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Veterans of Past Murderous Campaigns Are Leading Haiti's New Rebellion

By TIM WEINER and LYDIA POLGREEN

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 28 — The armed men trying to seize power in Haiti are led by death-squad veterans and convicted murderers, according to American officials and human-rights groups.

They are "the new Haitian army," said one of their commanders, Remissainthe Ravix. They are also "thugs," said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

They are men like Louis-Jodel Chamblain and Jean-Pierre Baptiste — two leaders of Fraph, the Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress. Fraph was an instrument of terror wielded by the military junta that overthrew Haiti's embattled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991. It killed thousands over the next three years.

Aristide

Mr. Chamblain, a former Haitian Army officer, was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the 1993 murder of Antoine Izméry, an important Aristide supporter. Before the trial, he fled to the neighboring Dominican Republic, returning to Haiti in recent months to seek power.

Mr. Baptiste, also known as Jean Tatoune, was serving a life sentence for murder, in connection with a 1994 massacre of Aristide supporters, when he was freed in a jailbreak in August.

"Fraph is back," President Aristide said in an interview with The New York Times last week. The question now is whether these men will take power once again, and whether American military force, in the form of a naval deployment, may be necessary to stop them. Pentagon officials have said marines could be called upon to evacuate Americans and other foreigners and provide other assistance if the crisis worsened.

"The Fraph and the Haitian Army are institutions with a long and very dark history," said James Dobbins, President Bill Clinton's special envoy to Haiti from 1994 to 1996.

That past is entwined with American history. United States forces occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. They created the modern Haitian Army, dissolved Parliament and imposed martial law in those years. In the 1980's and early 1990's, the United States Central Intelligence Agency had important senior Haitian Army officers and Fraph members on its payroll, according to American officials.

A decade ago, in 1994, the United States sent in 20,000 soldiers to reinstate Mr. Aristide after the Haitian Army overthrew him. Mr. Aristide disbanded the army upon his return to power. But he created nothing in its place beyond a small, American-trained national 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.

Now Mr. Aristide has little with which to defend himself. His power base has crumbled, leaving only the dissolute national police and a rabble of street gangs. On Thursday, he was accused in an American courtroom by a convicted cocaine trafficker of taking drug payoffs.

"Aristide has been criticized, and with some justice, of allying himself with forces that may be criminal or corrupt," Mr. Dobbins said. "But in a society which has no institutions, where all power derives from the use or the threat of force, it's impossible to govern without those alliances. It's the Haitian dilemma."

Broad-based alliances across Haitian society have lost faith in President Aristide. The political opposition includes victims of army power, like Evans Paul, a former mayor of Port-au-Prince, and once Mr. Aristide's campaign manager, who was arrested and tortured by Haitian military officers in 1989.

Mr. Paul now says the president has two choices: to leave "by the front door or the back door."

The political opposition in Haiti is united by its desire to depose Mr. Aristide, and the armed opposition by its hate for him.

Veterans despise him because he dissolved the army. Street gangs detest him because they think he betrayed their leaders. Guy Philippe, a former police chief leading the rebels, says Mr. Aristide broke his promise to lift up the Haitian people.

Mr. Aristide's supporters say the armed opposition seeks power for power's sake, to seize Haiti's ports and their cargoes of Colombian cocaine bound for the United States, and to pay back Mr. Aristide for disbanding the army.

Mr. Philippe was trained by the United States military as an army officer in Ecuador, according to a report published Friday by Human Rights Watch, and earned a reputation as a brutal police chief on the north side of Port-au-Prince. In 2000, suspected of plotting a coup, he fled to the Dominican Republic.

Mr. Aristide, who rose from slum priest to president preaching economic and spiritual deliverance, has made many such enemies.

"When he was democratically elected in 1990 his support was overwhelming and from the heart," said James Morrell, director of the Haiti Democracy Project, who is among those onetime Aristide supporters now calling for his ouster. Mr. Aristide "made a lot of mistakes, the biggest of which was that he demanded absolute power and absolute loyalty."

Timothy Carney, a former United States ambassador to Haiti, said Mr. Aristide spoke like a democrat but "displayed the traditional predatory behavior of Haitian leaders, including the idea that he is the embodiment of the state."

The revolt sweeping Haiti began on Feb. 5 in Gonaïves, the city where slaves who shook off Napoleon's rule declared this the first free black nation of the New World in January 1804, 200 years ago.

A gang of embittered former Aristide supporters attacked a police station, overpowered the officers and took over the city. They believed that Mr. Aristide killed their leader, Amiot Métayer. Mr. Métayer was known as a charismatic, ruthless man. Butteur Métayer, Amiot's brother, said he had died because he knew about the Aristide government's drug ties.

