Weekly Report - 17 February 2004

The insurrection in Haiti appears to have changed in nature over the past weekend. Until then, the driving force had been the Gonaí¯ves-based Revolutionary Artibonite Resistance Front, a formerly pro-Aristide gang of political `enforcers', emulated by disparate groups, some of the same kind, in a few other parts of Haiti. Now a new force has come onstage: former elements of the disbanded Haitian army and of paramilitary squads that operated during the period of military rule.