Rebels Force Haitian Police to Flee City

Police fled this key Haitian city after failing in bloody battles to vanquish rebels seeking to oust President Jean-Bertrand Astride. The death toll Sunday in the recent violence rose to at least 18.

Some 150 police had tried to retake Gonaives on Saturday, two days after armed rebels seized and burned the police station and drove officers out. Before midnight Saturday, rebel violence had forced police to withdraw again, leaving seven officers and two rebels dead.

Police fought gunbattles with armed rebels hiding on side streets and crouched in doorways. It was unclear how many rebel gunmen were in the city of 200,000, Haiti’s fourth-largest.

Crowds mutilated the corpses of three police officers. One body was dragged through the street as a man swung at it with a machete, and a woman cut off the officer’s ear. Another policeman was lynched and stripped to his shorts, and residents dropped a large rock on his body.

Haitian radio stations reported claims by other rebels that as many as 14 police were killed, but that couldn’t be confirmed.

Two other deaths were reported in the nearby west coast town of St. Marc, where residents on Sunday blocked the town entrance with felled trees, flaming tires and car chassis. Police fled Saturday after clashes with armed Aristide opponents that left at least two dead.

“After Aristide leaves, the country will return to normal,” said Axel Philippe, 34, among dozens of people massed on the main highway leading to St. Marc, located south of Gonaives.

Calling themselves the Gonaives Resistance Front, rebels took control of the Gonaives police station during a five-hour gunbattle Thursday and set fire to buildings including the mayor’s house. They also freed more than 100 prisoners in the city, 70 miles northwest of Port-au-Prince.

Thursday’s violence left at least seven dead and 20 injured.

Militants have attacked police stations and forced out police in at least five nearby towns since Friday, Haitian radio reports said. Judge Walter Pierre told private Radio Ginen that armed men were occupying the police station in the town of Anse Rouge on Saturday and had confiscated weapons.

A number of Gonaives and St. Marc residents said they had joined neighborhood committees to help the militants and keep watch over their areas.

Anger has been brewing in Haiti since Aristide’s party swept flawed legislative elections in 2000. The opposition refuses to join in any new vote unless Aristide resigns, which he refuses to do before his term ends in 2006.

At least 69 people have been killed in the Caribbean country since mid-September in clashes among police, government opponents and Aristide supporters.