Gunmen backing army rule scattered a demonstration of supporters of Haiti's elected president Friday as American soldiers, deployed blocks away in tanks surrounded by barbed wire, did nothing to stop the violence.
Rifle and pistol shots rang out, rocks flew, machetes and clubs flailed as a score of the plain-clothes auxiliaries known as attaches swaggered out of their hangout in the Normandie Bar and an office of the paramilitary party known as Fraph to block several thousand marchers marking the third anniversary of the military coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.Journalists counted at least eight bodies in the streets after the clashes, most of them shot by the attaches. But at least two, identified as attaches, were apparently beaten to death by demonstrators.
The marchers, growing hesitant and nervous a little before noon as their route took them near a street corner long controlled by the attaches, wildly cheered the first appearance of an American convoy. They danced, pulling American flags from their pockets and shouting, "The Americans have truly liberated us!"
But the Americans quickly drove off, as did others that followed, and the mood grew bitter toward the American soldiers as it became clear that the American force in Haiti, now more than 20,000 strong, would not provide protection to the marchers.
Demonstrators ran back and forth, trying to get away as gunfire came from the Fraph offices, from a nearby penitentiary and from gunmen on the street. An attache knelt behind a wall, aiming an M-1 rifle.
A Haitian driver for an American television network, taking shelter with his crew on a porch, was shot dead at point-blank range by an attache with a pistol. There were bodies in the street and people beaten bloody being dragged off.
Friday afternoon, long after the crackle of gunfire had died down and the demonstrators had run away down the side streets, a 24-year-old student who gave his name as Jean-Louis stood in a glum clump of people under a tree near the Holiday Inn, staring at a Sheridan tank whose cannon barrel bore the inscription "House of Pain."
"I can't believe what I see now,"
he said. "The American soldiers were supposed to be here to help us. They were to restore democracy and protect us from the machine guns of the Fraph people."
At a briefing Friday afternoon, American officials put the blame for not keeping order on the Haitian police, the very force that only two weeks ago was described by President Clinton as an integral of a repressive apparatus so vile it demanded American intervention.
"Our mission was and still is not to serve as the police for the country of Haiti," said Col. Barry Willey, the military spokesman.