Aristide, U.S. Split Over Makeup of Haiti Army, Police : Caribbean: President defies Washington, retires 43 officers. Some say move spells end to military.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti —  The first serious rift between the United States and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has developed over the composition of this nation’s police and security forces, according to Haitian and diplomatic sources.

The split opened almost immediately upon Aristide’s return from exile in October with plans to abolish the 7,000-member army that had forced him from office three years earlier.

U.S. officials, on the other hand, argued privately that Haiti needs a continuing, presumably conservative military to guarantee stability and balance the radical political tendencies some American policy-makers see in Aristide and his followers.

Although Aristide had been gradually but steadily defying the United States by reducing the army to little more than a 1,500-member border patrol, the dispute had been kept low-key and largely out of the public eye until this week.

But this week, the rift was plain to see.

In a statement made public Tuesday, the Defense Ministry announced that the army’s only four generals had been ordered into early retirement along with 39 other officers, including all existing colonels and lieutenant colonels, many of whom had been trained by the United States.

U.S. officials declined to comment on the record, but some diplomats conceded that the action killed any chance for a viable army. “It was already moribund,” one diplomat said of the military, “but today, Aristide buried it.”

While this angered some U.S. officials, they found it difficult to complain because those dismissed included Gen. Pierre H. Cherubin, Aristide’s top military aide, and Lt. Col. Pierre Neptune, who had been Port-au-Prince police chief before the president was overthrown Sept. 30, 1991. Both men are suspected by U.S. officials of ties to violence-prone radical groups and past human rights violations.

Their continued presence in the Aristide government so alarmed U.S. officials that Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security adviser, came here earlier this month to demand their dismissal.

Aristide turned U.S. pressure for the two officers’ ouster to his advantage, Haitian sources say, using what one described as “otherwise an unexcusable intervention in Haitian internal affairs” to eliminate almost any officer he felt could threaten him in the future.

“He told the Americans that he would fire Cherubin and Neptune, but then he got rid of nearly everyone else,” one Haitian analyst said. “I don’t know if he even informed them (the Americans) that he was firing all the others.”

The Americans evidently figured it out, because the U.S. military mission retaliated, starting a two-week program to weed out several hundred members of Haiti’s interim police force, appointed by Aristide in violation of an agreement with U.S. officials. Over bitter Haitian government objections, combat-armed U.S. and U.N. troops in helicopters and military vehicles began a nationwide sweep of interim police posts to remove unauthorized police, the sources said.

Under the pact, no one was to be named to the 3,500-member temporary police force, which is to provide law and order until a permanent and fully trained constabulary is in place sometime next year, without being approved by U.S. officials and undergoing a six-day crash training program.

But, U.S. and U.N. officials say, Aristide managed to insert what officials described as “several hundred really bad guys” into the interim force, including “thugs who belonged to the Tontons Macoutes,” the brutal paramilitary force formed by former dictator Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier.

Both diplomatic and Haitian sources said Aristide knew he was violating the agreement but went ahead on two grounds, one supposedly altruistic, the other cynical. “Most Haitians hate the interim force,” a Haitian source close to Aristide said, “because they see it as a haven for the army. Also, the president never trusted the whole system, and he felt vindicated on Dec. 26.”

The source was referring to a riot on that date by soldiers, many trained and approved for the interim police force, over the elimination of the army and the government’s failure to pay past salaries. Calling them traitors, Aristide had those involved in the riot removed from the interim force and replaced with supposedly neutral people, the sources said.

But U.S. and other diplomats said the new appointees were not neutral and were part of a cynical effort by Aristide to use the incident as an excuse to fill the police force with supporters to form a force personally loyal to him.

U.N. officials said there also were several hundred other “unauthorized” members of the interim police force, most of whom existed only on paper as part of an embezzlement plan. “There are a total of 1,500 unauthorized members” of the interim force, one U.N. source said, “with a lot of the ‘phantom’ troops created by some officers in order to pad their units’ payroll.”

Both U.S. and U.N. officials, including Lake, told Aristide the interim force would be cleaned up--with or without Haitian cooperation, diplomatic sources said. “Aristide was caught out and had no way of objecting,” one diplomat said. “He had no choice but to accept” the ultimatum.

Another diplomat observed: “At this stage, I guess you can say the Americans won. Neptune and Cherubin are gone and the troops will get rid of most of the Aristide people in the (interim police force). But is the rift, as you call it, over? I doubt it.”