20592: (Chamberlain) Arms embargo - a hitch in Haiti security plans (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Joseph Guyler Delva

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 19 (Reuters) - Disarming gangs, rebels
and people in general may be the key to peace in Haiti. But it won't happen
unless the Caribbean country's police can arm themselves to the teeth.
     As a new U.S.-backed government takes the reins following ousted
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's flight into exile, a U.S. embargo on
selling weapons to Haiti is proving to be a huge stumbling block to
restoring order.
     "I think it will be very difficult to take up that challenge, if the
embargo remains in effect," said Haiti's new police chief, Leon Charles.
"The Haitian government will not be able to purchase the equipment we need
to provide security to the Haitian people."
     The embargo on sales to Haiti of weapons and other police equipment
was imposed shortly after a bloody military coup against Aristide in 1991.
     Charles said he had spoken to new Prime Minister Gerard Latortue about
the embargo and the prime minister had promised to take it up with
Washington.
     In recent years, the police force trained by foreign officers after
20,000 U.S. Marines occupied Haiti in 1994 to restore Aristide to power,
had to seek its weapons in much the same way as the criminals it was
supposed to fight.
     A senior police commissioner, who did not want to be named, said some
of the force's weapons came from an old Haitian army depot at the
presidential palace. Others came from crime.
     "Many of those weapons have been smuggled in through the
Haitian-Dominican border, or shipped in containers to Haiti from the United
States and a few other Latin American countries," the commissioner said.
     "The police also used guns confiscated from drug dealers and other
gangsters, or weapons shipped from the U.S., concealed in bags of rice."
     At times, the presidential palace under Aristide paid port workers to
allow weapons to come in.
     "We knew it was wrong, but we had no choice. We needed the weapons to
protect the population and the government could not purchase them legally,"
the high-ranking officer said.
     The commander of a 3,000-strong U.N.-endorsed international force sent
in after a bloody monthlong revolt, U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Ronald Coleman,
said his troops were here to back up the police, not replace them.
     He said the force was considering allowing police to keep, and use,
any weapons they confiscate with the support of U.S. Marines, French
gendarmes and legionnaires, or Chilean and Canadian soldiers.
     Coleman declined to say whether he supported lifting the embargo
because that was an issue for diplomats, he said.
     However, "the sooner the Haitian National Police have the equipment
they need to perform their duty, the better off we all will be and the
sooner Haiti can become a more stable country," Coleman told Reuters.
     Haitian police officers say the situation was even more precarious
after the ouster of Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected leader
who faced increasing accusations of corruption and despotism in recent
years.
     As armed rebels, joined by former soldiers and onetime death squad
leaders, approached Port-au-Prince, the government took away weapons from
police and handed them over to street gangs loyal to the president.
     It was a "desperate effort," the police commissioner said, to protect
the capital as the demoralized police force, numbering just 4,000 in this
country of 8 million people, disintegrated in the face of the rebel
advance.