20087: (Chamberlain) UN team prepares for Haiti peacekeeping mission (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     UNITED NATIONS, March 8 (Reuters) - A U.N. assessment team is due to
arrive in Haiti on Tuesday to help prepare for a peacekeeping mission to be
deployed in the troubled Caribbean nation by June 1, the United Nations
said on Monday.
     The team will spend the next three months in Haiti laying the
groundwork for the broad U.N. peacekeeping operation, intended to help
Haiti rebuild after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's departure in the
face of an armed rebellion and international pressure, chief spokesman Fred
Eckhard said.
     One of the team's first tasks will be to help Secretary-General Kofi
Annan make recommendations by the end of the month on the size and
composition of the mission, in terms of troops, police, political staff and
others.
     Separately, Annan's special adviser on Haiti, Reginald Dumas, is
scheduled to make his first visit to Haiti next week, Eckhard said. Dumas
was named to the new post on Feb. 26 and has been conferring with leaders
of Haiti's Caribbean neighbors in recent days.
     The United Nations was also set on Tuesday to launch an emergency
appeal for aid contributions from wealthy nations.
     The peacekeeping mission was authorized by the 15-nation U.N. Security
Council in a resolution adopted on March 1.
     The U.N. operation is to take over from a U.S.-led multinational force
that began building up in Haiti a week ago, to restore order after
Aristide's departure for the Central African Republic. The work of that
force has been complicated by Aristide's charges that he was forced to
leave Haiti and remains its president.
     The March 1 resolution asked Annan to outline, within a month, a
program enabling the world body to help set up a new government in Haiti,
support humanitarian and economic aid and promote the protection of human
rights and the rule of law.
     It was uncertain who would lead the new mission but Brazil and Chile
are the top contenders, diplomats said.
     Last month's uprising was the latest in a long history of coups,
political unrest and violence in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest
country where as many as a third of the population of 8 million suffer from
chronic malnutrition.
     The United Nations, in turn, has a long history of involvement in
Haiti, with mixed results.
     But U.N. officials have pledged to take steps to ensure a renewed U.N.
presence in Haiti would turn out to be a long-term treatment rather than
just a band-aid as happened in the past.