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Ther e has been no formal request for South Africa to grant ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide any form of exile, the government said yesterday.

Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad told reporters in Pretoria he assumed there had been informal talks.

Pahad said South Africa would consider a wide range of views if such a request were received.

"In principle we would have no problem," Pahad said.

He reiterated South Africa's wish for a peaceful resolution to the problems of Haiti. He expressed the hope that those who rebelled against Aristide would not be given any say in a new transitional government for that country.

Several opposition parties have already condemned the mooted asylum.

"We believe that it would not be in the best interests of South Africa as a democratic country to give such a person asylum," African Christian Democratic Party president Kenneth Meshoe said yesterday.

"We should not be seen to be defending human rights abuses".

Meshoe said if Aristide had violated human rights in Haiti he should answer for that instead being given refuge here.

National Action co-leader Cassie Aucamp said that South Africa would be again aligning itself with "the Ghadaffis and the Castros" by granting asylum.

It was ironic that South Africa should grant asylum to someone accused of human rights violations in his own country when there were still people in South African jails serving sentences for apartheid-era human rights violations, Aucamp said.

Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder said the situation in Haiti reflected badly on President Thabo Mbeki after he decided to give credibility to Aristide by officially visiting Haiti recently.

"In future it will be better if the South African government use normal human rights criteria in choosing their friends and their official visits and let their judgement not be polluted with pro-black or anti-white sentiments and subjectivity," he said.

The Democratic Alliance said at the weekend that South Africa should not become a safe haven for dictators, and that its fund of goodwill was being dissipated by "strange friendships".

Meanwhile, it was reported from Bangui that an official of the Central African Republic's state protocol department expected Aristide to travel on to South Africa where he believed the former cleric was to go into exile.

It was added that Bangui said it had accepted Aristide's arrival as "a purely humanitarian" gesture of solidarity with the Haitian people, and had agreed to "take in the former president of the world's first black republic," but it did not say how long Aristide would be welcome nor where he might go afterwards.

US Marines arrived in Haiti earlier in the day yesterday to launch an international force to restore order.

The United Nations Security Council overnight authorised the deployment of a multinational force for up to three months.

Canadian special-forces, who had secured the airport on Sunday to protect the evacuation of Canadians, were still at their posts and French troops and gendarmes were expected to arrive later yesterday.

Aristide flew out from the same airport with US help on Sunday, under pressure from a mounting insurrection and having been abandoned by the international community.

Haiti has been a repeated recipient of peacekeeping missions and foreign interventions, but to date none have had lasting effect, including an occupation by a previous generation of US Marines between 1915 and 1940.

During that period the Marines also controlled the Haitian police. – Sapa.

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