Caribbean Leaders, Haitian Opposition Are to Meet

Top officials from several Caribbean nations will meet with Haitian opposition leaders next week to try to resolve Haiti’s increasingly tense political stalemate, Trinidad and Tobago’s foreign minister said Thursday.

“We are hoping that we will be able to persuade the opposition to shift from their very hard-line stance, namely that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide must go before anything moves forward again in Haiti,” Foreign Minister Knowlson Gift said.

He said Haiti’s opposition leaders had agreed to meet Wednesday in Nassau, the Bahamian capital, with the prime ministers of Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, Jamaica and St. Lucia. The meeting was organized by the Caribbean Community regional bloc.

Several people have been killed in recent months in Haiti as increasingly large anti-government marches have been attacked by pro-Aristide gunmen.

Aristide was hugely popular when he became Haiti’s first democratically elected leader in 1991. He was deposed soon afterward but restored to power by a U.S.-led invasion after three years in exile.

He was reelected in 2000, but his popularity has waned because of allegations that his party committed fraud in that election and because of accusations of corruption and violence.