An armed opposition group seized control of Haiti’s fourth-largest city in clashes that killed at least four people, while the government vowed to restore order.
Members of the Gonaives Resistance Front on Thursday set fire to the mayor’s home in Gonaives, then doused the police station with fuel, lighting it while officers fled, Haitian radio reports said.
At least four opponents of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were killed in gunbattles with police, Gonaives Resistance Front leader Wynter Etienne told Radio Vision 2000. Radio Metropole reported 20 people were wounded and more than 100 inmates were freed from the jail.
”Gonaives is liberated,” Etienne told reporters. ”Aristide has to go … We’ve liberated the police station and freed the population” from Aristide’s rule.
Etienne said the group aims to take control of other towns.
Government spokesperson Mario Dupuy said the armed attackers didn’t have the support of most people in the city 110km northwest of Port-au-Prince.
The attacks ”are terrorist acts undertaken by the armed wing of the opposition”, Dupuy said. ”The police will have to take measures to re-establish order.”
He linked the unrest to violence in the nearby Central Plateau, where in the past year at least 25 people have been killed in attacks blamed on a band of anti-Aristide former soldiers.
Thursday’s clashes came a day after two officials from the Caribbean Community concluded talks with the opposition and met separately with Aristide.
Discontent has been growing in Haiti since Aristide’s party swept 2000 legislative elections that observers said were flawed.
Other countries have distanced themselves from Aristide, poverty has deepened and protests have grown more numerous and chaotic.
At least 55 people have been killed in the Caribbean country since mid-September in clashes between police, protesters and Aristide supporters.
Members of the armed group in Gonaives were once allied with Aristide but turned on him last year after their leader, Amiot Metayer, was found murdered on September 22. Metayer had long supported Aristide, but many of his followers now accuse the government of involvement in the killing.
Aristide has denied involvement, saying only the opposition stood to gain.
Roughly 200 000 people live in Gonaives and surrounding areas.
The city has been the site of many protests led by Metayer’s supporters, who recently changed their name from the ”Cannibal Army” to the Gonaives Resistance Front.
Haiti won its independence from France in a revolt that culminated 200 years ago but has enjoyed little freedom since, suffering through a string of dictators interspersed with more than 30 military coups.
After 29 years of the Duvalier family dictatorship, Aristide, then a slum priest, won presidential elections in 1990 by a landslide. He was overthrown the next year, then restored in 1994 by a United States invasion.
He was re-elected in 2000, but has been plagued by political troubles. Opposition leaders have demanded Aristide’s resignation, accusing his government of incompetence and corruption.
Aristide has refused to step down before his term ends in 2006 and has defended his government, saying it has made progress despite many obstacles.
The military in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, meanwhile, tightened security along the border it shares with Haiti.
One Dominican soldier was wounded by a stray bullet on Tuesday during a bloody protest just across the border in the Haitian town of Ouanaminthe, Dominican General Jorge Radhames Zorrilla Ozuna said.
At least one Haitian protester also was reported killed. — Sapa-AP