UNTIL last week, Rémy Chalot would tell anyone who went to his restaurant, which sits amid mounds of rotting rubbish, bubbling sewage and burnt-out car wrecks, how much he detested his President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Then seven days ago the President’s men came for him. Wearing grease-stained bala- clavas and high on crack cocaine and rum, a shrieking gang of Chimères, or “monsters”, the slum-dwelling illiterates whom Haiti’s failed leader uses to keep a bony grip on power, smashed their way in at 4am, firing shotguns and setting Mr Chalot’s home and business ablaze.

“Now I am terrified,” Mr Chalot said yesterday inside the dark and charred interior of the restaurant in the blighted stench of Cap- Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city. He added: “Everyone I knows hates Aristide now.”

For the past month Haiti has been in the grip of an ugly, murderous gang war between pro-Aristide militia and a rapidly growing collection of rebels intent on his bloody overthrow. It is a chaotic and deeply unnerving crisis that threatens to plunge the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation into a full-scale civil conflict. The United States ordered all staff out of Haiti on Saturday. Thousands of aid workers, missionaries and foreign citizens flocked to the airports as a diplomatic effort to resolve the violence appeared to have failed.

“We are on the verge of a generalised civil war,” a group of aid agencies declared.

So rabid is the feeling of betrayal among the former supporters of Mr Aristide, the diminutive Roman Catholic priest who won Haiti’s first free elections in 1990 with promises to end its long cycle of demagoguery and corruption, that many people are ready to welcome the return of Louis Jodel Chamblain, a man with the blood of more than 5,000 Haitian men, women and children on his hands.

Mr Chamblain, one of the most reviled and feared henchmen in Haiti’s turbulent history — no mean feat in a country that has suffered 32 coups and the flamboyant depravity of the Duvalier dynasty — commanded army death squads before and after the 1991 coup that ended Mr Aristide’s first ascent to the presidency.

Ten days ago Mr Chamblain returned from exile in the Dominican Republic to join an armed group formerly known as the Cannibal Army. Until last year they murdered and maimed on behalf of Mr Aristide, who was restored to power in 1994 with the help of 20,000 US troops.

Their sudden switch of allegiance is at the root of the revolt, which has claimed more than 70 lives since February 5, including at least 40 policemen. The rebels have seized a handful of towns and cities, taken control of much of the interior and taken Cap-Haïtien, on the northern coast.

The Cannibals, now known as the Artibonite Resistance Front, were formerly led by Amiot Metayer. His oppression of anti-government sympathisers inside his fiefdom of Gonaïves, a western port with a lucrative customs racket, was so bloody that last September the US ordered Mr Aristide to jail him.

Instead, Mr Metayer was found in a seaside slum, the top of his skull missing, his eyes gouged out and his heart removed.

His wife reportedly held a voodoo ceremony that pointed to Mr Aristide’s complicity in the murder. His brother, Butteur Metayer, immediately vowed revenge.

Earlier this month his group, brandishing bottles of rum, Uzi sub-machineguns and M16s, seized control of Gonaïves, the starting point of the 1984 uprising that eventually led to the exile of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

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