New tensions emerged yesterday between the Caribbean Community and Haiti’s interim government in the face of Gerard Latortue’s seeming rejection of a set of the conditions Caricom leaders say his administration must fulfil if it wants to take Haiti’s seat in the Community.

Five Community foreign ministers, led by Barbados’ Billie Miller, are to travel to Port-au-Prince tomorrow to outline to Latortue what the region expects from his government, as well as gather information on the progress towards returning Haiti to democratic and constitutional government.

But in Haiti Latortue, who has had testy relations with the region, has been quoted as branding the Caricom conditionalities as “utter nonsense” and suggesting that there should be no barriers to Haiti regaining its place in the 15-member grouping.

“If the report out of Port-au-Prince attributed to Prime Minister Latortue is correct in his dismissal of the conditionalities we have outlined, then this will be most unfortunate and unhelpful to what we are seeking to achieve in the interest of the people of Haiti,” Caricom’s new chairman, Keith Mitchell, said yesterday.

“I say no more at this stage,” he added.

In Kingston, political sources yesterday sought to play down the potential new rift, although there was a sense of exasperation among some officials over what they considered to be Latortue’s erratic and less than astute behaviour since his installation as prime minister after the coup d’etat against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

However, Sunday Observer sources said that Latortue’s latest statement would not prevent the fact-finding mission to Haiti by the team led by Miller and including Guyana’s Rudy Insanally; Trinidad and Tobago’s Knowlson Gift; Antigua and Barbuda’s Harold Lovell ; and the Bahamas’ Fred Mitchell.

Latortue, named to head the interim government after Aristide’s controversial February 29 departure from Haiti, early on snubbed Prime Minister P J Patterson’s invitation to discuss the situation in his country and announced a withdrawal of Haiti’s ambassador in Kingston.

Angered by Jamaica’s decision to give Aristide temporary asylum and the region’s call for an international investigation into Aristide’s claim that he was victim of a political kidnapping orchestrated by the United States, Latortue denounced Caricom as unimportant and said that the Community had caused damage to Haiti.

He became further estranged from Caricom when he appeared on the same platform in Haiti with rebel leaders, most of whom are convicted murderers and drug smugglers with bad human rights records, and declared them heroes and freedom fighters.

But Latortue subsequently claimed that his statements about Caricom were misrepresented in translation from French and Creole into English and asked for a rebuilding of relations.

Last month, he sent back the ambassador to Jamaica, but at their summit in Grenada last week Mtichell reported that Caricom leaders, before they allowed Haiti back into their councils, wanted to see:

. moves toward an inclusive political process;

. moves toward the pursuit and disarming of all known criminals;

. the absence of persecution or arbitrary treatment of political opponents;

. the establishment of a credible election machinery; and

. a clear timetable for elections that would be internationally-monitored.

However, these conditionalities were not reflected in the final summit statement which outlined the leaders’ decision “to create a channel for engagement” with Latortue’s government by naming the foreign ministers who were assigned “to discuss recent developments with the Haitian officials”.

The leaders also named former Dominican trade minister Charles Maynard as Caricom’s special envoy to Haiti. Maynard once lived in Haiti and is also fluent in Creole, which is also spoken in Dominica.

Yesterday, Caricom’s secretary-general, Edwin Carrington, who will be accompanying the ministerial mission to Haiti, declined to comment on Latortue’s reported response to the Community’s conditions, saying that he wanted to ensure that the mission completed its work and reported to the Caricom Bureau – the small group of leaders that takes forward the work of the group in between summits.

Caricom was “anxious to press ahead with a resolution to the issue”, Carrington said.