebellion and armed resistance, it frightens the armed men who have commandeered control of Haitian life.

“Clearly,” one foreign official said, “what they are doing in Cite Soleil means they are afraid, that they feel weak. Otherwise, why do this?”

“The people seem to stand almost every degradation,” a human rights worker here said. “It seems to me their hope, what takes them past gut survival, is Aristide. They haven’t acted yet, but they could, and that’s what frightens Black.”

Herve Black is a 42-year-old, whip-thin man who heads FRAPH in Cite Soleil and is identified by U.N. officials as the head of an execution squad. Black, whose cold eyes never seem to change expression, spoke openly in an interview of being “a police informer for anti-gang”--a reference to the most ruthless of the uniformed police squads--and of leading “a technical committee” to root out Aristide followers.

Black and his committee are blamed for a January incident that established FRAPH as the most brutal civilian power here and also helps explain the strategy of the group’s military masters.

In a rare challenge to the army and its civilian wing, someone who was never identified killed a FRAPH organizer. The reaction was fast and sickening.

FRAPH members openly burned to the ground an area of Cite Soleil the size of four football fields. More than 3,000 people living in that area were driven out.

Despite such acts, FRAPH members exhibit an odd affinity for the very people they brutalize.

The meeting with Black, whose filthy clothes and rotted shoes are set off by a faux-gold necklace, two bracelets and a gold-colored watch, took place in a shack. He lives in Cite Carton, a mostly cardboard “city” within the larger slum of Cite Soleil.

His headquarters are a three-sided shack with walls and ceiling made of tin so bent and disintegrating that birds flew through it. The floor was festering mud.

“These FRAPH people don’t seem to be in it for the money or even the power,” Granderson said. “Just look at the way they live. I think many of them really believe they are saving the country.”

What separates Black from his followers is the automatic pistol clearly outlined in the back waistband of his pants. “There is no armed uprising because there are no arms,” one diplomat said.

There are people who want to mobilize and drive out FRAPH and the military, or who at least say they do. One is a 31-year-old former soldier who belonged to the army’s elite Palace Guard at the time Jean-Claude Duvalier was driven from power, but who grew disenchanted and joined Aristide’s followers.

In an interview, this Bible-carrying man, who begged not to be identified, told of his membership in an organization called MR-6, the initials standing for Revolutionary Movement and the “6” for the number of men in each of the group’s cells.

The organization sounds tougher than it is, even by this man’s account.

“We are organizing all over the country,” he said, “but it could take a long time. We’re not well organized, and we’re not well led. We don’t have any money, and almost no arms.”

He said his cell once had an Israeli-made assault rifle, a machine gun and several grenades. But a failed attack on a FRAPH office in February “put us on the run, and the guy with the assault rifle ran away and took it with him.”

According to a foreign official, the story underlines the military’s power and the weakness of Aristide’s followers.

“But at the same time, the fear the army and FRAPH has is justified,” he said.

“It won’t be an organized uprising, but one day a stray bullet is going to kill a baby, or an army truck is going to kill a woman trying to earn a dollar or just knock down her stand. Then (things) will explode, and I don’t think anything will stop it.”