
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, October 3, 1994                   TAG: 9410040026
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
DATELINE: PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI                                LENGTH: Medium

HAITIAN `MILITIA' RAIDED

The man portrayed as one of Haiti's biggest thugs hung up on his worried mother when she called from Miami on Sunday.

She fretted that U.S. troops would kill him. She relayed reports from abroad that he had been abducted or had fled into hiding. She worried that he could be jailed as the alleged orchestrator of last week's murderous backlash against peace marchers.

``Mother, don't worry about it,'' said Emmanuel Constant, chief of the pro-military group FRAPH. Then he slammed down the telephone.

With U.S. forces breathing down their necks, Haiti's feared militiamen were a bit edgy Sunday.

They knew of U.S. news reports saying American troops were about to raid their safehouses looking for weapons. Throughout the day, U.S. tanks and Humvees rolled through the city as paramilitary groups reportedly hid their caches.

By nightfall, U.S. forces had raided homes and businesses belonging to families of four prominent militiamen, including Romeo Halloun - former U.S. Army soldier and now a civilian adviser to Haiti's military leader, Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras. U.S. soldiers seized boxes of ammunition and weapons.

As the crackdown escalated, the city was without violence for the first time in three days.

``We're still feeling our way through,'' U.S. Embassy spokesman Stanley Schrager said of the disarmament mission as the number of U.S. soldiers in Haiti rose to 20,931.

In Washington, the House prepared to vote this week on setting a pullout date for the troops. Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., told NBC on Sunday that the Clinton administration was ``on the edge of disaster'' and said U.S. troops should be pulled out ``as quickly as possible, and I mean weeks - not months, not years.''

Constant, sensing his power slipping away, entertained reporters at his house Sunday, nervously tugging at his fashionable suit, tattered at the seams.

His group boasts about 300,000 members, including 250 officers who U.S. officials say lead gangs of undercover mobsters on missions of terror. Plainclothes police and FRAPH followers are thought to be behind several hundred political murders and thousands of beatings since the 1991 coup that overthrew elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

But Constant paints his group as Haiti's version of a political Greenpeace, responsible for cleaning up the violent environment.

Aristide's voice was heard on state radio on Sunday for the first time in years. State media, which had banned his voice, were under the control of the coup leaders until U.S. troops seized the installations Friday.

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by CNB