Now What For Aristide?

(AP)  Nigeria has offered temporary asylum to Haiti's ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, at the request of Caribbean leaders.

The 15-nation Caribbean Community asked Nigeria to allow Aristide to stay there for a few weeks until he finds another place to go, Nigerian presidential spokesman Remi Oyo said Monday.

It was not immediately clear whether Aristide would agree to asylum in Nigeria.

Aristide fled Haiti on Feb. 29 as rebels were closing in on the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. He arrived in Central African Republic on March 1 and stayed there with his wife and two bodyguards until March 15, when he flew to Jamaica to be with his two daughters.

Interim Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, the United States and others have criticized Jamaica for accepting Aristide, saying his presence in the Caribbean would raise tensions in Haiti. Jamaica is about 100 miles from Haiti.

A spokesman for Latortue, Minister Robert Ulysse, welcomed Nigeria's offer.

"We didn't want any destablization, so it's good news if he can find a place" outside the region, he said.

It would not be the first time Nigeria has granted asylum to an ousted leader. Former Liberian president Charles Taylor traded in his seaside palace for a squat lodge in the Nigerian jungle city of Calabar after he resigned last August as rebels shelled Monrovia, the Liberian capital.

Taylor's one-time Liberian rival, former warlord Prince Johnson, was given refuge in the commercial capital of Lagos in the late 1990s and another rebel faction leader, Roosevelt Johnson, took asylum in the central city of Jos.

Ousted Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who left his nation starving and in anarchy when he was forced from power in 1991, spent the final years of his life in Lagos, where he died in 1995.

Meanwhile, human rights groups criticized Latortue. Human Rights Watch warned Monday that fighters in the rebel-held north were illegally detaining former Aristide officials and journalists who supported him. It urged French troops to quickly fill a "security vacuum" in northern Haiti.

The New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights, meanwhile, accused Latortue of "fanning the flames of lawlessness" when he shared a platform with rebel leaders at a rally in his hometown of Gonaives on Saturday. And Amnesty International's Americas director Eric Olson said "It sends a very bad signal for the prime minister."

Cabinet Minister Robert Ulysse rejected the criticism, saying Latortue was trying to "reckon with everything in the past" and discuss the "repressive nature" of Aristide's government.


By John Murray