Chaos continue in Haiti, Aristide vows to come back

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, March 06, 2004

Chaos continue in Haiti, Aristide vows to come back

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Supporters of Haiti's exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide ransacked a container port in Port-au-Prince late Thursday as United States and French patrols try to enforce an overnight curfew in the Haitian capital that hasbeen in anarchy for more than five days.

Reports reaching here quoted an official of the huge Haiti Terminal, which handles 35 percent of the country's container imports, as calling the looting a "disaster."

"We have to act quickly to save what's left of the containers before the catastrophe is total," Georges Romain said.

The port's warehouses, holding an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 containers, were the main target as of late Thursday.

"The area must be quickly secured by a military force of Americans, French or Haitian National Police," said Romain.

On Thursday, residents of the capital converged on banks which were open for the first time in two weeks. Sporadic gunfire still echoed in parts of the city.

But the city was relatively calm after days of chaos marked by killing, arson and looting sprees that left a shoulder-high pile of decomposing bodies stacked in the main morgue.

An exact death toll from the violence was yet impossible to determine.

The US said it expected Haitian police to handle looting and disorder in Port-au-Prince and that the 1,000 US Marines in the capital would play a supporting role.

"We are going to support the Haitian police, who are handling that very well right now," Brigadier General David Rodriguez of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in Washington.

Earlier, Aristide, who is currently in exile in the Central Africa Republic, had repeatedly accused France and the United States of ousting him in a coup d'etat and complained that he had been the victim of a "political kidnapping" and was forced out at gunpoint.

In a phone conversation with a French writer in Paris, Aristidesaid he planned to go back to his impoverished Caribbean country, insisting he had not officially resigned.

"There is a document that was signed to avoid a bloodbath but there was no formal resignation. This political kidnapping was theprice to pay to avoid a bloodbath," he said.

He said he was forced to sign the resignation letter and that he still thinks himself as the president of Haiti and plans to go back.

In another development, the Caribbean Community, formed by 15 Caribbean nations including Haiti, also called on Wednesday for aninternational inquiry into the circumstances of Aristide's exile.

But US officials have called Aristide's charge nonsense and said they provided a plane to ferry him to safety after he voluntarily resigned to prevent a bloody showdown with the rebels controlling much of his country.

"There is nothing to investigate," said US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher on Thursday. "We do not encourage nor believe there is any need for an investigation. There was no kidnapping. There was no coup. There were no threats."

Aristide was reportedly expected to travel on from Central Africa to South Africa. But he said any trip to South Africa wouldonly be a step in a journey back to Haiti.

"I'm not the kind of person to stay in exile... If I have to make a stopover in South Africa, I will -- before going back home," he said in Bangui, capital of Central Africa.

Source: Xinhua

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