Haiti Is Urged to End Revolt

A bloody revolt against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide spread to a dozen towns and cities Monday as his political opponents warned that the violence could spiral out of control unless Aristide stepped down.

The United Nations, United States and France -- the Caribbean island’s former colonial ruler -- expressed concern about the escalation of violence that has killed about four dozen Haitians in the last week.

The United States called on Aristide’s supporters and opponents to halt the deadly clashes. U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the U.S. told the Haitian government to respect human rights and urged it to negotiate a solution through two regional groups, the Caribbean Community, known as Caricom, and the Organization of American States.

Aristide’s government responded to the crisis by accusing rivals of trying to stage a coup d’etat.

The government scored a small victory Monday morning after sending police reinforcements to the port of St. Marc, where armed rebels had seized control a day earlier. Police recovered their burned-out headquarters in the city of 100,000 when a pro-government gang broke through roadblocks and fired on rebels until they fled.

Opponents blamed the government for the violence, saying Haitians have been driven to desperation by government repression and a decade of misrule by Aristide and his Lavalas Party. Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, with half its 8.5 million people malnourished and illiterate.

For weeks, opposition groups have staged demonstrations against Aristide, a former priest who was ousted in a coup but restored to power in 1994 by a U.S. military intervention. The revolt erupted Thursday when a formerly pro-Aristide group overran the police station in the coastal city of Gonaives.

Inspired by the gang’s success, Aristide opponents in St. Marc seized their city’s police station. More than a dozen officers were killed in the clashes.

The unrest spread Monday, with disgruntled Haitians taking encouragement from the Gonaives and St. Marc incidents to stage their own assaults on police stations -- seen here as symbols of Aristide’s power. In several cities, looting of schools and food warehouses followed attacks on the police. People fled their homes, carrying their few belongings.

Mainstream political opposition groups in Port-au-Prince, the capital, plan a massive demonstration Thursday with the apparent expectation that momentum to drive out Aristide will have built throughout the country and the government will be too overwhelmed by the myriad challenges to contain them.

The government is believed to have no more than 5,000 poorly equipped police officers. Haiti lacks a national army because Aristide disbanded the force that helped depose him in 1991.

“What is happening now is a general uprising,” said Charles Baker, a leader of the Group of 184 movement pressing for Aristide’s ouster and an interim government of national reconciliation. “People are tired of the situation they’ve been suffering for the past three years. They’re tired of the terrorism they’ve had to endure.”

Some, though, feared that the unrest could hurt the image of the opposition that has called for a peaceful transition.

“If some elements take advantage of the situation to commit crimes, that has to be condemned,” said Leopold Berlanger, a businessman and head of the Foundation for a New Haiti, one of the civil society groups urging Aristide to step down. “We have to condemn this because it is exactly because of the crimes of the government that we are in a revolt.”

Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, who made a brief visit to St. Marc after it was recaptured, denounced the unrest as part of a plot by opposition politicians to force the president to abandon the remaining two years of the term he won in 2000 when opposition groups boycotted the election to protest police abuse.

“What we are doing is to make sure that peace is reestablished. We are encouraging the police to get together with the population so that the cycle of violence can cease,” Neptune told reporters.

At the station, Neptune was flanked by six truckloads of security guards who had driven up from Port-au-Prince.

Sporadic violence against Aristide critics was also reported in the capital. The bullet-riddled corpses of four men with their hands bound with wire and their faces mutilated beyond recognition were found in the capital’s Cite Soleil slum, Radio Metropole reported.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that the world organization was following the crisis “very closely” and that it planned to step up its role in seeking a peaceful resolution. France also pledged to help.

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Times staff writers Carolyn Cole in St. Marc and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.