Global Policy Forum

By Pablo Bachelet

UN-protectorate status is being discussed as a possible way finally to bring Haiti out of chaos.

From the anarchy that is Haiti, an old question is rising again: If Haitians can't rule themselves, should the United Nations run the destitute country for them? The question is being batted about in Washington think tanks, cafes in Port-au-Prince and U.S. academic circles, with many saying that there are few options left for a country mired in decades of mismanagement, corruption and political bloodletting.

''The only way we're going to make any progress in Haiti is to establish a good, old fashioned trusteeship,'' said Riordan Roett, the Western Hemisphere director at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Haiti needs a ''multilateral force with a 25-year mandate to rebuild the country year by year. Everything's been destroyed. It's a failed state, a failed nation,'' Roett said.

CHAOS REIGNS

Everyone agrees that Haiti is in chaos. Since September, clashes by armed gangs of supporters and opponents of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide have left more than 90 dead. The gangs freely walk the streets of three of the nation's four largest cities, for-ransom kidnappings have become routine and the U.S.-backed interim government is being increasingly criticized as inefficient.

But publicly, the Bush administration and U.N. diplomats bristle at the notion of putting Haiti under direct U.N. control, a last-ditch option employed most recently in deeply troubled hot spots like Kosovo, Bosnia and East Timor. During a recent visit to Haiti, Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear the Bush administration was sticking to the current course of action, saying that ``we have a constitutionally designated government and we have a plan in place that could lead to elections next year.'' Chile's U.N. ambassador, Heraldo Muñoz, told The Herald he hadn't heard of any U.N. officials discussing ''exotic ideas'' like a Haiti protectorate because ``in the long term, it is the Haitians that will have to construct their own future.''

But in private, some U.S. officials seem to be warming up to the idea of establishing some sort of long-term U.N. oversight over Haiti. ''Protectorate status is not a politically correct term these days, but Haiti is a pretty good candidate if it were,'' said a Defense Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Haiti governance debate reflects not just the country's status as the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation but the growing realization that the interim government that replaced Aristide after his ouster on Feb. 29, and the 5,000 or so Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeepers deployed there now, have been unable to stop the violence or improve Haitians' lot.

NOT MUCH OPTIMISM

Few analysts are optimistic that municipal, legislative and presidential elections scheduled for next year will happen, or that they'll be legitimate if they do. ''Elections presume an infrastructure not only of political capabilities but of values that underwrite a democratic system,'' said Gabriel Marcella, a Latin America expert at the U.S. Army War College. ``I simply don't see those.''

Marcella was one of the lead authors of a Nov. 8 report on defense issues for Latin America, widely circulated among top Pentagon officials, that triggered the latest outbreak of the protectorate debate, an idea last raised a decade ago. With Haiti ''on the verge of an outward explosion of boat people and an inward immolation of gang-on-gang violence,'' the report said, policy-makers should consider a protectorate ``under a Brazilian-led regional coalition, if one can be created that is willing to support a 10-year restoration initiative.''

Haiti's 3,000-member National Police is outgunned by the gangs and shot through with corruption and politics -- one Pentagon official called it a ''broken force'' -- and the U.N. peacekeepers have done little to disarm the gangs. Daniel Erikson, with the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, described the peacekeepers' approach to disarmament as ``don't ask, don't tell.'' ''It's not clear that they even have a strategy for focusing, for example, on the most egregious gangs, or to try and capture key leaders among rebel movements,'' Erikson said.

Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue scoffs at the notion of converting Haiti into a protectorate. What the country needs, he told reporters, was a ''good government that can work, root out the corruption . . . and take Haiti back to its place in history'' -- a reference to the 1804 slave revolt against France that made Haiti the world's first black republic and the second nation in the hemisphere to oust its colonial masters, after the United States. Some agree that the United Nations, itself plagued with problems, is unlikely to resolve Haiti's issues. ''Given the last six months [of the U.N. presence in Haiti] . . . on what basis should we say that the U.N. should be running Haiti?'' asks the Dialogue's Erikson.

CALL FOR PATIENCE

U.N. officials meanwhile urge patience. The U.N. special representative to Haiti, Juan Gabriel Valdés, has recommended trying to defuse political tensions by convening a national dialogue that would include at least the more moderate elements of Aristide's Lavalas Party, blamed by the U.S. State Department for much of the violence. U.N. officials also argue that the current peacekeepers can't be expected to pacify in months a nation that has experienced decades of turmoil and numerous foreign interventions, including one in 1994, when 23,000 U.S. troops landed there to restore Aristide to power after a military coup in 1991.

The peacekeepers' mandate runs out in mid-2005, and the working assumption in the U.N. Security Council is that it will be extended another year. Protectorate or not, most say the United Nations will be in Haiti much longer.

Herald staff writer Jacqueline Charles contributed to this report.

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