US military systematically search for and seize weapons in Haiti 12 Oct 94.

WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said Wednesday he expected a ``beautiful'' day Saturday when he returns after three years in exile but called for continued disarming of ``thugs'' to avoid violence.

``In 1991, Haiti was celebrating peace and democracy; it was a beautiful day,'' Aristide told reporters, referring to the seven-month period when he served as president. ``... The same way, Saturday will be beautiful.''

He said later he was ``confident'' concerns about his personal security could be addressed, but did not elaborate.

Later, in an interview on the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour television program, Aristide said the biggest problem he faces on return was disarming ``thugs'' and called for continuation of disarmament by U.S. troops.

``If we continue this process of disarming the thugs peacefully, we'll see how beautiful the Haitian people will answer,'' Aristide said.''

He said if the weapons stay in opponents' hands, there will be violence and insisted Haiti is a non-violent country. Earlier, in his talk with reporters, Aristide had kind words for U.S. troops now policing Haiti with forces of the deposed military regime headed by Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras.

``It's clear what the troops are doing there, they are disarming people, preventing people from moving to violence and with them we will continue creating that kind of peace,'' he said.

``Clearly that means no to violence, no to vengeance, moving toward reconciliation ... (and) establishing a judicial system.''

Aristide's comments were made at a news conference at which he accepted the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award on behalf of the Haitian people.

The award was given to honor Guy Malary, who was Haiti's justice minister when he was assassinated on October 14, 1993.

The award, a bust of the late Robert F. Kennedy, was presented by Kennedy's widow, Ethel, and her daughter, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- American GIs may not have been happy to come to Haiti, but now many don't want to leave. And no wonder: They have been greeted as conquering heroes, hailed and cheered wherever they go.

The commander of U.S. forces in Haiti has opposed an early, congressionally mandated deadline. ``There's no plan to leave this job half done,'' Lt. Gen. Hugh Shelton said Friday.

One reason Shelton's troops may agree is that the mission, which was murky in its first days, has become clearer. American patrols have spread through the capital and leapfrogged about the countryside, reassuring Haitians, attempting (with limited success) to round up weapons, and arresting some of the more brazen attaches.

They also have made clear that they will not stand idly by and permit brutality by Haitian soldiers or police. In recent days, the Americans say they have experienced few problems with the Haitian military.

PETIONVILLE, Haiti (AP) -- Helicopters whirred overhead and thousands of poor Haitians cheered from both sides of the dry gulch. At the bottom of a tiny corn field, the Americans had just arrested the terror of the neighborhood.

``Kill him!'' some shouted, picking up rocks. ``He won't kill anymore!''

U.S. soldiers Wednesday had been on a routine arms search in the residential quarter of Nerette, where houses of the relatively well-off line the ridge road above the cinderblock houses of squatters.

But the people demanded they arrest ``Ti-Samuel,'' the Creole name for Samuel Chery, who had ridden night patrols with police since the army ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991.

They told horror stories of the beatings he administered in this predominantly pro-Aristide neighborhood.

``If they don't get him, he'll kill us,'' said Eliseo Cyprian, 30, a parliament building security guard who lives in the area.

Soldiers captured the 35-year-old Chery in front of his house without a fight. He denied the charges, saying of his neighbors, ``They're all a bunch of lying thieves.''

But residents told another story.

In October 1993, before the failure of a U.N.-brokered plan to bring Aristide back, Chery dressed in a cast-off army uniform and, armed with grenades and assault weapons, drove hundreds of his neighbors to seek refuge in the provinces.

``He has killed a lot of people. He has got to be judged,'' Benito Max, 37, a neighborhood delegate of the pro-Aristide National Front for Change and Democracy, told The Associated Press. On June 24, 1992, Chery and seven other police auxiliaries had arrested Max and beat him with cudgels.

``He said he was beating me because we Aristide supporters had made his people lose power,'' said Max.

``Ti-Samuel'' used to taxi people up and down the road by motorcycle, sounding out his passengers for pro-Aristide sentiment. Often he stopped in the middle of the road to beat up a pedestrian.

Before U.S. soldiers landed Sept. 19, he publicly said he would kill any Aristide supporters he found in his way.

On Wednesday, Chery claimed he had handed in his rifle and pistol to the local police Monday and had only a machete left. But U.S. soldiers, with the help of specially trained dogs, found several grenades buried in his yard, and arrested him.

``There are a lot of happy Haitians today,'' said Lt. Col. Ed Sullivan, who led the operation. He wouldn't say where Chery was to be detained.

As Chery was shoved into a Humvee and driven up the slope, hundreds of cheering Haitians clapped and waved green branches. Some hugged and kissed the Americans they called their ``liberators.''

