Tue Feb 17, 8:43 AM ET
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - Haiti's contested President Jean Bertrand Aristide has appealed for international help to contain a 12-day-old uprising on the Caribbean island state after armed rebels seeking his ouster took control of another town and killed the district police chief.
AFP Photo
Slideshow: Haiti Uprising
�
In Paris, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said that France, with overseas territories in the Caribbean and South America, was in a position to rapidly deploy resources to Haiti, and several other countries were also ready to act. He said a French government crisis unit on the situation would meet Tuesday, and that a UN-sponsored humanitarian mission had been sent to Haiti. "We have important assets close to Haiti ... we have skills in the field of humanitarian interventions," said De Villepin.
"That is what we want to make available when the time comes." He also voiced concern that the crisis could lead to a partition of the poverty-stricken country, whose capital in the south has so far been spared violence despite an anti-government protest Sunday by some 1,000 people. Haiti has been racked by turmoil for more than two decades since the end of the dreaded Duvalier dictatorships that ruled Haiti with terror and plundered its riches.
Aristide's democratic election in 1990 brought hope, but he was quickly overthrown then returned to power for a year in 1994 with the help of US troops. He won a new five-year term in 2000 but the poll was boycotted by the opposition, which accuses him of corruption and mismanagement, and tainted by fraud charges.
Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest who has dismissed the allegations and refused to step down, vowed again to finish his term, in an interview that appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday. "I will leave office February 7, 2006. ... What we are doing now is preventing bloodshed," he said. At the presidential palace, Aristide he told reporters he was rallying support for an international police force to deploy under the banner of the Organization of American States in what he called "a fight against terrorism."
The Dominican Republic, Haiti's neighbor sharing half the island that lies just east of Cuba, also urged international help. The Dominican Republic closed its border with Haiti on Monday after nearby Hinche, a town of 87,000 that lies 130 kilometers (80 miles) northeast of the capital, fell to armed rebels.
Three people, including police chief Jonas Maxime and his bodyguard, were slain in the attack on the police station, local radio reports and residents said. The radio said the assault was led by Louis Jodel Chamblain, a feared paramilitary leader under Raoul Cedras, the man who ousted Aristide in 1991 then ruled as military dicatator until the US intervention. �
State Secretary for Communications Mario Dupuy said the offensive was carried out by about 40 former members of the military. Amid the spreading violence, rebels are apparently divided. "There are two opposition factions -- one committed to the rule of law, which we belong to, and the other violent, which we don't approve of," one rebel leader Serge Gilles told AFP.
The United States said it would keep working within multilateral institutions to restore human rights and the "rule of law as called for in the Organization of American States resolutions," said White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan.
The European Union (news - web sites) meanwhile urged groups to refrain from violence and Aristide to implement a peace plan promoted by the 15-nation Caribbean community, Caricom, which calls for him to allow opposition marches, disarm pro-government militants and reform the police force. In Geneva, the UN refugee agency on Tuesday urged Haiti's neighbors to take in anyone fleeing the unrest, saying it had contingency plans under way, including a team in Cuba, should the situation deteriorate further.
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state."
- Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister
