18839: (Chamberlain) Haiti's enfeebled police no match for rebels (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Michael Christie

    PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb 19 (Reuters) - When around 50 policemen were
driven from the central Haitian town of Hinche this week by a band of
former soldiers numbering possibly as few as 15, they didn't just run to
the next town, and the next police station.
     Outgunned, under-trained and dispirited, they high-tailed it all the
way to the west coast of the impoverished Caribbean country, a
tooth-rattling four hours' drive away, witnesses said.
     They abandoned at least two other police posts along the road, took
colleagues stationed there with them, welded iron bars across a bridge and
forced a driver to park his truck across the path in a desperate bid to
stop the rebels from following.
     Few believe Haiti's 5,000 police -- one-seventh the number patrolling
New York City, which has about the same population of 8 million -- can roll
back an armed revolt that began in the city of Gonaives two weeks ago and
has now spread across the north.
     Not even the government does.
     Prime Minister Yvon Neptune called this week on the international
community to send technical assistance to help the police do their job.
     The police have abandoned a dozen towns after attacks by a motley
collection of armed gangs, civilian vigilantes and, most recently, a
professional paramilitary force led by a notorious former death squad
leader.
     Eight armed men who said they were Haitian policemen arrived on a boat
in Jamaica at the weekend, telling authorities they had fled over the water
after their police station was attacked a week ago.
     The Haitian police force has already had plenty of foreign assistance.
It was set up under U.N. supervision after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
was restored to power by 20,000 U.S. Marines in 1994, and disbanded the
army that had ousted him in a bloody coup three years before.
     What went wrong?
     Critics of the former slum priest, once hailed as a champion of
democracy and Haiti's downtrodden poor but now facing accusations of
corruption and political violence, say the foreign assistance was
undermined when the government politicized the force.
     Civilian administrators loyal to Aristide and the ruling Lavalas
Family party were appointed over professional police commanders. Known
drug-dealing commissioners were never punished but transferred to other,
and often more lucrative, posts, the critics say.
     "We spent hundreds of millions of dollars training a new police force,
advisers, for several years," said Ernest Preeg, who was a U.S. ambassador
to Haiti in the early 1980s before the U.S. intervention. Now, virtually
all of the police leadership trained by foreign advisers has gone, he said.
     Foreign assistance for the police force, along with millions of
dollars in other aid for the poorest country in the Americas were largely
suspended when parliamentary elections in 2000 were declared flawed.
    The Haitian police force has been criticized for human rights abuses by
groups such as Amnesty International, which in its 2003 report on Haiti,
said the police were accused of repressing anti-government protests while
failing to intervene to control violent pro-government crowds.
     Amnesty also said it was concerned about reports of several
"disappearances" of people who had been arrested by police, of
extrajudicial executions and complaints of police brutality.
     With Aristide's rule under threat, there is now talk of another
international attempt to build a professional police force in Haiti.
     But the frailty of the police is emblematic of much broader rot in
Haiti's crumbled institutions.
     Courts function at a judge's whim. The country does not have a
parliament because a dispute between Aristide and the opposition has held
up new elections.
     "When you're dealing with a country with such insipid levels of
institutions, then lack of law and order very rapidly disintegrates into an
inability to govern," said Peter Hakim, president of the Washington
think-tank, Inter-American Dialogue.