18759: Burnham: Globe and Mail: Haiti: The army is gone, the police are helpless (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: thor burnham <thorald_mb@hotmail.com>

Haiti: The army is gone, the police are helpless

By PAUL KNOX
Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - Page A17

Jean-Bertrand Aristide's boldest stroke as President of Haiti was to disband
the country's army. It existed for two purposes only: to dispense day-to-day
terror among civilians, and to thwart the periodic expression of the popular
will. In a land scarred by oppression, it was the fount of violence. It was
thoroughly corrupt, and it was also unnecessary. Its existence betrayed the
ugly truth about Haiti's brutal despots: Their only potential enemy was the
people in whose name they claimed to rule.

It was the army that overthrew Mr. Aristide in 1991, eight months into his
first term as an elected president. A U.S.-led military invasion restored
him to power in 1994. Within a year, the army was dismantled and its
equipment destroyed. Teams of United Nations experts, advisers, technicians
and relief workers arrived in Haiti to try to smooth the transition to
civilian rule.

One of their chief activities was helping Haiti build a national police
force. The hope was that it would not only supervise the streets effectively
for the first time, but also offer protection for the government. As Mr.
Aristide is fond of pointing out, there have been 32 coups d'état in Haiti's
200 years of independence. Perhaps an effective police force, with a
well-trained and robustly armed elite unit, could be a visible bulwark
against the overthrow of democracy.

That dream has died. This month, in as many as a dozen towns in the north
central region, detachments of the Haitian National Police (PNH) have
surrendered to assaults by street gangs and armed guerrillas. Mr. Aristide
himself has acknowledged the PNH is incapable of defending the capital city
against a serious armed attack. He says he wants foreign police and
equipment to bolster the locals. But his real protection, if the rebels
muster enough strength to attack Port-au-Prince, will come from his own
followers - led by the armed gangs of Aristide loyalists that control the
slums of the city and much of Haiti's contraband trade.

I spent some time here in 1996, when Canadian troops were part of a UN
peacekeeping force, and more than 100 Canadian police officers were helping
train the PNH. French and U.S. police were also participating. Everyone I
spoke with warned that it would take years to get the force up to speed.
Some of the new PNH members didn't know how to drive a vehicle, let alone
use a firearm. The force lacked cars, trucks and tactical weapons. Officers
sometimes showed up for work without their uniforms.

But with peacekeeping crises raging in other parts of the world, foreign
governments had little stomach for an extended mission in Haiti. Their
support soon dwindled - partly through lack of interest, but also because
Mr. Aristide's successor and close ally, René Préval, failed to persuade
donors that their taxpayers' money was being put to good use. By 2001, when
Mr. Aristide became President once again, the peacekeepers and most of the
police trainers were gone. Slumlords had districts such as Cité Soleil, the
cauldron of misery on the Port-au-Prince waterfront, firmly in their grip.

Since then, the line between political rivalry and gang warfare has become
increasingly blurred in Haiti. In the capital and major provincial towns,
clashes between gangs allied with or opposed to Mr. Aristide have become
more frequent. Whatever you call the violence, the police are increasingly
unable to do much about it. The climate of insecurity is pervasive. The
current uprising in the north is only the most visible part.

I travelled up to Gonaïves on Saturday, sharing the road with brightly
painted buses bearing names such as The Sweat Of My Brow, and tiny pickup
trucks that sagged under the weight of a dozen passengers. The route
traverses the Artibonite River valley, the rice bowl of Haiti, where farm
workers share the lush green paddies with grazing cattle and roosting
egrets. On the way back, in the late afternoon, we stopped at the bustling
market where the road crosses the river.

Women vendors, sitting beside fat baskets full of plum tomatoes, okra and
onions, had a story to tell. A short while earlier, a man had arrived in a
car. He pulled out a gun, shot another man dead, dragged his body to the
river, dumped it in, strode back to the vehicle and drove off. A girl of
about seven or eight showed us a red stain on the dusty road. An empty black
leather wallet lay beside it.

That was the what, where, when and how, more or less. No one knew the who,
or the why. There was no talk of investigation, let alone punishment. No one
thought to mention the police

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