=?x-unknown?q?29985=3A__Durban_=28pub=29=3A__NY_Times_on_?==?x-unknown?q?UN_action_in_Cit=E9_Soleil_=28fwd=29?=

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Lance Durban <Lpdurban@yahoo.com> posts this article from the New York
Times of February 10, 2007:


U.N. Troops Fight Haiti Gangs One Street at a Time
By MARC LACEY
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 5 ? For years, street gangs have run Haiti
right alongside the politicians. With a disbanded army and a corrupted
wreck of a police force, successive presidents have either used the
gangs against political rivals or just bought them off.

Recently, something extraordinary has occurred. President René Préval
decided to take on the gangs and set the 8,000 United Nations
peacekeepers loose on them, a risky move that will determine the
security of the country and the success of his young government.

?We?re taking back Port-au-Prince centimeter by centimeter,? said Lt.
Col. Abdesslam Elamarti, a peacekeeper from Morocco. ?We?re pressing
these gangs so the population can live in peace.?

The offensive by the United Nations forces, who arrived here in 2004
after the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, began in earnest
in late December. One of the fiercest battles took place on the morning
of Jan. 25 with a raid by hundreds of United Nations forces on a gang
hide-out on the periphery of Cité Soleil, this sprawling seaside
capital?s largest and most notorious slum.

After a fierce firefight in which gang members fired thousands of
shots, United Nations officials succeeded in taking over the hide-out,
a former schoolhouse that gang members had once used to fire upon
peacekeepers and to demand money from passing motorists. The United
Nations said four gang members had been killed in the battle.

Other raids have followed, and though it is still too early to judge
the operation, gang leaders seem to be on the run, and armored United
Nations vehicles now rumble through the crowded streets of Cité Soleil.

[Some 700 United Nations peacekeepers raided strongholds in Cité Soleil
before dawn on Friday trying to take control of abandoned buildings
used by gang members. One person was killed and several others wounded,
including two peacekeepers, United Nations officials said.

[?There will be no tolerance for the kidnappings, harassment and terror
carried out by criminal gangs,? Maj. Gen. Carlos Alberto dos Santos
Cruz, the commander of the United Nations forces, said in a statement
on Friday. ?I will continue to cleanse these areas of the gangs who are
robbing the Haitian people of their security.?]

The biggest of the United Nations operations have been aimed at one of
the most wanted and feared of all the gang leaders, an unlikely and
unpredictable power broker in his 20s who goes simply by the name
Evans. Evans and his groups have been linked to a rash of kidnappings
in the capital, and lately his men have been locked in fierce battles
with United Nations peacekeepers.

Within the confines of Cité Soleil, Evans?s every whim is enforced with
absolute authority. Deeply superstitious, he recently said he suspected
cats of bringing him bad luck after one appeared during a raid by
United Nations troops on one of his hide-outs, local residents and
United Nations officials said.

So he issued an order that all cats were to be killed in his patch of
the slum. His gunmen would be rounding them up and roasting them, he
told the people. When one woman resisted, he or one of his men shot
her, United Nations officials say.

Evans and the other leaders now hide in the maze of tin-roofed shanties
that are home to some 300,000 of Haiti?s urban poor. Meanwhile, the
local population debates which is a more effective strategy for dealing
with these young toughs, confronting or conversing with them.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has a long
tradition of politics mixed with thuggery. In the 1970s and ?80s,
François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude employed the Tontons Macoute,
dreaded paramilitary hoodlums.

Mr. Aristide was elected president in 1990 and again in 2000 with the
support of the poor. Gang leaders, who act as de facto spokesmen for
long-neglected slums, gained entry to the presidential palace and
helped dole out jobs and other spoils to their men.

In his initial months in office, Mr. Préval, who had been Mr.
Aristide?s prime minister as well as president from 1996 to 2001,
followed a similarly conciliatory tack. He negotiated with gang
leaders, including Evans, inviting them at times to face-to-face
meetings in the presidential palace, officials say.

