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Haiti Warns Of 'Coup'

Haiti's premier warned of an impending coup amid fears that an uprising that has left at least 57 people dead may have reached the country's second city, Cap-Haitien.

Prime Minister Yvon Neptune appealed for international aid, but the United States and France expressed reluctance to send troops to put down the two-week-old rebellion.

Police and armed supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide mounted barricades and patrolled the streets of Cap-Haitien on Haiti's north coast on Tuesday.

"We are witnessing the coup d'etat machine in motion," Neptune said, urging the international community "to show it really wants peace and stability."

Aid agencies called for urgent international action, saying Haiti is on "the verge of a generalized civil war."

Currently, officials from USAID, the U.N. and the Organization of American States are in Haiti, trying to assess the humanitarian needs of the country's 8 million people, says CBS News State Department Reporter Charles M. Wolfson.

The U.N. refugee agency met with officials in Washington to discuss how to confront a feared exodus of Haitians, though there are no immediate signs of people fleeing.

In Gonaives, rebels fired shots into the air to prevent crowds of hungry residents from stampeding several trucks loaded with food — lentils and millet — brought by the aid agency CARE. Associated Press Television News footage showed one woman trampled in the melee. She was taken to a hospital for treatment.

The food was the first shipment to reach Gonaives, Haiti's fourth largest city, since it was taken by rebels who began the revolt Feb. 5.

The brutality of the insurrection was on display in the central city of Hinche, where the bullet-riddled body of a policeman lay, unburied and rotting, outside the local police station.

Hinche, at a strategic crossroads in Haiti's agriculture-rich Artibonite district, was seized Monday by some 50 rebels reportedly led by former death squad leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain.

About 30 heavily armed police officers barricaded themselves into the nearby town of Mirebalais and nervously scanned the horizon for potential attackers.

Also Tuesday, airlines in Port-au-Prince canceled flights to the Cap-Haitien, a city of a half-million people, after witnesses in the barricaded city saw a boat approach and rumors swept the town that rebels were about to attack.

"People think the rebels were already in some neighborhoods, and that while they don't control Cap (Haitien), they are there now," said Bruno Firmin, a 27-year-old businessman who spoke to relatives in Cap-Haitien after his flight there was canceled.

Illustrating the problems Aristide faces in holding on to Cap-Haitien, Firmin said many there would welcome the rebels, despite the fact that their leaders are former military and police officers with infamously bad human rights records.

"I'm not afraid of the rebels, I'm afraid of the Aristide supporters," Firmin said of gangs of toughs who have burned homes and attacked opposition supporters in Cap-Haitien.

Haiti's 5,000-member police force appears unable to stem the revolt, Neptune conceded Tuesday, asking for technical help to strengthen the force. Both he and Aristide have stopped short of asking for military intervention.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday "there is frankly no enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces to put down the violence."

Powell said the international community wants to see "a political solution" and only then would willing nations offer a police presence to implement such an agreement.

Powell spoke by telephone with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who called an emergency meeting in Paris to weigh the risks of sending peacekeepers and discuss how otherwise to help Haiti, an impoverished former colony that is home to 2,000 French citizens.

"Can we deploy a peacekeeping force?" de Villepin asked on France-Inter radio, noting it "is very difficult" amid violence.

He said France had 4,000 troops in its Caribbean territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe trained in humanitarian work.

But he also told French TV that "an intervention force … implies a stop to the violence, a restart to dialogue. Nothing will be possible in Haiti if there isn't a jolt."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday the world body plans to "become much more actively engaged" in Haiti's crisis.

Aristide's popularity has waned since his party swept flawed 2000 legislative elections and international donors — including the United States — froze millions of aid dollars.

Haiti's opposition and foreign donors claimed that 10 seats in Haiti's 27-member Senate were illegally decided in a first round of voting, rather than going to a second round, because the votes were tallied using an incorrect formula. Aristide's party won those and most other legislative seats.

The elections had initially been described as fair. The resulting aid freeze meant Aristide has been unable to keep his election promise of "peace of mind, peace in the belly."

The U.S. government last week appeared to signaling that it would not be opposed to Aristide's overthrow. A senior State Department official told The New York Times, "When we talk about undergoing change in the way Haiti is governed, I think that could indeed involve changes in Aristide's position."

But Tuesday, asked if the U.S. wanted Aristide to step down, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, "That's not our position."

"The violence in Haiti puts the Bush Administration is in an uncomfortable position: While Powell has been clear that a coup d'etat would be unacceptable, the Administration in part provoked the crisis by cutting off aid to Aristide," CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk said.

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