By JUAN PABLO TORO
Associated Press Writer
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti
Gang members, pistols tucked underneath their sport shirts, watch idly from a street corner as children walk to school and housewives carry food home from a market.
Not a policeman is in sight.
If any particular place in Haiti needs police, it’s the teeming streets of the Cite Soleil slum in the capital, Port-au-Prince. But all it has is the crumbling ruins of an abandoned police station.
The battered, impoverished Caribbean nation has teetered on the brink of anarchy since former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a bloody rebellion in February 2004.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission that arrived within months of the rebellion has been training a force, but the pace is slow. Every three months, 200 more recruits complete their training and are ready to hit the streets. But Haiti needs 20,000 policemen and has only about 6,000, says Juan Gabriel Valdes, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti.
“To reach 20,000 will take several years,” he said in an interview.
Meanwhile, kidnappings are alarmingly frequent in the capital. Its few foreign business executives speed through the streets in bulletproof vehicles with armed bodyguards.
Haiti is also a key transshipment point for fast boats bearing cocaine from Colombia toward the United States, according to a State Department report issued earlier this month.
While Haiti’s police force is built up, security is provided mostly by about 1,750 U.N. police and 7,250 U.N. peacekeeping troops, who are generally unaccustomed to taking a police role.
In Cite Soleil, Jordanian U.N. troops hunker down in armored personnel carriers, barely interacting with the Creole-speaking public. Shanty walls are pocked with hundreds of bullet holes from U.N. troops’ clashes with gang members over the past two years.
President-elect Rene Preval, whose strong backing among Haiti’s poor propelled him to victory in the Feb. 7 elections, faces the challenge of bringing security and jobs to Haiti. He wants the U.N. peacekeepers to stay, but prefers a stronger police contingent.
For much of Haiti’s history, the police were a repressive arm of the military that supported dictatorships or ruled outright after seizing power in coups. Aristide dismantled the military after U.S. troops restored him to power in 1994. The military had toppled the elected leader in a coup three years earlier.
The scarcity of police is also due to newly elected leaders firing police officers and hiring new ones loyal to the leaders, and the objective now is to create a professional, unpoliticized force free of corruption and criminal behavior, Valdes said.
Valdes said increasing officers’ salaries _ now averaging about $100 per month _ would help.
Haitian police have committed arbitrary arrests, torture and even summary executions, U.N. human rights official Thierry Fagart said last October.
Haitian National Police chief Mario Andresol has tried weed out violators, among them 15 officers arrested for their suspected role in killings last August at a soccer stadium in the capital.
The U.N. Security Council last month extended the Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeeping mission through Aug. 15, and it could be renewed again.
“There is no public agency in Haiti capable of ensuring security,” said Daniel P. Erikson, an analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington. “In the short term, the withdrawal of U.N. troops would be a disaster for Haiti.”