ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

DAVID BEARD

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP)—U.N. officials welcomed a peace proposal by opponents of Haiti’s exiled president, but said Sunday the army and lawmakers must move faster to restore democracy or face a broadened commercial embargo.

A U.N. spokesman said the proposal by a group of lawmakers opposed to exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide represented a shift toward acceptance of the U.N. plan to free violence-plagued Haiti from military rule.

Still, U.N. officials were trying to assess whether the plan unveiled Saturday night would ease the current crisis, or was a delaying tactic.

The United Nations reapplied a weapons and petroleum embargo last week to pressure the military to give up power. One of the warships placed off Haiti to enforce the sanctions cruised in Port-au-Prince harbor Sunday, then steamed to a point off suburban Mariani near the headquarters of Haiti’s tiny navy.

Under the U.N. plan, army commander Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras is to step down and Aristide is to return by Saturday. But Cedras has resisted quitting, and the country has been plagued by violence blamed mostly on opponents of Aristide.

Overnight, six people were reported shot in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. Their conditions were not known.

The new proposal attempts to win some concessions from Aristide before allowing his return from 25 months of exile.

It asks for parliament to enact a general amnesty law, for Aristide to accept political opponents into his Cabinet and for the world body to lift the weapons and petroleum embargo.

Aristide decreed an amnesty for political crimes, but Cedras has argued that this order could be revoked and an amnesty law is needed. Aristide says he’s not opposed to including opponents in his government, but only after he returns.

U.N. envoy Dante Caputo unveiled the proposal Saturday night, after meeting with U.S. Ambassador William Swing and Premier Robert Malval, head of the transition government. Malval is to ask Aristide about concessions in a meeting Wednesday in Washington.

The U.S. Embassy welcomed the initiative and issued a statement saying, ‘‘We encourage all parties to give the proposal the closest possible scrutiny at the earliest possible time.’‘

A U.N. spokesman said Sunday that the proposal represented a shift by several anti-Aristide legislators to acceptance of the U.N. plan, signed by Aristide and Cedras in July.

‘‘We clearly sense that (with) the embargo … it is not in anybody’s interest to stall,’‘ the spokesman, Eric Falt, told The Associated Press on Sunday.

But Falt, Caputo’s spokesman, said as he looked out at the warship from a mountainside hotel, ‘‘It is apparent that if it (the pace toward settlement) doesn’t move much faster, then the U.N. Security Council will press on for an embargo on all commercial items.’‘

A senior U.N. official said such a recommendation could go before the Security Council as soon as Monday. A duty officer at U.N. headquarters in New York, Jean-Pierre Bugada, said Sunday afternoon that no session was yet scheduled to consider the issue.

Swing met Malval on Sunday, and officials in Malval’s office said the premier was scheduled to meet with Cedras on Monday and parliament also had scheduled a session.

Cedras, who helped topple Aristide in a 1991 coup, has formally asked the president for early retirement but he gave no planned date to leave in an Oct. 14 letter to Aristide. U.N. officials did not know if the request was only a formality.

‘‘Gen. Cedras has pledged before to retire. Gen. Cedras has pledged to honor the (U.N.) plan,’‘ Falt said. ‘‘We’ll see if he’s a man of honor.’‘

Cedras was spending Sunday with his family, said a senior military official at army headquarters downtown. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he and two other senior officers reviewed videotapes of U.S. news reports on Haiti.

Throughout the city, gas stations were closed, but motorists sat at some pumps anyway, waiting until the stations would open. Esso, Shell and Texaco ordered the spigots turned off at their storage depots to comply with the embargo, and the move prompted panic buying and a sharp reduction in the nation’s fuel on hand.

Haitians played soccer near the idled tank farm where the gasoline is stored in the suburb of Carrefour.

In another development, a senior official in the former Duvalier dictatorship told right-wing Radio Liberte on Sunday that he had already met with Malval. He described him as a friend.

The Washington Post quoted Malval as acknowledging he had met with former Port-au-Prince mayor and police chief Franck Roumain, who is accused by human rights groups of masterminding the Sept. 11, 1988, massacre at Aristide’s parish church while the future president said Mass.

Malval has said he would like to include all factions in the transition to a democratic Haiti, which has suffered from a series of coups since the fall of the Duvaliers in 1986.