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

DATE: SUNDAY, October 9, 1994                   TAG: 9410120040
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI                                LENGTH: Medium

HAITIAN POOR GRAB LAND OF THE RICH

There were dozens of them, impoverished Haitians from an urban hell called Cite du Soleil - City of the Sun - and they worked all day carving new subdivisions into a rich man's land: a prime, verdant hillside adjacent to Port-au-Prince's international airport.

It was a land seizure, plain and simple. People power, Haitian-style. The worst nightmare of Haiti's rich.

``This is my land now, the people's land,'' declared one of the occupiers, a barefoot, toothless man in an undershirt, pausing to explain. ``I have no house. I have no money. And now this is mine. Now, we simply will wait for our President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to come, and he will give us the papers to make it legally ours. Then he will give cement for our houses; sewers; lights, and roads.''

But as they illegally toiled away just a few hundred feet from the airport terminal, where U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry was declaring Haiti a new zone of peace, the capital's poor also were sowing the seeds for what the rich fear will be civil war.

Port-au-Prince was, in fact, a city at peace Saturday. In the three weeks since the first U.S. troops arrived, an evolving, ad-hoc U.S. military strategy finally appeared to have checkmated the brutal Haitian regime and its paramilitary thugs, at least in the capital.

On the several hilly acres near the airport, off a street named Delmas 33, the imagery shocked Haiti's small but powerful rich elite.

``This is the real meaning of Aristide,'' said a manager at one of the island nation's faded five-star hotels, as he watched the peasants carving up land. ``You Americans don't realize what you're doing bringing back Aristide. He wants everyone to eat corn. There will be no ice cream. If you liked Fidel Castro, you're gonna love this little priest.''

At the heart of those fears are Aristide's long-stated policies to divvy up Haiti's riches. In a land where the overwhelming majority of the population lives in crushing poverty while a tiny minority controls the economy and luxuriates in sprawling villas far from the slums, a formal, gradual redistribution of wealth is the only way to avert civil war, according to Aristide's aides.

``We don't know if we'll be able to keep these plots,'' the barefoot land-seizer said with a smile. ``First, we make the occupation, and then we wait and see."

The man, missing a little finger he said was chopped off by paramilitary thugs last February, asked not to be identified by name. He was still afraid, he said, because Aristide has yet to return. But his mere presence, along with that of dozens of others usurping land in broad daylight Saturday, showed how emboldened the city's poor have become with the presence of 20,000 American troops who they believe are on their side.