Haiti interim president sworn in
Haiti’s interim president was solemnly sworn in as ousted leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide restated his claim from his faraway African asylum to be the country’s true leader.
Boniface Alexandre took the oath of office yesterday in a room of the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, the capital, where he urged the increasingly chaotic Caribbean country to remain calm.
Aristide’s supporters could be heard at the palace gates in the distance shouting demands for his return.
“Aristide or death!” the ousted president’s followers yelled.
Alexandre, who has served as president for a week, said: “We are all brothers and sisters. We are all in the same boat, and if it sinks, it sinks with all of us.”
Military helicopters circled overhead and United States marines in armoured cars patrolled the streets around the palace where Aristide’s followers declared: “Like it or not, Aristide must come back.”
Aristide, who arrived on March 1 in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic aboard a plane chartered by the US government, said today: “I am the democratically elected president and I remain so. I plead for the restoration of democracy.
“We appeal for a peaceful resistance.”
He claimed his February 29 departure was a “political kidnapping (that) unfortunately opened the road to an occupation”.
US marines and French legionnaires began arriving on the same day to form the vanguard of a United Nations force to restore peace in Haiti, where a month-long rebellion left more than 130 dead and where reprisal killings continue.
Inside the palace, Alexandre, the country’s Supreme Court chief justice, urged people “to keep calm. No one has the right to do justice by themselves.”
Yesterday’s pro-Aristide protest was mostly peaceful, a sharp contrast to the massive anti-Aristide protest on Sunday on which gunmen opened fire, killing at least five people, including a foreign journalist.
A sixth victim died overnight, doctors at Canape Vert Hospital said.
US marines said they shot one gunman at Sunday’s demonstration, raising the toll to seven. “He had a gun and he was shooting at Marines,” Colonel Charles Gurganus said.
The violence was the worst bloodshed since Aristide fled. It prompted the first armed action by the marines and led both opponents and supporters of Aristide to threaten their own armed action, damaging efforts to reach a frail peace.
Chief rebel leader Guy Philippe said Sunday’s attack would not have happened if his men had not been asked to lay down their arms.
Yesterday he warned he would “reunite my men and take up arms” if the peacekeepers did not disarm military Aristide loyalists blamed for Sunday’s attack.
