HAITI: Haitian civilians barricaded roads into Port-au-Prince with buses and old fridges yesterday after rebels fighting President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said they would march on the capital city within days.
With rebels holding half of Haiti, President Aristide appealed for international help for the country's hopelessly outgunned police, who number only 4,000 in a nation of eight million, and have appeared on continual retreat since the revolt erupted on February 5th.
More than 60 people have been killed in the rebellion.
Washington, which sent 50 Marines to Haiti on Monday to protect US facilities there, has urged US citizens to leave the country. Britain also told its citizens to leave, warning of a "highly volatile security situation". Residents shook their fists at cars that tried to pass the barricades.
"It (the barricade) is not for or against the government. It's to protect the people in the area from the insurgents," said one young man at a blockade.
Opposition political parties and civil groups, who insist President Aristide quit but distance themselves from the two-week-old uprising, imposed a deadline of yesterday to respond to a US-backed power-sharing plan that would keep the president in office.
Even if they did agree to a deal - something unlikely - it was far from clear whether it would halt rebels, whose dozens of professional-looking former soldiers pose a more serious threat to President Aristide in a revolt in which more than 60 people have died.
US Marines took up positions around the US embassy complex in Port-au-Prince, including on rooftops, yesterday.
The airport at Port-au-Prince has been crowded with people, including US missionaries, clamouring for flights out of Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas and whose 200 years of independence from France has been blighted by political upheavals.
The rebels, who include former pro-Aristide gangs, have taken over Cap Haitien, Haiti's second-biggest city. Many Haitians, who say the president runs their country with thuggery and corruption, have welcomed them.
In Port-au-Prince, several dozen people stood outside the gates of the presidential palace, shouting "Five years!" - the slogan used by Aristide supporters to call for him to remain in office until his second term expires in 2006, as the president has said he is determined to do.
At a news conference inside, the president denounced the rebels, saying they were committing "crimes against humanity". Confident rebel leaders in Cap Haitien said the only resistance so far had come from the machetes of local Aristide gangs.
The rebellion began in the western city of Gonaives, organized by an armed gang that once supported President Aristide and turned against him. It has been joined by others, including a former head of a militia that terrorized Haitians in the early 1990s, and ex-soldiers from the army President Aristide disbanded when the US returned him to power in 1994. President Aristide, a former parish priest, championed Haitian democracy in the 1980s and became its elected leader in 1991.