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Insane
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Finally, the truth comes out!
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Cap-Haitien, Haiti -- In just three weeks, the National Resistance Front, the rebel group that is threatening to topple the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has swept through northern Haiti with ease.
Last week, it captured several more towns without facing down a single bullet and is now within miles of the capital, Port-au-Prince. As word of the rebel approach reaches towns, Haitian police officers are simply shedding their uniforms and disappearing into the hills.
Yet the insurgents' swift victories and rising popularity may have more to do with their bravado and the reputations of their leaders than with military prowess. Western diplomatic sources estimate their numbers at no more than a few hundred men, even with the new volunteers in Cap-Haitien and in villages, but the rebel commanders have well-known checkered pasts as army and police officers, drug traffickers and death squad leaders.
"The people are happy," the Front's nominal leader, Guy Philippe, told reporters last week as he listened from the balcony of a plush hillside hotel headquarters in Cap-Haitien to a group of people in the shantytowns below singing. "Here in Cap-Haitien, we have more than 100 young people ready to die for the cause, ready to die for the country."
Philippe is a former army lieutenant and police captain. The front's second in command, Gilberto Dragon, is a former military officer and police major. They trained in Ecuador together and both are cited in numerous Haitian government and diplomatic reports for their involvement in drug trafficking and racketeering.
The Front's strongman, Louis Jodel Chamblain, is a former army officer who later headed the Front for the Advancement of the Haitian People or FRAPH, a paramilitary organization responsible for thousands of murders of Aristide followers in the early 1990s.
Other former FRAPH members, including Jean-Pierre Baptiste, alias Jean Tatoune, have also joined the insurgency. Baptiste and Chamblain were convicted in absentia for massacring 25 Aristide supporters in a seaside slum known as Raboteau in the northern city of Gonaives in 1994. In 1995, Chamblain fled the country and has been residing in the neighboring Dominican Republic ever since. Baptiste was sent to prison for life for his role in the murder of Aristide supporters. He joined the revolt after former Aristide loyalists broke him out of a Gonaives jail in 2002.
Early on Saturday, the capital remained relatively calm, despite a burst of bloody chaos the previous day. Aristide, appearing on national television, called for an end to the bedlam, saying "looting is bad." He also urged the government's 46,000 employees to go back to work on Monday and called for schools to reopen.
Pro-Aristide armed gangs were still out in force in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, but so were more police, although their numbers were still small.
Cap-Haitien, the country's second largest city, fell into rebel hands in a matter of hours last Sunday. Philippe is promising the capital will be next, although he said Saturday that his troops would hold off for now, in response to U.S. Ambassador James Foley's appeal for peace.
"We always give peace a chance here, so we'll wait to see for one or two days," Philippe said in Cap-Haitien. "We will keep on sending troops, but we won't attack Port-au-Prince until we understand what the U.S. means."
So far, about 100 people, about half of them from the poorly equipped police force that is the government's only defense, have died in the insurgency against Aristide, a former priest who became Haiti's first freely elected president in 1990.
As they approach the National Palace, the rebels say they don't intend to govern Haiti. "We don't have any political platform," Philippe said. "We are fighting for a better country. As soon as Aristide leaves, we are ready to give our weapons to, I don't know, the new government."
Philippe, Dragon and Chamblain all said they were fighting for the restitution of the army, which Aristide disbanded in 1994.
"The army was demobilized. Now the army has been remobilized and is a constitutional army," said Chamblain, a husky, serene man. "Aristide has two choices: prison or execution by firing squad."
Chamblain's fight with Aristide is personal as well as political. After the military ousted Aristide following just seven months in office, violence ensued, during which, Chamblain said, pro-Aristide militias clubbed his pregnant wife to death in their home. "It's very hard," he said of the memory. "It gives me more (incentive) to fight."
Chamblain helped form FRAPH, which he claims was a political organization. But rights groups say the paramilitary group employed systematic rape and torture against its enemies.
"Given the horrendous human rights records of some of the leaders of the armed rebellion, we are extremely concerned that the rebel forces will take advantage of the opportunity to settle scores," said Joanne Mariner, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Americas Division.
"These men, notorious for killings and other abuses during the military government, must not be allowed to take violent reprisals against government loyalists."
The repression of civil society sparked an exodus of refugees, and the United Nations authorized intervention, but the military stepped down before U. S. troops occupied the country. Once back in office, Aristide disbanded the army and replaced it with a small police force -- a force now filled with no- show officers, commanded by the president's cronies and corrupted by cocaine, according to a recent State Department report.
Both Philippe and Dragon were part this new police force. They and 10 other officers soon took on the name "Latinos," because they'd trained together in Ecuador, spoke Spanish and stuck together. "We lived in the same house for years," Dragon explained in the rebels' Cap-Haitien hotel headquarters. "And we were loyal to the military institution."
In Ecuador, Philippe became the undisputed leader of the group. And in Haiti, he kept in close contact with his team, even as they rose through the ranks in different parts of the country. Philippe became the police chief of Cap-Haitien; Dragon, the commisaire of an important area in Port-au-Prince. Throughout, they maintained their esprit de corps. "We're not former military; we are military," Philippe said. "We are soldiers."
They also began collecting bribes for the drugs that easily pass through this nation of 8 million people. Internal reports from foreign observers found that the "Latinos" routinely gave gifts to politicians and once squeezed the government into exiling its inspector general after the seizure of more than three-quarters of a ton of cocaine implicated the men. Philippe, who trained with U.S. Secret Service in 1995, fled Haiti in 2000, after he and the "Latinos" were tied to a coup plot. He denied that he or the insurgent group he now leads had anything to do with coup attempts or drugs. "I'm an open book, " he declared.
Philippe studied medicine in Puebla, Mexico, before joining the military. While he was in Ecuador he met and married a woman from Wisconsin. His heroes include U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. "I like tough guys. The guys that protect their country," he said.
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