But he has grown increasingly impatient with the gangs as they resisted
surrendering their guns and continued wreaking havoc on Port-au-Prince.

The kidnapping spree at the end of last year was the last straw. As the
country prepared for Christmas, street thugs began grabbing people off
the street, taking them into the slums and demanding ransoms.

Then the kidnappers began singling out children. In one horrible
episode, a teenage girl was killed and her eyes were gouged out. Then,
a school bus of children was seized by gunmen, prompting many terrified
parents to keep their children hidden at home.

Mr. Préval, who has support among Haiti?s poor as well as its elite,
found his coalition government under attack as well, with opposition
politicians in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies denouncing him for
allowing the violence. The president changed course, calling off
negotiations with the gangsters and giving the United Nations the go
ahead to go after them.

Some local residents say that the raids are stirring up the gangs and
that innocent people are getting caught up in the cross-fire.

David Wimhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission, said that
the peacekeepers were careful to single out only combatants and that
gang members had themselves killed civilians and then blamed the United
Nations.

Not everybody agrees that confrontation is the best way of calming the
slums. ?The gang men can change,? insisted Meleus Jean, 45, a pastor
who runs a tiny church in Cité Soleil and who was once almost hit by a
stray bullet while delivering a Sunday morning sermon. ?I talk to them
and I think they are gang men because they have nothing else. Fighting
them will not change them.?

One of those who has been criticized in the past for dealings with gang
members has been Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-American rapper formerly of
the Fugees. ?The problem is much bigger than the gang leaders,? he said
in a telephone interview from New York. ?I?m not saying they are not
part of the problem. When people are killing people, that?s a problem.
But we don?t have enough conversation.?

But United Nations officials say the time for talk is over.

?If one of them goes to Préval and says, ?I want to give up,? and waves
a white handkerchief, that is fine,? said Edmond Mulet, a Guatemalan
diplomat in charge of the United Nations mission here. ?That?s the kind
of conversation we want.?

At the same time, nobody believes that arresting or killing the gang
leaders will be enough to calm Port-au-Prince. The violence is linked,
most say, to the dire poverty.

?The people didn?t ask to be born here,? said Christy Jackson, 42,
headmaster of a school in Cité Soleil. ?We didn?t ask to live like
this.?

The United States government recently set aside $20 million to create
jobs for young people in Cité Soleil once the violence is quelled. In
Solino, a neighborhood where the gangsters were chased away, people are
being paid to clean garbage from a clogged drainage ditch.

Mr. Jean, the singer, has numerous social projects under way, including
a program to bring giant mobile movie screens to poor neighborhoods,
which have no cinemas.

Mr. Mulet, of the United Nations, said he believed that the gang
leaders were beyond rehabilitation. ?They?ve been killing people,
kidnapping people, torturing people, raping girls,? he told reporters
recently in Washington. ?It is very difficult to reinsert into society
someone like that. A psychiatric institution would be the best place to
place them in the future ? after we arrest them.?

Even if the gangsters are all rounded up, the country?s justice system
is ill-equipped to handle them.

Justice is bought and sold in Haiti, with both police officers and
judges routinely allowing bribes to determine guilt or innocence. Jails
are packed with people awaiting trial, most languishing for years.

On top of that, more and more narcotics have begun flowing through
Haiti to the United States, law enforcement officials say. It is
Haiti?s weakened state that is the big attraction to narcotics
traffickers, officials say.

In a recent report on Haiti?s woeful law enforcement apparatus, the
International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group committed to preventing
and resolving deadly conflicts, said that without urgent reform ?the
current escalation of organized violence and criminality may come to
threaten the state itself.?

As bullets fly, everyone is under threat. One stray shot pierced the
outer wall of a hospital in Cité Soleil recently. ?We don?t know who
shot it,? said Marie Yves Noël, the chief nurse. The bullet continued
on through the maternity unit and then broke the glass of a pediatrics
ward. Nobody was hit.