PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Eleven years after thugs burned down the church where former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide once preached, hundreds commemorated the anniversary Saturday and clamored for his re-election.
The peaceful rally took place in downtown Port-Au-Prince, amid the ruins of St. Jean Bosco Catholic church.It was at that church in 1988 that army-backed thugs interrupted a Mass celebrated by Aristide, who was a priest before he became president. They shot and hacked to death at least 12 worshippers and set the building on fire.
Aristide, dressed in black, made a brief appearance at Saturday's commemoration. He saluted the crowd but said nothing.
Photos of victims were pasted to the charred walls of the church, which has never been rebuilt. None of the perpetrators of the St. Jean Bosco massacre were ever brought to trial.
Since mid-April -- when an Aristide partisan was shot and killed in an altercation -- sporadic, sometimes vandalistic, pro-Aristide street demonstrations have wracked the capital.
Aristide, Haiti's first freely elected president, served for a year until he was ousted by the army in September 1991. U.S. troops restored him to power in September 1994.
He stepped down in February 1996, when his successor and disciple, current President Rene Preval, was inaugurated. Preval briefly visited St. Jean Bosco church early Saturday.