Butteur Métayer revived his brother's group and named it the Artibonite Resistance Front. Inspired by the front, others rose up, burning police stations, looting and plotting, setting off a chain reaction now reaching Port-au-Prince.

Early on Saturday, a relative calm returned to the city. Mr. Aristide spoke by telephone late on Friday on national television, urging militants to stop the violence and looting that has convulsed the capital.

"We should prevent ill-intentioned people from infiltrating our movement and polluting it," Mr. Aristide said. His remarks seemed to be a response to a statement by the American Embassy here blaming the president for the violence and demanding that he put a stop to it.

The public face of the rebel army is the smile of Mr. Philippe, the former police chief. He is suspected by both Haitian and United States officials of cocaine trafficking.

In an interview last week at a seaside hotel that his troops are using as their base in Cap Haitien, Haiti's second largest city, Mr. Philippe said he had no lust for power.

Collin Powell

"I am not ambitious," Mr. Philippe said, swigging a beer as his men lounged by a swimming pool, machine guns cradled in their laps. "What I want is a better life for the Haitian people. What I want is democracy."

Mr. Philippe has few democratic credentials. In 2001, while he stood accused of planning a coup, the government said he masterminded a raid on the presidential palace that left seven dead.

He is joined in this rebellion by Mr. Chamblain, the convicted assassin from Fraph. (The acronym Fraph is a play on the French word frapper, to hit.) Mr. Chamblain denied in an interview that he or his group ever killed anyone, a contention belied by overwhelming evidence.

"I was never paramilitary chief," Mr. Chamblain said. "I was the leader of a political organization. Fraph helped people and brought the Haitian people together."

He said he joined the revolt against Mr. Aristide because the president had betrayed the principles of the men who freed Haiti from France two centuries ago. "This fight is to liberate the Haitian people under the regime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide," Mr. Chamblain said.

Also along for the ride are former army officers like Mr. Ravix, a 38-year-old former corporal.

"There is no such thing as the former Haitian Army," said Mr. Ravix, a bull-necked, barrel-chested man, still bitter about the army's dissolution. "Aristide made a big mistake sending us home with our guns."

If this is indeed "the new Haitian army," as Mr. Ravix says, it represents the revival of a force that has always served Haiti's tiny elite, less than two percent of the people holding at least half the nation's wealth.

The armed rebels are not a large force. They may number as few as 500 trained fighters, American officials believe. It is an open question whether a force that size could seize this sprawling capital. But it has proved capable of creating fear and havoc.

Their assault weapons and crisp camouflage uniforms suggest the rebels have outside support. Mr. Philippe said his force was receiving donations from Haitian exiles in the United States and Canada. In a country where drug money flows freely, government officials have accused the rebels of financing their assault with money from Colombian cocaine cartels.

From the 1980's into the early 1990's, the Haitian Army and its National Intelligence Service — an agency created and financed by the C.I.A. — committed acts of terror and trafficked in cocaine, according to American officials.

There is no known evidence that the United States has supported the armed uprising against Mr. Aristide, although the White House is strongly suggesting that he should step down.

"We cannot allow these thugs to come out of the hills, or even an opposition to simply rise up and say `we want you to leave' in an undemocratic, nonconstitutional manner," Secretary Powell said on Feb. 19.

A senior administration official said Saturday, "We cannot be in the position of going in to oust an elected leader."

But, by law or by force, the end may be near for Mr. Aristide, the priest who came to power preaching democracy in Haiti but delivered only its stillbirth.

"I think this is the end game for Aristide," said Mr. Carney, the former American ambassador. "I think things will move very fast. He will go. If he is so foolish as to think he could stay, it will be feet first."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

For those who like Cuban comics here is a page from popular Cuban cartoon Elpídio Valdés

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February 22, 2004

THE LAST WORD

The Da Vinci Con

By LAURA MILLER

The ever-rising tide of sales of ''The Da Vinci Code'' has lifted some pretty odd boats, and none odder than the dodgy yet magisterial ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail,'' by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. A best seller in the 1980's, ''Grail'' is climbing the paperback charts again on the strength of its relationship to Dan Brown's thriller (which has, in turn, inspired a crop of new nonfiction books coming out this spring, from ''Breaking the Da Vinci Code'' to ''Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code''). ''The Da Vinci Code'' is one long chase scene in which the main characters flee a sinister Parisian policeman and an albino monk assassin, but its rudimentary suspense alone couldn't have made it a hit. At regular intervals, the book brings its pell-mell plot to a screeching halt and emits a pellet of information concerning a centuries-old conspiracy that purports to have preserved a tremendous secret about the roots of Christianity itself. This ''nonfiction'' material gives ''The Da Vinci Code'' its frisson of authenticity, and it's lifted from ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail,'' one of the all-time great works of pop pseudohistory. But what seems increasingly clear (to cop a favorite phrase from the authors of ''Grail'') is that ''The Da Vinci Code,'' like ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail,'' is based on a notorious hoax.



