Duvalier Loyalist Claims Power Takeover in Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti —  Roger Lafontant, feared leader of a faction loyal to exiled dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, claimed early today to have seized power in Haiti after a two-hour gun battle near the presidential palace.

“I have assumed the presidency of the republic,” Lafontant said in a one-sentence statement today on the state-run Radio Nacional.

Provisional President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, in a brief statement from the palace broadcast on the radio, said she was stepping down. Her announcement came about 2 1/2 hours after the heavy gunfire broke out at the palace.

“The armed forces have done their utmost to protect life and property and maintain law and order,” she said, but “government has become impossible to run. For the happiness of this land that all of us love dearly, I am forced to resign as provisional president.”

Pascal-Trouillot was to have turned power over next month to a populist priest, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was a landslide winner in the Dec. 16 presidential election. It was Haiti’s first free and peaceful poll ever.

Aristide, 37, who has survived several assassination attempts, is a self-proclaimed champion of Haiti’s impoverished majority.

Today, he was believed to be in the capital, but his precise whereabouts were not immediately known.

The leading Western diplomats were not immediately available for comment. A Marine guard who answered the phone at the U.S. Embassy said Ambassador Alvin Adams had come into the embassy late Sunday night.

Lafontant, a feared former Interior Minister under toppled strongman Jean-Claude Duvalier, returned from exile last July. Security officials never acted on a warrant for his arrest on crimes allegedly committed under Duvalier.

Lafontant, whose ties to the Duvalier family dynasty date to the early years of Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier in the early 1960s, admits to having been a member of the Tontons Macoutes, the brutal secret police of the Duvalier family. But he has denied widespread allegations that he headed the force.

Lafontant was disqualified from the presidential race in November on a technicality. He repeatedly vowed that Aristide would not take power, although in interviews he repeatedly claimed that he would fight Aristide nonviolently.

In October, before Lafontant was disqualified, he appeared at a military convention of 2,000 Duvalier loyalists. The Duvalierist political party is known as the Union for National Reconciliation.

The impoverished nation of 6 million people has been ruled almost exclusively by tyrants since gaining independence from France in 1804.