PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Most everywhere he goes, Guy Philippe strides through adoring crowds chanting his name, but the rebel leader with the boyish grin says he doesn’t want to be president and won’t create another military dictatorship in Haiti.

His behaviour suggests otherwise.

“The country is in my hands!” Philippe declared on the radio Tuesday, and threatened to arrest Prime Minister Yvon Neptune. He also said he was Haiti’s new “military chief”.

Philippe, who is 36 and counts former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet as among his heroes, has flip-flopped before, leaving many wondering what is really going on inside his head.

After a motley band of rebels under his command captured Haiti’s second-largest city, Cap-Haitien, on February 22, he threatened to move soon on the capital. Then he said he would wait a few days to “give peace a chance” – and a chance for President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to resign. Then he threatened to blockade the capital.

In the end, he arrived in a convoy on Monday without firing a shot after Aristide departed the previous day.

“My job is done,” Philippe said after the president left. “We’re not interested in politics. I know security, so that’s where I’ll be if they want me.”

But on Tuesday, he started calling himself “the chief”. His fighters settled into the former army headquarters, near the presidential palace.

The top US diplomat for Latin America, Roger Noriega, dismissed Philippe, saying he would “probably want to make himself scarce” as hundreds more US Marines, French Legionnaires and troops from other countries arrived to restore order.

But the United States, which on Tuesday had 400 US Marines in Haiti and was sending more, may have to contend with Philippe as a player. Lots of Haitians seem to love him.

Hundreds ran alongside his convoy and chanted “Guy Philippe” Tuesday, trying to get close to him as, wearing all black and with a pistol bulging from his waist, he waved from the back of a pick-up truck.

“The people want Guy Philippe to be Haiti’s leader,” said one man, Evans Celestine. “Everybody wants a chance to have food and work.”

Aristide had called Philippe and the other rebels “terrorists,” accusing them of ties to drug trafficking and citing past killings of Aristide followers by Philippe’s fellow commanders.

Philippe was accused of masterminding deadly attacks on the Haitian Police Academy and the National Palace in July and December 2001, as well as hit-and-run raids against police stations on Haiti’s Central Plateau over the last two years. Philippe denies this.

Human Rights Watch says that while Philippe was police chief in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas from 1997-99, dozens of suspected gang members were executed by police under the command of Philippe’s deputy.

Philippe, Human Rights Watch adds, was also a Duvalier death squad leader in the 1980s.

Asked if he had ever killed anyone, Philippe replied Tuesday: “I won’t answer this question because it’s not a fair question.”

“I’m just one Haitian who loves his country,” Philippe said. “The people love us for what we are doing.”

Philippe, who speaks fluent English and Spanish along with Creole and French, spends time in Miami, where he has an American wife – originally from Wisconsin – and children aged 4 and 6.

He says he has a law degree from Ecuador and studied medicine in Mexico for a year.

On February 27, Britain’s Guardian newspaper online edition reported Philippe as saying that he admires US President George W Bush because “I like tough guys, guys who protect their country.”

Philippe was born to peasants near the provincial town of Jeremie. He said the Haitian army sent him as a cadet to receive training at a police academy in Ecuador from 1992-1995. He denied reports he had been trained by US Special Forces troops in Ecuador.

But Human Rights Watch insists that this information is factual and says Philippe fled Haiti for Ecuador in 1991 when Aristide was ousted in a military coup. At the time, Philippe was in the Haitian army.

Just before Philippe finished his training, Aristide was restored to power in 1994 by US troops. The next year, Aristide disbanded the army, meaning that after completing his training, Philippe had no army to serve in.

Philippe joined Haiti’s new police force in 1995, eventually serving as police chief in Cap-Haitien.

Under Rene Preval, the new president elected in 1995, Philippe helped hunt down members of the ousted military junta, including former members of the disbanded army. He now claims a common cause with some of these men.

Philippe’s career in the police came to an abrupt end in 2000, when the authorities accused him of plotting a coup with other police chiefs.

He fled, first to Ecuador, then to the Dominican Republic.

In December 2001, when armed men tried to seize the presidential National Palace, a year after disputed elections returned Aristide to office for a second term, authorities accused Philippe of masterminding the operation.

But extradition negotiations failed, and Philippe remained at large.

While in the Dominican Republic, his reputed taste for luxury hotels fuelled speculation he was involved in drug trafficking. He has vehemently denied these charges.

Some of Philippe’s men say they see him being a general. Philippe has said he wants to reconstitute the army, which has a history of ruling with brutality, but says soldiers should stay in the barracks and not lead the country.

– Associated Press and the Sunday Observer