Aristide accuses U.S. of forcing his ouster

Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said last night that he was forced from his country by the U.S. military early Sunday morning, an accusation the Bush administration dismissed as “complete nonsense.”

Calling his ouster a “coup d’etat” by the United States, Mr. Aristide said, “I was told that to avoid bloodshed I’d better leave.” The soldiers who came to get him, he said, were “white American, white military.”

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, responding to complaints earlier in the day from black U.S. lawmakers and activists, said Mr. Aristide “was not kidnapped. We did not force him on the airplane. He went on the plane willingly.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the accusations were “complete nonsense,” and administration officials outlined a detailed chain of events that led to Mr. Aristide’s weekend departure.

“We took steps to protect Mr. Aristide, we took steps to protect his family, and they departed Haiti,” he said. “It was Mr. Aristide’s decision to resign.”

“The idea that someone was abducted is just totally inconsistent with everything I heard or saw,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

But Mr. Aristide told a different story in interviews last night with CNN and the Associated Press, arranged by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of many black lawmakers and activists who support Mr. Aristide.

“Agents were telling me that if I don’t leave they would start shooting and killing in a matter of time,” Mr. Aristide said last night in an interview with the AP from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, where he landed early yesterday.

Mr. Aristide admitted signing documents that removed him from power, but he said he had done so out of fear that the violence in his country, which has raged during the nearly monthlong political siege, would continue.

“And then, despite of diplomatic conversations we had, despite of all we did in a diplomatic way to prevent them to organize that massacre which would lead to a bloodshed, we had to leave and spent 20 hours in an American plane,” he said.

His captors, he told CNN, “were not Haitian forces. They were … Americans and Haitians together, acting to surround the airport, my house, the palace.”

“No one should force an elected president to move in order to avoid bloodshed,” Mr. Aristide said. “They lied to me, and they may lie to you, too.”

White House officials last night had no new comment on Mr. Aristide’s interviews and stood by their remarks from earlier in the day.

Democratic Reps. Maxine Waters of California and Charles B. Rangel of New York, as well as black activist and Aristide friend Randall Robinson, said in separate statements yesterday that armed U.S. guards took the Haitian leader out of his presidential home in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and put him on a plane.

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