The London Tube (photo: Rui)

The back story to both books, like most conspiracy theories, is devilishly hard to summarize. Both narratives begin with a mystery that leads sleuths to vaster and more sinister intrigues. In Brown's novel, it's the murder of a curator at the Louvre; in ''Grail,'' it's the unusual affluence of a priest in a village in the south of France. In the late 1960's, Henry Lincoln, a British TV writer, became interested in Rennes-le-Chateau, a town that had become the French equivalent of Roswell or Loch Ness as a result of popular books by Gerard de Sède. De Sède promulgated a story about parchments supposedly found in a hollowed-out pillar by the town priest in the 1890’s, parchments containing coded messages that the priest somehow parlayed into oodles of cash. Lincoln worked on several ''Unsolved Mysteries''-style documentaries about Rennes-le-Château, then enlisted Baigent and Leigh for a more in-depth investigation.

What eventually emerges from the welter of names, dates, maps and genealogical tables crammed into ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail'' is a yarn about a secret and hugely influential society called the Priory of Sion, founded in Jerusalem in 1099. This cabal is said to have guarded documents and other proof that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus (who may or may not have died on the Cross) and that she carried his child with her when she fled to what is now France after the Crucifixion, becoming, figuratively, the Holy Grail in whom Jesus' blood was preserved. Their progeny intermarried with the locals, eventually founding the Merovingian dynasty of Frankish monarchs. Although deposed in the eighth century, the Merovingian lineage has not been lost; the Priory has kept watch over its descendants, awaiting an auspicious moment when it will reveal the astonishing truth and return the rightful monarch to the throne of France, or perhaps even a restored Holy Roman Empire.

All the usual suspects and accouterments of paranoid history get caught up in this 1,000-year jaunt: the Cathar heretics, the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Vatican, the Freemasons, Nazis, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Order of the Golden Dawn -- everyone but the Abominable Snowman seems to be in on the game. ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail'' is a masterpiece of insinuation and supposition, employing all the techniques of pseudohistory to symphonic effect, justifying this sleight of hand as an innovative scholarly technique called ''synthesis,'' previously considered too ''speculative'' by those whose thinking has been unduly shaped by the ''so-called Enlightenment of the 18th century.'' Comparing themselves to the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal, the authors maintain that ''only by such synthesis can one discern the underlying continuity, the unified and coherent fabric, which lies at the core of any historical problem.'' To do so, one must realize that ''it is not sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts.''

Thus liberated, Lincoln et al. concoct an argument that is not so much factual as fact-ish. Dozens of credible details are heaped up in order to provide a legitimizing cushion for rank nonsense. Unremarkable legends (that Merovingian kings were thought to have a healing touch, for example) are characterized as suggestive clues or puzzles demanding solution. Highly contested interpretations (that, say, an early Grail romance depicts the sacred object as being guarded by Templars) are presented as established truth. Sources -- such as the New Testament -- are qualified as ''questionable'' and derivative when they contradict the conspiracy theory, then microscopically scrutinized for inconsistencies that might support it. The authors spin one gossamer strand of conjecture over another, forming a web dense enough to create the illusion of solidity. Though bogus, it's an impressive piece of work.

Dan Brown

Finally, though, the legitimacy of the Priory of Sion history rests on a cache of clippings and pseudonymous documents that even the authors of ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail'' suggest were planted in the Bibliotheque Nationale by a man named Pierre Plantard. As early as the 1970's, one of Plantard's confederates had admitted to helping him fabricate the materials, including genealogical tables portraying Plantard as a descendant of the Merovingians (and, presumably, of Jesus Christ) and a list of the Priory's past ''grand masters.'' This patently silly catalog of intellectual celebrities stars Botticelli, Isaac Newton, Jean Cocteau and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci -- and it's the same list Dan Brown trumpets, along with the alleged nine-century pedigree of the Priory, in the front matter for ''The Da Vinci Code,'' under the heading of ''Fact.'' Plantard, it eventually came out, was an inveterate rascal with a criminal record for fraud and affiliations with wartime anti-Semitic and right-wing groups. The actual Priory of Sion was a tiny, harmless group of like-minded friends formed in 1956.

Plantard's hoax was debunked by a series of (as yet untranslated) French books and a 1996 BBC documentary, but curiously enough, this set of shocking revelations hasn't proved as popular as the fantasia of ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail,'' or, for that matter, as ''The Da Vinci Code.'' The only thing more powerful than a worldwide conspiracy, it seems, is our desire to believe in one.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company