After the soldiers left, the people ransacked Chery's house and destroyed all the property inside.

Chery is one of four notorious army-allied civilian attaches in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, and the first to be arrested. There are thousands of attaches nationwide.

Also Wednesday, 25 Army Special Forces troops raided the isolated northeastern village of Fort-Liberte, where townspeople had said many army-backed gunmen had fled in recent weeks.

The soldiers descended before dawn in a Humvee and a white truck commandeered from the Haitian army and took over the crumbling military barracks without firing a shot. They found 50 to 60 rifles, mostly semi-automatic and in bad repair.

Townspeople stood at each end of the paved block, cheering and beating on yellow plastic buckets.

There were signs the American arrival was not a surprise. Reporters were told Tuesday that there were 60 to 70 soldiers in the town, but only 17 were present when U.S. troops arrived.

Officers said they had intelligence information about Belgian and Israeli assault rifles being stored in the village, but didn't find any.

Searches of houses of allegedly armed military attaches during the early hours of the operation turned up just one knife, and only six people were detained.

Capt. Mike Gallante told the Haitian troops, who stood in formation outside their barracks, ``The goal is to get the Haitian military to work with the people and for the people.''

He told them the Americans would work with the army to make it more professional and sensitive to civil rights. The Americans then left.

About an hour later, a squad of blue-uniformed Haitian police appeared on the scene and began rounding up citizens. The policemen left when U.S. soldiers returned.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- A demoralized Haitian army, trained to fight U.S. troops to the death, is rapidly disintegrating and struggling to respond to humiliation by American troops.

The first weekend, U.S. Marines in Cap-Haitien opened fire on Haitian soldiers, killing 10. One of the Haitians had made a ``threatening gesture'' during an anti-army demonstration in front of a police station, Washington said.

Haitian police could not even fire a parting salute to the dead men; they had already been disarmed.

The Americans also disarmed Haiti's navy and arrested several key private militia leaders allied to Haiti's army.

And they handcuffed Haitian police outside a militia headquarters on Monday, taping their mouths shut and keeping their faces to the ground as thousands of ordinary Haitians taunted them.

UN troops alarmed that forces unfriendly to UN chosen gov't are armed

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- With one coup leader in exile, ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide appears a step closer to returning to power.

Aristide pledged in a speech before the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday to return by Oct. 15 and called for reconciliation among Haitians.

``We say yes to reconciliation, no to violence, no to vengeance ... yes to justice,'' said Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest who is Haiti's first democratically elected president. He was ousted in a 1991 coup.

In what could be another promising sign, a feared paramilitary leader Tuesday claimed a conversion to pacifism.

Emmanuel Constant, leader of the paramilitary group the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, which has tortured and killed pro-democracy activists, urged Haitians ``on every side'' to put down their weapons and renounce violence.

But Constant's sincerity was in doubt: FRAPH is considered responsible for much of the terror waged in Haiti over the past year. And violence on Tuesday showed Aristide's peaceful resumption of power is far from assured.

On Monday, U.S. troops stormed the FRAPH headquarters in downtown Port-au-Prince and arrested more than two dozen members.

But with thousands of weapons still reportedly in the hands of FRAPH members and other extremists and some Haitians thirsting for revenge, the potential for violence remains high.

Inside police headquarters, Francois' temporary replacement, Maj. Marc Kernizan, met with former New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who will be leading a 1,000-member group of international police force to train and monitor the Haitian police force.

6 Oct 94.

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuter) - Alan Francillon loaded a 12-gauge pump shotgun, eyed the crowd of hungry Haitians gathering outside his food warehouse and said he was baffled why American soldiers were not protecting private property from looters.

``If they come again, I'll shoot to kill,'' he said. ``I'll die here if necessary, but I'm not going to lose any more goods.''

As the military state that protected them crumbles, members of Haiti's wealthy elite have taken up arms themselves to defend their wealth from the angry poor masses emboldened by the presence of U.S. troops.

Francillon, 34, a business graduate of Boston's Northeastern Univeristy, opened fire on a crowd that advanced on his food import business Thursday before dawn, killing one person and wounded four others.

After looters smashed through a wall Monday and dragged off thousands of dollars worth of sugar and powdered milk, Francillon put on a bandolier of ammunition and barricaded himself inside the depot with relatives and employees armed with nine millimeter pistols and six 12-gauge shotguns.

Frenzied crowds have pillaged neighboring food warehouses since American forces landed in the hemisphere's poorest nation over two weeks ago to restore democracy and reinstate exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Last week, private security guards at his uncle Rudy Chemaly's food depot near the Cite Soleil shanty town open fire on a crowd of slum dwellers that begun climbing the walls, injuring nine people including three children.

