US stands guard as Aristide gets ready to return home: Patrick Cockburn in Port-au-Prince watches Haitians prepare a royal welcome for their radical President

UNSMILING American military police bearing heavy machine-guns guard the four corners of President Jean- Bertrand Aristide's house on a plain on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. It was here, at the start of the coup on 29 September 1991, that Fr Aristide watched, as 'friends, militants who were with me, or who tried to reach the house, were massacred'.

The house was gutted. Scorch marks show where flames licked the walls. Even Fr Aristide's pets were shot by the soldiers. Everything from light fixtures to wash basins was looted and is being replaced by Haitians working 24 hours a day without pay, to get the house ready for his return on Saturday.

The strength of the US garrison protecting President Aristide's residence at Tabarre is a sign that, while he depends on them for his return to Haiti, the US cannot do without the man that leaked embassy reports once called a 'firebrand radical'. Only Fr Aristide has the popularity to replace the outgoing regime of soldiers, paramilitaries, and death squads.

The depth of affection felt by the Haitian poor for Fr Aristide was expressed by Marcilin Lornera, 57, an unemployed mechanic, who was stumbling along the rubble road to the house at Tabarre. Looking older than his years, he said he had been walking for about three hours - he was too poor to own a watch - and just wanted to see where Fr Aristide would live.

He said that he had not worked since the coup and he had difficulty explaining how he had survived. 'I live because God lets me live,' he said. 'If it was up to the bad people who got rid of Aristide, then I would die.'

He walked around a meadow that was filled with rusty tin cans and donkeys, surrounding the Tabarre house, listening to the workers inside singing a hymn in creole to the refrain 'He's Up There. He's Coming.'

Six years ago, on 11 September 1988 Mr Lornera was attending mass as usual at Ste Jean Bosco, Fr Aristide's yellow-and-white church, in the centre of Port-au-Prince, 100 yards from the room, down a narrow alley, where he lives with his wife. As the liturgy began, armed men smashed the gates of the church and attacked the congregation with pistols and machetes. 'We all started to run when we heard the screams,' Mr Lornera said.

Back in the church, Fr

Aristide shouted 'Blessed be the eternal' as more than a dozen members of his congregation were hacked or shot to death. Mr Lornera recalled seeing one man shot in the courtyard with a Bible in his hand. 'I saw a pregnant woman screaming for help in the pews, and holding on to her stomach. A man had just speared her there and she was bathed in red blood,' he said.

Today, there are 15ft-high trees growing in the nave of the burnt-out church, and paint is peeling off the walls. The Silesian order, to which Fr Aristide belonged and whose school is next door, expelled him. They accused him, among other things, of putting 'the Eucharist and the sacraments at the service of politics'. Fr Aristide said that the crime of which he was accused 'is the crime of preaching food for all men and women'.

This was a revolutionary slogan in Haiti, one of the most divided societies in the world, where the millionaire elite live in walled and guarded villas on the mountain above the capital while the per capita income is under dollars 350 ( pounds 225) a year.

In 1985, Fr Aristide said: 'A Christian who wishes to grow in holiness must ask that the land be distributed. He must ask that the big landowners give land to the poor, and that the poor work that land and make it fruitful.'

The ruined shell of Ste Jean Bosco shows how the rich of Haiti responded to that idea. One businessman described Fr Aristide as 'a cross between the ayatollah and Fidel (Castro)'.

Elected in 1990 with 67 per cent of the vote, President Aristide lasted only seven months in office. Washington officials always regarded him with deep suspicion, as a left-wing priest. But the US eventually discovered that they had no alternative candidate to hold Haiti together.