On Dec. 17, a heavily armed commando unit stormed and took control of the National Palace for about five hours. Although they were surrounded by the Haitian National Police (PNH), the assailants managed to drive out of the Palace grounds and speed to the Dominican border some 50 kilometers away. There they abandoned their vehicles and escaped into the Dominican Republic on foot. Only one suspected assailant was captured by Haitian police.

According to a Haitian government spokesman, there was a total of 33 gunmen, who were dressed in military uniforms. Driving two or three large pick-up trucks, they rammed their way through the Palace gates around 2 a.m. after lobbing a grenade at them.

"They entered firing, and our agents responded with the usual strategy, that is they fired back in order to later rout them," said Jean Oriel, head of the Presidential Security Unit (USP). "Upon learning of the situation, I informed the Chief of State, who asked me to take all necessary measures to defeat the enemy."

The intense gunfire exchanged during the Palace take-over roused many Port-au-Prince residents and ignited hours of anxious telephone calling, briefly jamming international circuits to the country.

Before attacking the Palace, the gunmen had fired on the National Penitentiary, a few blocks away, possibly attempting to free some prisoners. Haitian government spokesmen say that attack was repulsed.

In the fighting, two Haitian policemen -- Théogène François and Romain Jean Eustache -- were killed. Six were wounded, including Duke Jacques, Belle Crisnord, Mérisette Ednor, Dieugrand Richard, and USP officer Nazaine Anthony. 

One assailant was also killed at the Palace. He was identified only as "Perez," and it has been speculated but not confirmed that he was a Dominican. His body, in a camouflage uniform and a pool of blood, was shown to reporters. Police say they found documents on him.

Another man who may have been among the assailants, Haitian citizen Pierre Richardson, was wounded in the foot and captured after the pick-up he was driving was stopped at a road-block near the border. He was found with "a large sum of cash, several documents in Spanish and an M16 rifle," according to Reuters.

At the Palace, commando members communicated by radio to each other in Creole, English and Spanish, sparking speculation that Dominicans were among them. In their intercepted radio communications, the assailants identified their leader as Guy Philippe, said a Haitian government official who requested anonymity. Philippe, a former police chief in Cap Haïtien, was implicated in an alleged coup attempt last October (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 18 No. 32 10/25/2000). Haitian government sources say he was the leader of a circle of influential police chiefs known as they "Ecuadorians," because they were trained by the Ecuadorian Special Forces in Ecuador during the 1991-94 coup d'état. When their alleged plot was foiled, they sought and received refuge in the Dominican Republic.

Guy Philippe called some press agencies and radio stations from the DR to deny that he had any involvement in the attack. According to him, "it was all just theater to provide a pretext to attack the opposition." The coup attempt would have been successful if he were involved, he said.

On leaving the Palace, the commandos killed two passers-by and wounded several others on the Tabarre Road and on National Road #4, which links Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In two different areas near Croix-de-Bouquet, a town about half way between Port-au-Prince and the border, a man named "Ti Ra" was wounded in the arm at a people's barricade and some youths were fired on. The fleeing assailants were briefly followed by a Haitian government helicopter, but they fired on the aircraft and it broke off the chase.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said that the PNH had made a "strategic retreat" to allow the gunmen to escape so it could later "snare them in a fish net."

The brazen assault on the Palace prompted a fierce and emotional anti-coup response from the Haitian people. By dawn, barricades were erected around the whole city. A large crowd, armed with picks, clubs, and machetes as well as pistols, 12-gauge shotguns, and automatic weapons, surrounded the Presidential Palace. 

Meanwhile, angry crowds all over the city went on the rampage. They burned the Pétionville home of Gérard Pierre-Charles, a leader of the Washington-supported Democratic Convergence (CD) oppostion front (Pierre-Charles was in Miami at the time). Also torched were the CD headquarters (which was also the seat of the CD-component OPL), as well as the headquarters of three CD member parties: Conacom, the KID, and ALAH. Also, the French government's French Institute was sacked, particularly the computer room.

In the provinces, homes belonging to opposition members were burned in Petit Goâve and Gonaïves. Two security guards were killed by fire in Gonaïves at the house of Mochrenah leader Pastor Luc Mésadieu, another opposition politician.

Ben Dupuy, secretary general of the National Popular Party (PPN), criticized the PNH's performance during the episode. The police could not take control of the Palace until after the assailants decided to leave it after 5 long hours, he said. The commando unit also suffered very few losses, leaving with virtually everything it brought: vehicles, radios, and weapons. They crossed the Dominican border by foot, leaving behind their vehicles and uniforms. Perez, the assailant killed, had on civilian clothes beneath his uniform, suggesting that the commando unit intended to melt back into the population after their action.

Because the raid appears to have been launched from the DR, possibly with Dominican military support, Dominican ambassador to Haiti, Alberto Despradel Cabral, was on the defensive. "We have no problem with the legitimacy, with the Haitian government presided over by President Aristide," he said. "If there are some people who attacked the National Palace, they are Haitian people, exactly, who have acted outside of Haitian legality. But we have nothing to do with that."

Condemnation of the coup attempt came from the French government, the Organization of American States' Secretary General César Gaviria, and U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. U.S. Ambassador Brian Dean Curran requested and obtained reinforcements for the police security around the U.S. embassy and U.S. consulate in Port-au-Prince.

Robert Ménard, secretary general of the Paris-based Reporters Without Frontiers, said that Aristide partisans took advantage of the coup attempt to aggress certain journalists identified with the opposition. Certain conservative radio stations, like Radio Métropole and Radio Vision 2000, stopped broadcasting on Dec. 17, apparently for security reasons.

In a message to the nation on the afternoon of Dec. 17, President Aristide recalled the horrors of the Sept. 30, 1991 coup d'état. "Haitians will never again be sent into hiding," he said. "The time of coup d'états is over... I call on the Haitian people to continue to mobilize peacefully, respect the rights of all citizens, respect the rights of everybody without distinction." Information Minister Guy Paul condemned the acts of "dechoukaj" (uprooting) by popular organizations, while at the same time saying he understood their anger.

Most opposition leaders took cover on Dec. 17 and called the coup attempt a fabrication. "It is a pretext of a coup d'état, about which we still don't understand all the ins and outs," said CD leader Micha Gaillard. "It looks a lot like the events of Jul. 28 (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 20 8/1/01); it is a creation of the Lavalas in order to justify hunting down all the leaders and militants of the Convergence around the country."

But the PPN interpreted the attack neither like the opposition (as an invention) nor the government (as a coup).

"Obviously you can't hope to carry out a coup and control an entire country with 30 guys," Ben Dupuy said. "These attacks of Jul. 28 and Dec. 17 are provocations to try to spark civil war and invite yet another foreign military invasion, similar to those in the Dominican Republic in 1965 or Grenada in 1983."

For months, the PPN has warned that the Dominican Republic is being used as a staging ground for attacks against Haiti, much as Washington-financed "contras" used Honduras to wage war against Nicaragua's Sandinistas in the 1980s. Many former Haitian dictators, coup leaders, and soldiers are presently living in the Dominican Republic.