Pentagon Says Foes Of Aristide On Hit List Fears Heightened By Assassination Of Prominent Haitian Lawyer

The Pentagon has sent a classified cable to the U.S. embassy in Haiti, warning that over two dozen political opponents of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide may be targeted for assassination, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.

U.S. military officials compiled the list in the last several days from intelligence information and after analyzing purported “hit lists” that have circulated in Haiti and in the Haitian-American press.

“We think this is a reasonable list of potential targets, all of whom are anti-Aristide people,” a senior Defense Department official said.

The U.S. military had provided information earlier about a plot against a prominent opposition figure, Mireille Durocher Bertin, who was shot to death last week.

But officials said the information in that case was more specific than the list now being made available, and that the Pentagon and State Department appeared to be at odds over the importance of the list and what should be done with it.

A senior Defense Department official said that of the 27 names submitted, three people are considered to be in “highly extreme danger,” and should be warned. But the Pentagon acknowledged that the final decision rests with the U.S. embassy in Portau-Prince.

The official said the main potential threat “could be pro-Aristide elements,” but not necessarily linked to President Aristide himself.

A U.S. official in Haiti said the Pentagon list is one of many that embassy experts have received in recent weeks and are analyzing. “We’re looking at the names right now to determine whether to inform anyone on it,” the official said.

Rumored assassination plots and other intrigues are the stuff of daily gossip and street talk in Haiti. “These lists are a part of Haitian life,” said a Western diplomat in Haiti, during a discussion of the “hit lists” floating around Port-au-Prince.

Indeed, just this week United Nations officials in Haiti were circulating a list with even more names on it than the Pentagon’s best effort.

But the assassination of Durocher Bertin last week and subsequent accusations implicating Aristide’s interior minister, Brig. Gen. Mondesir Beaubrun, in the killing have raised unsettling questions over the ability of Aristide to influence his own Cabinet much less his most extreme supporters.

Haitian government officials warned Durocher Bertin, a lawyer who supported the military junta that overthrew Aristide in 1991, about a plot to kill her after U.S. military officials received information about the plan. She declined extra government protection in favor of her personal bodyguard.

A team of forensic experts from the FBI and the U.S. Army Institute of Pathology is investigating the killing of Durocher Bertin and a client who was in her car when they were shot.