19956: (Craig) NYT: Haitians Again Relying on U.S. Military to Bring Order (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>



Haitians Again Relying on U.S. Military to Bring Order
March 7, 2004
By TIM WEINER and LYDIA POLGREEN

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 6 - Jean Rodrigue peered
through the green gates of the palace wall, struggling to
take in the sight of a dozen or more United States marines
in armored vehicles on the lawn of the National Palace that
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had fled.

A decade ago, Mr. Rodrigue had wept for joy when Mr.
Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president,
returned with the help of the American military. Now he is
gone, and American troops are trying to mop up the mess he
left behind.

"There was so much hope then," Mr. Rodrigue, a 40-year-old
biology teacher, said, staring vacantly at the marines from
underneath a wide-brimmed straw hat. "We all believed in
Aristide and we believed the world would help us."

Now the United States military is back in Haiti for the
third time in 90 years. It says its mission will last 90
days. On June 1, the United States plans to hand off to an
international force under the United Nations. Planning for
that force has barely begun, and Haiti's 15 neighbors in
the Caribbean, furious at Mr. Aristide's ouster under
American pressure, say they want no part of it.

Trying to put Haiti back together again may well require
more soldiers, more time and more money than the last
American military deployment, in 1994, to build lasting
institutions, like the police, courts and schools. The $3
billion spent by the United States during those years has
washed away like the soil on Haiti's denuded hills.

Many of the armed rebels who rose up in Haiti this past
month are veterans of the junta that overthrew Mr. Aristide
in 1991. They have not put down their arms as they have
promised. United States Special Forces have flown to the
rebels' strongholds outside Port-au-Prince to try to
persuade them to do so.

United States military officers are working with senior
members of Haiti's police force trying to reform a rabble
of demoralized and poorly trained officers, who have been
unable to bring order to a deeply divided country of
heavily armed citizens with grievances and long memories.
United States officials said the new police chief would be
L?on Charles, 38, who has worked with them before as a
Haitian Coast Guard commander.

The Haitian government, torn between rival elites, has
traditionally ignored the needs of Haiti's poor, who saw in
Mr. Aristide a champion of their interests. Though a
"council of elders" was formed Friday to try to select
nominees for a provisional government, political discourse
here is still often carried out at gunpoint.

When the last American-led military mission in Haiti ended
in 1996, it left behind a nation that slowly fell apart
again, dissolving into the monthlong armed rebellion that
led Mr. Aristide to exile. Haitians hope for better this
time, but history has taught them many cruel lessons.

After the Americans left, Mr. Aristide decided to send home
the soldiers of the Haitian Army with their guns but no
jobs or compensation. As a result, many soldiers joined the
rebels to seek his ouster, and the rebels now want to bring
back the much feared Haitian Army.

A three-month occupation would be the shortest dalliance in
a long and inauspicious American history of military
engagement with Haiti. The first American occupation lasted
two decades, from 1915 to 1934. The second, starting in
1994, involved 20,000 American-led troops.

This time around, the United Nations secretary general,
Kofi Annan, says, any peacekeeping force will have to be a
long-term mission. An in-and-out operation may have little
effect on a nation so scarred, where legitimate authority
is shaky after what some Haitians see as an American-backed
coup.

The United States "didn't think about the endgame when they
had Aristide leave," said Arturo Valenzuela, a former
National Security Council officer for Latin America. "They
thought the problem was the bad leader, just like in Iraq,
and that the departure of the bad leader would have a good
outcome. Political order has to be established with
legitimate force. Only the U.N. can do that."

A United Nations Security Council resolution passed last
Sunday only approved the dispatch of troops by member
countries. About 1,900 have arrived - 1,200 Americans, 500
French, 130 Chileans and 60 Canadians. Canada pledged 390
more and Brazil has promised troops. The improvised
American-led effort may grow to 5,000 soldiers, including
about 2,000 marines, this month.

But there is no visible recruitment yet for a United
Nations force. "The U.N. is not in the business of
recruiting," said Fred Eckhard, Mr. Annan's spokesman. "If
you want that, speak to the United States and its friends."

Mr. Annan, under the resolution, has 25 days left to create
a peacekeeping force. Until then, the United States is in
charge. But as in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, it may
prove easier for American troops to land in Haiti than to
leave.

Raymond W. Kelly, now the New York police commissioner,
strove to create a working force for law and order in Haiti
a decade ago. But the national police dwindled to a force
of less than 3,000, became dissolute and corrupt, and
barely exists today.