As the angry crowd turned to exchange friendly waves with U.S. soldiers who drove by in a convoy of jeeps and tanks, a nervous Francillon said American military police had inspected his warehouse for illegal guns and then left.

``Americans feel that Haiti's elite is morally repugnant and they don't care too much what happens to us,'' said Francillon's cousin Greg Batroni. ``Some of us have really worked for our money, but the Americans think that anyone with money here is a dirt bag.''

Wealthy Haitians see Aristide, a Catholic priest loved by Haiti's poor, as a vindictive rabble rouser who will stir up violence against them when he returns October 15, three years after he was deposed in a military coup.

Their worst fears are a return to the months of ransacking and house burnings that followed the fall of Jean-Claude ``Baby Doc'' Duvalier, who fled a popular uprising in 1986, ending a 37-year family dictatorship.

``There was a lot of looting...our depots were ransacked and we lost our businesses,'' Batroni said. ``We won't let it happen this time.''

Some like Francillon are perplexed that the world's champion of capitalism, instead of protecting Haitian businessmen, has sent troops with sniffer dogs to search their homes for weapons caches and raided the offices of Haiti's main paramilitary group, the FRAPH, arresting more than 100 of its members.

Elite members complained that U.S. soldiers had publicly humiliated Haiti's uniformed police by disarming officers at gunpoint, forcing them to the ground and detaining them gagged and handcuffed to the cheers of Aristide supporters.

They believe the police is in disarray and can no longer control Haiti's masses, so American soldiers should protect them.

Port-au-Prince's feared police chief, Colonel Michel Francois, blamed for running a network of armed gunmen known as ``attaches'' responsible for many of the 3,000 deaths under the military government, fled across the border to the Dominican Republic Tuesday.

``A lot of people are very frightened of the mob,'' said a flower planter whose business of exporting anthuriums to New York has been paralyzed by a U.N.-sanctioned embargo against Haiti's outgoing military regime.

He said looting would snowball if Aristide failed to control his supporters when he returns next week.

``From Day One, Aristide has to pacify the country and reassure people, or else Haiti will slip over the precipice of violence,'' said the businessman, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals.

``In Haiti, people believe authority is a gun.''

13 Oct 94.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuter) - Factions of Haiti's paramilitary network are likely to persist in their resistance to democracy, and some elements are in hiding, the commander of U.S. forces in Haiti said Thursday.

``I still am concerned that there are various elements, several factions that don't necessarily want to see democracy succeed,'' Lt. Gen. Hugh Shelton said in an interview.

Those elements, he said, ``will continue for an interim period of time -- until we can get a professionalized police force established -- to attempt to interfere with the functioning of the government.''

He also said he did not believe there was a ``substantial collective threat'' to the 19,000 American troops in Haiti. ''But I can't make light of the fact that this country has a lot of weapons in it,'' he said.

Haiti's repressive military regime, which ended with the resignation Monday of army commander Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, operated through a network of paramilitary supporters and a police force controlled by the army.

In addition to the U.S. forcing of Cedras's resignation and his subsequent flight into exile Thursday, the U.S. military operation in Haiti has broken up the leadership of the paramilitary organization FRAPH (Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti) and confiscated or bought back more than 6,000 weapons.

Shelton said some Haitian police, which have operated under military control, had fled into hiding in outlying areas of the country, particularly in the second largest city of Cap Haitien and the southern coastal town of Les Cayes.

``(Haitian defense force) police basically fled, or have gone into hiding,'' in those areas, he said.

That has left the U.S. military as the only provider of security in some places. The military and international police monitoring team are both attempting to increase their presence in the abandoned areas, he said.

Despite the concerns, Shelton said he was confident exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide would return in safety to Haiti Saturday.

``I think we're in good shape to bring him back right now,'' Shelton said. Thousands of American and Haitian army troops -- virtually every soldier in the Port-au-Prince area, would take part in the security effort, he said.

The army's acting commander-in-chief, Maj. Gen. Jean- Claude Duperval, had given promising indications of a desire to reshape the army, Shelton said.

He said Duperval indicated in his speech upon taking over Monday that human rights abuses and crimes would not be tolerated.

Deperval, he said, is very much aware that the army ``has been associated with this in the past and very much wants to change that image'' and change its actions.

Shelton said he anticipated Haiti will eventually ask the United States or United Nations for assistance in retraining the army. ``I would think that just like we're helping train the police force, ultimately someone -- either the United Nations or maybe the U.S. as a part of the United Nations, would provide some assistance in that regard,'' he said.

He said it was unclear whether any assistance for weapons procurement would be requested or granted.

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