Global Policy Forum

By Bill Varner and Glenn Hall

The United Nations should keep peacekeeping soldiers in Haiti for at least 20 years to rebuild the violence-plagued Caribbean nation that is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, the UN's special envoy said today. Reginald Dumas told the Security Council that 10 international missions to Haiti in the past 10 years left the country with no stable governmental organizations, leading to the rebel insurgency that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last month.

"You cannot continue with the stop-start cycle that has characterized relations between the international community and Haiti,'' Dumas said after a closed-door briefing to the Security Council." You cannot go in and spend a couple of years and leave. Then the whole thing collapses. This has to stop.''

The envoy's recommendation would put Haiti's 8 million people under international protection for a generation. The Security Council voted on March 1 to send a "multinational interim force" for as long as three months, followed by a UN peacekeeping mission. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is to recommend the size and mandate of that mission in a report to the council this week. The U.S. is leading the interim force, which includes 1,940 U.S. soldiers, almost all of them Marines, along with 825 French troops, about 500 Canadians and almost 330 Chileans, according to Miami-based U.S. Southern Command. Chilean troops escorted two food aid convoys today in one part of the mission. Forces elsewhere are training Haitian police to disarm rebels.

Gangs, Kidnapping

Dumas told the council that while the security situation has improved in the capital Port-au-Prince and on the main roads around the city, the country has no more than 2,000 police and no military to enforce law elsewhere. "You can't effectively have the rule of law in such circumstances,'' Dumas told reporters after the Security Council meeting. "There are armed gangs and a great deal of kidnapping for ransom."

He said that election of a new government probably couldn't be held for at least 18 months. The Security Council didn't discuss the request for an investigation of Aristide's departure from Haiti by the 15-nation Caribbean Community, according to Ambassador Heraldo Munoz of Chile, a council member. Aristide has said from exile that the U.S. removed him from power in what amounted to a coup d'etat. U.S. officials insist he left voluntarily with U.S. help to escape rebels who were advancing on the capital.

Haiti has a history of political instability since it declared independence from France in 1804 after a revolt by half a million black slaves. The nation had a per-capita economic output of $425 in 2002, and is beset with AIDS, illiteracy and drug trafficking.