Scores of armed rebels approached Gonaives and some sneaked into the city despite opposition from UN peacekeepers, ratcheting up more tension in the city of a quarter million devastated by Hurricane Jeanne.
Barefoot survivors still walk through sewage and mud. Gangsters are looting food aid. Widespread damage to crops and livestock has experts fearing a famine.
Radio Vision 2000 reported on Wednesday that about 150 heavily armed rebels in trucks tried to enter the city in northwest Haiti but turned around when ordered to by UN peacekeepers guarding the entrance, which has been a flashpoint for looting.
But an AP reporter encountered about 20 fatigue-clad rebels inside the city as darkness fell, in front of the main international food aid warehouse belonging to CARE, and having a confrontation with UN troops. The only visible weapons the rebels had were a rifle, a pistol and a knife.
The rebels were telling the peacekeepers they had come to provide security and patrol the city.
The peacekeepers, who have complained about lack of help from Haiti's demoralized police force, said they would welcome the help but that the rebels would have to give up their guns.
The confrontation occurred soon after people looted a food warehouse, according to Haitian radio reports. CARE, an international humanitarian organization, said it was not its warehouse, as some had reported. Anne Poulsen of the UN World Food Program, which is providing most food in Gonaives, said they believed it was a government warehouse.
Gonaives' Cannibal Army street gang in February rose up against the government of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, sparking a rebellion that quickly was joined by soldiers from the former Haitian army that Aristide disbanded in 1995.
The rebels overran half the country in three weeks and Aristide fled his Caribbean country -- under pressure with the US and France demanding his resignation and refusing to send troops to his aid.
US troops arrived as he departed but did little to disarm the rebels, who are demanding the reinstatement of the army and have friendly relations with the US-installed interim government.
Rebels now have formed a political party which Aristide supporters -- including a vast majority of Haiti's impoverished peasants and slum dwellers -- say is aimed at returning power in the country to the hands of a lighter skinned elite that has become wealthy on the backs of Haiti's poor.
Aristide became Haiti's first freely elected president in 1990, chosen for his fiery rhetoric as a slum priest that fueled a revolution and ended the 28-year Duvalier family dictatorship. He was ousted within months by the army, returned by a US invasion in 1994, was forced to step down by US pressure and a constitutional clause forbidding two-term presidencies, and was re-elected in 2000.
The storm ravaged an estimated 10,000 hectares of the most fertile land in Haiti.
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