42 dead after Haitian rebels uprising

At least two men were shot and another was allegedly shot and killed by Aristide supporters.

His body was left on a roadside.

“The national police force alone cannot re-establish order,” prime minister Yvon Neptune told The Associated Press in St Marc on the first visit to any of the affected towns by a senior government official.

“The violence is tied to a coup d’etat,” he said the day before.

In Port-au-Prince, a coalition opposition political parties met to discuss whether they should join the rebels. By last night, they had distanced themselves from the uprising.

“We do not recognise ourselves in the armed insurrection but in the peaceful struggle of the people for democracy,” said Mischa Gaillard, an opposition politician who met others in the Democratic Platform. “We deplore violence.”

The uprising, which began on Thursday in Haiti’s fourth-largest city of Gonaives, signals a dangerous turning point in Haiti’s three-year political crisis.

A similar revolt in 1985 also began in Gonaives and led to the ousting the following year of the 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship.

“We are in a situation of armed popular insurrection,” said opposition politician Himler Rebu, who led a failed coup against Lt Gen Prosper Avril in 1989.

Tension has mounted since Aristide’s party won flawed legislative elections in 2000 and international donors blocked millions of dollars in aid.

Misery has also deepened with most of the nation’s eight million people living without jobs and on less than one dollar a day despite election promises from Aristide, a former priest who had vowed to bring dignity to the poor.

With no army and fewer than 5,000 poorly armed police, the government is ill-equipped to halt the revolt.

Police stations have been a major target because they symbolise Aristide’s authority and officers are accused of siding with government supporters.

Since capturing Gonaives, a city of 200,000 people, the rebels have spread to towns to the west and north, including the Artibonite valley that is the breadbasket of Haiti.

Some residents fled western Grand-Goave with belongings perched on their heads Monday, the day after rebels torched the police station.

Rebels also set ablaze stations in the northern towns of St Raphael and Dondon, where police launched counter-attacks and wounded two rebels, according to Radio Vision 2000.

It reported that police in Dondon put the rebels to flight, and that afterward government supporters torched houses of nine anti-Aristide leaders.

On the highway near Grand-Goave, police fired into the air to disperse a large crowd of clashing protesters who were for and against the government.

One man, identified as an Aristide partisan, was shot dead but it was not clear by who.

The United States condemned the violence and called on Aristide’s government to respect human rights.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Haiti’s problems would not be solved by violence and retribution.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the UN “will be stepping up our own involvement fairly soon”, but did not elaborate.

The rebels are led by several factions, including former Aristide supporters, former soldiers who helped oust Aristide in a 1991 coup and civilians frustrated by deepening poverty.

Aristide won Haiti’s first democratic election in 1990 and was then ousted months later by the army.

He was restored in a 1994 US invasion, and disbanded the army three months later.