To re-establish order, "clearly you need more resources
than were ever talked about there" in the past, Mr. Kelly
said. "You'd be talking roughly 20,000 police in Haiti."

Training and equipping a force that size could take years.

The question of the Haitian Army also overshadows the
country's future. Mr. Aristide dissolved it in 1995; the
armed rebels have announced its resurrection. The army was
created by the American military after it occupied the
country and imposed martial law in 1915.

Mary A. Renda, author of "Taking Haiti," an award-winning
history of the American occupation, said the Marines
created "a military that was intended to be used against
the Haitian people."

The government is riven by factions. Beyond the rebels,
whom the United States has told to lay down their arms,
there remain loyal Aristide ministers and supporters, and
the political opposition led by Haiti's elites.

Many Aristide loyalists are still hiding from rebel death
threats, and many elites supported the rebel cause - the
overthrow of Mr. Aristide and the reconstitution of the
army, which has always served the elites at the expense of
its poor.

Many of Haiti's poor - the millions who live on less than a
dollar a day - remain loyal to Mr. Aristide, who rose to
power on his promises to deliver "peace in the mind, peace
in the belly." They wonder what role they will have in a
new government.

"Look at how we are living," said Sony Aurelien, a
33-year-old port inspector who lives in La Saline, the vast
slum where Mr. Aristide served as a priest, gesturing at
the open sewers overflowing with putrid garbage. "With
Aristide, for the first time we have started to live. I am
the first one in my family to have a regular job. Aristide
tried to lift us up, so America kidnapped him and took him
away."

One model for Haiti today may be Liberia, the West African
nation of former American slaves established with American
support in 1821.

In Liberia, less then seven months ago, as rebels besieged
the capital, 2,000 marines dropped anchor offshore and
secured the airport for aid shipments. Small platoons
patrolled the capital and quelled the rebels. In weeks,
they handed off power to United Nations peacekeepers.
Liberia is hardly healed, but $500 million worth of
promised international aid and the peacekeepers have made a
start.

Without law and order and a flood of economic aid,
thousands more Haitian refugees may take to the seas,
fleeing their failed state for Florida. The last time Haiti
fell to an armed rebellion, in 1991, some 40,000 refugees
washed up on American shores. During February, 1076
Haitians were intercepted by the United States Coast Guard.


Stopping refugees was a high priority in dispatching the
Marines. "We will turn back any refugee that attempts to
reach our shores," President Bush said.

Some of those trying to flee Haiti are Aristide loyalists
who fear for their lives. International law forbids
returning political refugees to a place where they might be
killed or jailed. In 1994, President Clinton created a
"safe haven" for Haitian refugees at the nearby American
naval base at Guant?namo Bay in Cuba. That base is now
filled with suspected Islamic militants imprisoned by the
United States.

Hunger and disease are rampant in Haiti, and the flow of
international aid achingly slow. Many international aid
agencies' stores were looted during the rebel advance on
the capital. "We have let Haiti slip back into a silent
humanitarian emergency even before this period of extreme
internal strife," Jan Egeland, the United Nations's chief
aid coordinator, told the Security Council on Friday.

Saturday was market day in the capital, the first calm day
for commerce in five weeks on the Rue des Miracles in
downtown Port-au-Prince. But, given Haiti's ruined economy,
"normal is terrible," said Mona Alexis, a street vendor
selling cinnamon, ginger and star anise alongside hawkers
of brake fluid, saddle shoes and cornflakes on the Street
of Miracles.

"I haven't sold a thing all day," said Ms. Alexis, 41, the
sole supporter of five children. "Nobody has any money. My
family and I are barely surviving."

United States military aircraft landed all Saturday
afternoon at the international airport here, deepening the
American presence in Haiti. They ranged from a 17-seat
government executive jet to a gray hulking Air Force
transport.

The transport jet touched down and, with its engines still
running, its nose cone tilted up. Two dozen marines, three
carrying laptop computers along with their weapons, walked
down a ramp, blinking and squinting in the harsh sun.

United Nations officials plan to fly here next week to
study Haiti's needs, Mr. Eckhard said.

A long international occupation of Haiti "would be sad, but
it's necessary," said R?gine Santil, a Port-au-Prince
shopkeeper. "We have proved through the years that we are
incapable of running this country. But didn't the Americans
who brought Aristide back 10 years ago know that this day
would come?"

Reporting for this article was contributed by Rachel L.
Swarns, Eric Schmitt and Christopher Marquis in Washington,
Warren Hoge at the United Nations and William K. Rashbaum
in New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/international/07HAIT.html?ex=1079624931&ei=1&en=7a0abc97e4929daf
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company