Title: HAITI: Election Attack Underscores Disarmament Need/RELATE/RPTING

/AT EDS: Pls relate the following item from the story run earlier from Port-au-Prince entitled ‘Voters Apathetic as Aristide Ally Heads for Win’/

PETIT GOAVE, Haiti, Dec. 18 (IPS) — A quick succession of armed attacks on U.S. soldiers, Haiti’s police, and prominent supporters of the ruling Lavalas Platform here this weekend underscores the need for more disarmament efforts, according to the newly deployed Haitian police force.

‘’There is a necessity to truly disarm the ex-military, especially in Petit Goave,’’ Jacques Jean-Baptiste, the head of the new Haitian police force here, told IPS. ‘’The former military soldiers remain armed and they give every sign that they’re going to come back.’’

In what was one of the most serious incidents involving U.S. military forces since they arrived in Haiti in Sept. 1994, a gunman fired eight shots into a U.S. Special Forces truck in the early morning hours of Dec. 17, according to Capt. David Milling, the local commander of the 12-man ‘’Green Beret’’ unit here.

Capt. Milling said that the one attacker tried to hit the two soldiers in the car and succeeded in blowing out a tire. The soldiers fled the scene without firing back, and later returned to find eight shell casings, Milling said.

Only hours earlier, late Saturday night, at least one armed assailant, and as many as four, fired seven times at the home of prominent supporters of Haiti’s ruling coalition, the Lavalas Platform, according to local police, U.S. forces and eyewitnesses.

Also that night, 14 shots were fired into an unmanned police post, according to Inspector Jean-Baptiste. The assailants apparently believed it was occupied, said local police and U.S. forces.

The shots in all the incidents were fired from a Garrand M-1 rifle, the main weapon of Haiti’s now-disbanded army. The police reported no injuries.

The attacks, which coincided with the Dec. 17 presidential elections here, highlight the sharp debate over the need to disarm the rump elements of Haiti’s military and paramilitary forces.

The Haitian government, joined by national and international human rights groups, say that U.N. Security Council Resolution 940, which authorised last year’s military intervention in the Caribbean country, requires international forces to establish a ‘’safe and secure’’ environment in Haiti. That includes, they say, a concerted disarmament campaign.

Indeed, outgoing President Jean-Bertrand Aristide recently slammed the international community’s ‘’hypocrisy’’ over disarmament, a reference to what the Haitian government believes to be the restraint with which international forces have viewed their disarmament mission. Aristide also questioned the political will of the U.S. and U.N. in seeing stability and democracy flourish in this Caribbean nation.

U.N. and U.S. forces agree that more needs to be done on disarmament, but that the job must be done by Haiti’s new, largely U.S.-trained police force.

They point out that 30,000 weapons have been seized since U.S. troops intervened in Sept 1994. Those weapons were collected by U.S. forces from the Haitian army, as well as through a ‘’buy- back’’ program, raids on army and paramilitary forces, and through the widespread and active disarmament efforts of the Haitian people themselves.

U.S. and U.N. officials, as in previous cases of attacks on international forces, downplayed the weekend’s incident, calling it isolated. They also say it is a myth that U.N. forces can easily find weapons caches and refuse to launch arbitrary searches.

Brian Atwood, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) told a news conference in Port-au-Prince Monday that during Dec. 17's election balloting, ‘’There was no attempt by any segment of society to prevent people from voting or to subvert the exercise of free political choice.’’

Still, the attack on U.S. Special Forces, the elite of the U.S. Army, must worry U.N. commanders. Though small, it represents one of the most serious attacks on international forces since U.S. troops landed 16 months ago to oust Haiti’s brutal three-year military regime and restore Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president.

One U.S. soldier, a Special Forces soldier, was killed last December. A French police officer, working with the U.N.’s Civilian Police monitoring group, was shot and seriously wounded at the end of August 1995. He was shot in Petit Goave.

Asked whether U.S. forces might respond more aggressively following the attack, as they had done in the past, Capt. Milling told IPS that he has yet to receive guidance from his superiors. Likewise, U.S. officials in Port-au-Prince Monday gave no indication that any significant measures would be taken.

In Petit Goave, a small port town of 10,000 people about 60 kms west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, police and residents insist that the military and paramilitary forces remain active, armed and dangerous.

‘’This just didn’t happen yesterday, or this morning,’’ said Beauciquet Claude, standing outside the house of 64-year-old Jean Morency, which was attacked Saturday night. ‘’It’s been happening a long time.’’

The attack also comes in the wake of the installation of 70 members of Haiti’s new police force here earlier this month. They replaced the Interim Public Security Force (IPSF), a temporary police force cobbled together from former members of Haiti’s army by the Haitian government and U.S. and U.N. forces.

Residents, police and some U.N. officials, point to that changeover as one factor. But generally they say that the former rulers of the town refuse to give up power, as well as a cut of the lucrative contraband trade running through the port, without a fight.

Last summer, Haitian authorities arrested six people, reportedly close to Hubert de Ronceray’s Movement for National Development (MDN), for burning down the house of the pro- government director of the electricity company. Some residents, and U.N. officials, also believe the shooting of the U.N. Civilian Police officer last August may have been connected to former soldiers close to the MDN. No arrests have been made in that case.

Local residents, though, say that U.N. forces are not doing enough. Some charge that the U.N. officials are too close to the old power structure — for example, by renting plush compounds from the elite family in town.

‘’These MDN people are close to the soldiers, they work as interpreters, and when ever they go to do something, they get blocked,’’ Claude said.(END/IPS/DC/JL/95)

Origin: Washington/HAITI/ ----

[c] 1995, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS) All rights reserved

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