Partisans of exiled Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide looted a container port on the northern fringe of Port-au-Prince late Thursday as US and French patrols sought to enforce an overnight curfew in its fifth consecutive night.
The nation's political rivals, meanwhile, were assessing their meeting earlier in the day, the first in the month-old crisis to start the process of naming a new government.
An official of the huge Haiti Terminal, which handles 35 percent of the country's container imports, called the looting a "disaster."
PHOTO: AFP
"We have to act quickly to save what's left of the containers before the catastrophe is total," the official, Georges Romain, said.
The port's warehouses, holding an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 containers, were the main target as of late Thursday.
"The area must be quickly secured by a military force of Americans, French or Haitian National Police," Romain said.
On Thursday, residents of the capital converged on banks which were open for the first time in two weeks.
Sporadic gunfire still echoed in parts of Port-au-Prince, but the city was relatively calm after days of chaos marked by killing, arson and looting sprees that left a shoulder-high pile of decomposing bodies stacked in the main morgue.
An exact death toll from the violence that erupted was impossible to determine on Thursday.
The Pentagon said it expected Haitian police to handle looting and disorder in Port-au-Prince and the 1,000 US Marines in the capital to play a supporting role.
"We are going to support the Haitian police, who are handling that very well right now," said Brigadier General David Rodriguez, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The advance wave of a UN-backed stabilization security force hastily established itself as violence erupted amid anarchy in the capital after Aristide resigned and fled last weekend.
Aristide accused France of colluding with the US to oust him in a coup d'etat and complained from the Central African Republic, where he is in exile, that he had been the victim of a "political kidnapping" and was forced out at gunpoint.
Washington dismissed the charges and rejected calls for an inquiry into the conditions of Aristide's departure.
"There is nothing to investigate," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. "There was no kidnapping, there was no coup, there were no threats."
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin said he believed the US version.
Representatives of the government Aristide left behind, along with the opposition and the UN, met to start implementing an international power-sharing plan designed to end the country's long-running political crisis.
The so-called "tripartite council" -- Leslie Voltaire, the minister for Haitians abroad, Paul Denis, a former opposition senator, and Adama Guindo, head of the UN Development Program in Haiti -- is to select a seven-member "council of wise men" to name a new prime minister and government.
The meeting was held at the Organization of American States (OAS) offices here and the OAS issued a statement later saying it expected the council's work "will proceed very rapidly and that the decision process will finish in less than one week."
As the council met, US and French troops gathered at the presidential palace where they met up with uniformed Haitian police for their first walking forays into the city's streets.
Onlookers and hopeful job seekers loitered in the square outside the palace gates which had seen violence by pro-Aristide gangs on Sunday before armed rebels seeking the president's ouster moved in on Monday and Tuesday and staged mass rallies there.
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