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On this occasion the force was able to deploy without resistance, paving the way forAristide’s return. The handover from peace restoration to peacekeeping operation(from MNF to UNMIH) took place in March 1995. UNMIH comprised 6 000troops and about 800 civilian police officers.The democratic credentials of the presidential election five years later in 2000,which saw Aristide returned to power were hotly disputed, with even the OASregistering its misgivings about the poll. 614 It is upon this basis that domestic andinternational calculations of support or opposition to Aristide’s removal in 2004hinge. While some human rights activists have painted Aristide as the villain, someAfrican and Caribbean states, and commentators on the left worldwide, tended toview Aristide as the legitimate leader of Haiti, in terms of the outcome of the 2000elections. From the latter perspective, Aristide’s removal from power in 2004 was aclear interruption of democratic government in Haiti, buttressed by foreignassistance.Nonetheless, by January 2004, Aristide was reduced to governing by decree.Tensions were rising in Haiti, after six months of violent protests against thegovernment. Violence escalated with the decision of the Front de Résistance del’Artibonite (FRA, or the Artibonite Resistance Front) based in the northern city ofGonaïves, to begin a military campaign against the government on 5 February 2004.Joining ranks with Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a prominent member of Cédras’ deathsquads, FRA’s leader Guy Philippe commanded an estimated 500 former membersof the Haitian Army (whom Aristide had unwisely disbanded but not disarmed in1995), a coalition called Front pour la Libération et la Reconstruction Nationales (FLRN, orthe National Liberation and Reconstruction Front). 615614 The OAS declined to dispatch observers to the Haitian Presidential and Senatorialelections of 26 November 2000, as the poll went against the Organisation’s position thatelections only be held under conditions of ‘national accord’. Such accord was absent,stemming from irregularities in the country’s two previous elections, on 21 May 2000,and in 1997. Opposition parties comprising the Convergence Démocratique called for anannulment of the 21 May elections, and refused to participate in the Novemberelections, which they described as ‘illegal’. See ‘Third Report of the Mission of theOrganization of American States to Haiti, Visit of the Assistant Secretary General toHaiti, February 6-10, 2001. Accessed online at:http://www.oas.org/xxxiiga/english/docs_en/report3_haiti.htm on 4 December, 2010.615 Armed Conflict Database, International Institute of Strategic Studies, accessed onlineat:244