Haitian Rebel Leader’s Agenda Is as Murky as His Past

The self-proclaimed leader of the armed rebels in control of most of Haiti will celebrate his 36th birthday today and wants this capital as a gift.

Guy Philippe has a boyish face, a winning smile, a cocky demeanor and a record of duplicity that terrifies both supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the political opposition waiting for the rebels to depose the president.

But in his stronghold in Cap Haitien, the country’s second-largest city that fell to his gunmen with little resistance Feb. 22, Philippe told Associated Press that Port-au-Prince “would be very hard to take.... It would be a lot of fighting, a lot of death.”

Philippe returned to Haiti two weeks ago, infiltrating from the Dominican Republic, where he had fled after being accused of plotting a coup against the government in 2000. At the time, he was the No. 2 official in the strategic Northern Department, the province surrounding Cap Haitien, and a trusted cog in the wheel of state that seldom has turned smoothly in Haiti.

He was an officer in the Haitian National Army when it ousted Aristide in a 1991 coup. But Philippe has denied involvement in the putsch that sent the former priest, whom many Haitians saw as a political savior, into exile just seven months after he took office.

Philippe has explained his insurrection strategy in interviews with Haitian and foreign journalists from his base at the Mont Joli Hotel in the hometown he affectionately refers to as “the Cap.” But neither his motives nor his means are apparent.

Government officials here have accused him of drug trafficking, a charge Philippe denies, though he has yet to account for how he supported himself in exile or his military contingent since it returned.

Clad in camouflage and directing his rebellion from poolside, Philippe on Saturday grabbed at a face-saving chance to call off his promised march on the capital, saying he had learned from the Internet that Washington was against it.

“I heard the United States asked our men to stop their advance on Port-au-Prince,” Philippe told Associated Press. “It’s on the news, on the Net.”

Although comfortable in cyberspace, the rebel leader has cut telephone and cellular communications between the northern half of Haiti, which he controls, and the capital -- possibly to mask his location and those of other fighters being tracked by the government.

Philippe and other rebel commanders say they want nothing more than to force out Aristide and rebuild the army the president disbanded nine years ago. But Philippe’s return in the company of several figures from previous dictatorships has cast doubt on his credibility.

Among those accompanying Philippe into the country was Louis Jodel Chamblain, a former army sergeant accused of participating in political massacres during the three years Aristide was in exile.

The 50-year-old Chamblain was also a co-founder of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, known by its French acronym as FRAPH -- a phonetic equivalent of the word “hit.” The paramilitary group killed hundreds of Aristide supporters during the junta’s rule. Chamblain also has been identified as leader of a death squad under Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the dictator forced into exile in 1986.

From his base at the Mont Joli, Philippe has told visiting journalists that he would order his followers to lay down their weapons as soon as Aristide resigned and would cooperate with whatever transitional government succeeded him.

Opposition leaders say they have no choice but to take him at his word, though some concede privately that they are deeply uncomfortable relying on the alleged coup-plotter to bow out without conditions.

The spearhead of the insurrection has insisted since joining the rebellion that he supports democracy, not another junta. Soldiers, Philippe says, “should stay in the barracks.”

He has bragged of having as many as 5,000 fighters, though no more than a few hundred have been seen in the towns and cities the rebels have rolled over in the last few weeks. His retreat from threats to take the capital by today also suggested those numbers were inflated.

Philippe and Chamblain reportedly crossed from the Dominican Republic with about 20 other exiled soldiers. They were part of the military Aristide disbanded three months after returning to Haiti in 1994 with a U.S. intervention force of 20,000 troops that reinstalled him in office.

Shortly after the army was disbanded, Philippe moved to Ecuador where he studied at an elite police academy, then returned to Haiti. Former President Rene Preval, an Aristide ally who served as head of state for the five years in which Aristide was constitutionally ineligible, appointed Philippe as his security chief. Preval later made him police chief in Cap Haitien. Philippe was accused of plotting a coup against Preval in 2000 and fled to the Dominican Republic to escape retribution.

How Philippe and the armed rebels who first launched the insurgency against Aristide came together is unclear. The rebellion was started Feb. 5 in Gonaives by a gang known as the Cannibal Army that Aristide had armed and deployed to menace political opponents during the tainted May 2000 parliamentary election campaign.

The gang’s leader was assassinated in September, reportedly on Aristide’s orders, unleashing protests and attacks that escalated into an uprising three weeks ago. Within a week, the former regime military figures had joined them in Gonaives and helped spread the rebellion to most of the other major towns and cities north of the capital.

On Friday, word reached here that three key cities in the south -- previously an Aristide stronghold -- had fallen after sympathetic militants attacked the police stations. Police, who are the only government armed forces left in the country, have deserted in droves as rebels march against them.

Aristide has conceded that the force of 5,000 has dwindled to fewer than 4,000, mostly in the capital. They have been conspicuously absent from their posts and patrols since pro-Aristide fighters erected flaming barricades to block Philippe’s threatened attack.

Having instigated random violence by Aristide gunmen with his boast of sweeping out the pro-government rabble in a few hours, Philippe on Friday toned down his rhetoric, noting the hundreds of armed and rampaging defenders of the president might not be so easily defeated.

Despite his alleged role in previous coups, Philippe and his ragged band of rebels have been cheered by townspeople as they have swept across the north, prompting the chief gunman to call his actions a campaign for national “liberation.”