Haiti Police Hit Isolated Marchers : Caribbean: Officers attack demonstrators out of sight of GIs. Incident mars visit of Perry, Shalikashvili. General says U.S. not ready to provide blanket security.

With U.S. troops just a few blocks away, Haitian police reportedly attacked and detained a group of pro-democracy demonstrators in downtown Port-au-Prince on Saturday, marring the first visit to the U.S. forces here by Defense Secretary William J. Perry and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As hundreds of demonstrators marched through the streets in a show of support for exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, witnesses said, a group of police officers shot tear-gas canisters from the back of a pickup into the crowd. The witnesses said the officers took away at least five of the protesters.

The attacks came after the demonstrators were out of sight of U.S. troops at the city’s port and international airport. A U.S. military spokeswoman said that there were no U.S. personnel in the area and could not comment on or describe the incident.

And Perry, questioned later at the airport, said: “I have no indication that our troops saw that. I do not have that information.”

But he said “that U.S. troops can and should take action if the situation warrants” in cases where they encounter police attacks on Haitians.

Also speaking to reporters at the airport, Shalikashvili said that U.S. troops will intervene to stop Haitian-against-Haitian violence when possible but are not yet in a position to provide security coverage for the entire country.

Other military officials noted that they have only about 500 U.S. military police in Haiti; while another 500 are scheduled to arrive soon, military officials say they now must limit their security patrols to areas of the city where American facilities are located.

“We are still moving out” into the country, Shalikashvili said, “and when we do see violence, we will take action.”

The issue of continuing Haitian-on-Haitian violence has posed the most serious political problem for U.S. commanders here and in Washington since American forces first landed Monday.

The killing Tuesday of a pro-democracy demonstrator by Haitian police within sight of U.S. soldiers guarding the port prompted a controversy over the rules of engagement for U.S. troops here, as well as over the agreement reached by the Clinton Administration and the military dictators that allows the leaders to stay in power until Oct. 15.

While U.S. troops have disarmed the most powerful units of the Haitian army and American commanders have ordered Haitian leaders to stop all acts of violence against the Haitian people, lightly armed Haitian police and other paramilitary forces loyal to the military junta are still in place.

The Haitian police are hardly visible on the streets near U.S. troops, but many Haitians on the streets of Port-au-Prince insisted Saturday that paramilitary groups and police are still harassing them in neighborhoods not yet patrolled by U.S. military police.

The paramilitary groups “still (give) us problems,” said Louis Amonnon, who was waiting in a U.S. government office downtown Saturday afternoon to ask American officials to start military police patrols of his neighborhood. “There are no American patrols there, and the (paramilitary groups) come every day,” he said.

“They should have more American patrols; (the Haitian) police are still out there,” said Frantz Valcaint, a pro-Aristide demonstrator who saw the police attack Saturday.

President Clinton, in his weekly radio address, confirmed reports that U.S. forces have begun not only to confiscate heavy weapons controlled by the Haitian military but also to buy back light weapons from the paramilitary groups and civilians. Many Aristide supporters had warned that without some effort to disarm Haiti’s paramilitary attaches and other backers of the Haitian military, civil unrest will erupt soon after U.S. forces leave.

Perry and Shalikashvili arrived in Haiti on Saturday morning and conducted a quick tour of U.S. forces in the Port-au-Prince area and in the northern region of the country, and also received briefings from senior U.S. commanders here.

Perry said that while U.S. Lt. Gen. Hugh Shelton has been meeting with Haitian leader Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the meetings are not “ ‘negotiations’ about Cedras’ status.”

The issue of whether the military leader will have to leave the country after he gives up power Oct. 15 has been one of the main sticking points of the last-minute agreement hammered out between the Haitian leaders and an American team of negotiators led by former President Jimmy Carter. That accord averted a U.S. military invasion just hours before it was scheduled to begin and led to the awkward status of coexistence between U.S. forces and the military junta they were supposed to evict.

Perry insisted that while the Carter agreement “did not demand that he (Cedras) leave the country, we believe he should and will.”

Aristide has not yet fully endorsed that agreement, but U.S. officials still expect him to return to Haiti from his U.S. exile soon after Oct. 15 in order to reinstall his government. But U.S. officials and Haitians alike continued to debate whether the priest-turned-politician will be able to unify Haiti’s deeply divided society in time to avert a return to chaos and bloodshed.

Speaking on CNN’s “Newsmaker Saturday,” Aristide critic Raymond Joseph, editor of the newspaper Haiti Observateur, called the ousted Haitian president “a man who sends double messages. . . . I don’t know whether he’s not having a special message for Americans and another for his people.”

But Father Gerard Jean-Juste, an Aristide supporter and a member of the ousted government, told CNN, “The rejoicing will be peaceful” when Aristide returns to Haiti. Declaring that Aristide is ready to reach out to affluent Haitians who have not supported him in the past, Jean-Juste said, “We need skilled Haitians, talented Haitians, from all walks of life to come together and work.”

During his visit, Perry refused to say how long U.S. troops will remain in Haiti. He noted that the Clinton Administration has “set the end conditions” that it wants to achieve in Haiti, but “we have not set the end date.”

But in his radio address, Clinton repeated assurances that U.S. forces will not stay long in Haiti.

“Our mission . . . is limited,” Clinton said. “We must remember, as I plan to tell the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, that it is up to the people in those countries, ultimately, to ensure their own freedom.”

Perry and Shalikashvili noted that small units of the multinational force now being trained to take over many functions in the Haiti operation should begin arriving in the next week or two, with a larger buildup later in October and in November.

Overall, Perry and Shalikashvili said they were pleased with the progress of the Haiti operation, but the Joint Chiefs chairman cautioned against overconfidence.

“The first five or six days have gone extremely well, but that’s just the first five or six days,” he said. “As a rule, we have to expect the worst and plan for the worst.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this report from Washington.