BY Joe Mozingo
04/28/2005

Read the entire article.

Below is an excerpt of an article from the Miami Herald:

HINCHE, Haiti - The men sleeping on a dirty concrete floor in a back room of the makeshift police station are not prisoners. They are police -- scared to go home because someone might kill them.

The United Nations advisors here to help them can only sigh in dismay.

''The police officers right now, they can't do anything,'' said Amadou Mbaye, an advisor from the U.N. Civilian Police (CIVPOL) at the Hinche station. ``They are afraid.''

The armed insurgency that helped oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last year decimated an already feeble force. Now, only 4,000 underequipped, underpaid officers patrol a volatile nation of 7.6 million people. And the U.N. mission trying to rebuild the corrupted institution faces a tragicomedy of obstacles.

...

Refugees International, a Washington-based nonprofit that monitors peacekeeping around the world, said the U.N. mission in Haiti needs to be given the authority to enforce the law, whether against gangs or bad cops, as it had on its last assignment here.

''This would allow CIVPOL to do more than passively advise and mentor an essentially dysfunctional institution,'' the group wrote in March.


In Port-au-Prince, CIVPOL faces an even more complicated dynamic. Police there claim they are outgunned by the slum gangs. But they are seen all around town with rifles poking every which way out of pickup trucks and high-end SUVs. And residents in the slums regularly accuse them of shooting and arbitrarily arresting people, while peacekeepers look on.