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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
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Monitoring
Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
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Memorandum to the Press 04.63
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Thursday, 23September,
2004
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Word Count: 3150
Haiti: Smoldering on the Edge of Chaos
• Disbanded Haitian army seeks to be
reconstituted
• Latortue
government is more a cruel joke than a professional presence
• UN special representative and military
force still too invisible
Six months after the
abrupt and violence-laced departure of constitutionally elected President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and over three months after the deployment of U.N.
peacekeeping units which were hailed as an instrument for order and stability
in this long-troubled Caribbean island, Haiti remains poised on the edge of chaos. Just as nature in the
form of a tropical storm that has managed to kill perhaps 1,000 Haitians,
thousands more have died over the past decade, victims of right-wing military
and paramilitary forces. Today, ruled by a bumptious, ineffectual and illegitimate
cabal whose only validity is supplied by U.S. fiat, Haiti now faces the imminent de facto reconstitution of its
brutal Haitian Armed Forces (FADH), dissolved by Aristide in 1995. Across the
island, bands of former soldiers are seizing police stations and establishing
themselves as the de facto local power, at times displacing the remnants of the
national police and placing large swaths of the country under what is
effectively outlaw rebel jurisdiction. Meanwhile these soldiers demand the
restitution of unpaid wages over the past ten years.
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This analysis was prepared
by Jessica Leight, COHA Research Fellow.
September 23, 2004
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