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'A jail without bars'

Haiti's descent into all-out chaos has become frightingly clear, and it's time the international community move in to quell the anarchy. As David Adams, the St. Petersburg Times' Latin America correspondent, who has covered Haiti for 17 years, reported Thursday, quoting e-mails from a friend with family there, the rash of kidnappings, assaults and home invasions has become "tantamount to a total breakdown of society and the outbreak of urban, class war."

Other reports by eyewitnesses and official observers bear out this grim assessment. People who can are fleeing Haiti. On Wednesday, the United Nations Security Council unanimously agreed to increase its number of peacekeepers there and extend the mission in Haiti until February. "Haiti is a jail without bars; a country with no values," an investigative journalist, Nancy Roc, who fled the country last week amid threats on her life, told the Miami Herald. Even the United Nations, which faces a credibility test for its security presence and lobbying for reconstruction aid, described the security situation as "fragile." These conditions are a powder keg in the runup to local and national elections scheduled this fall.

Expanding the U.N. security presence can help stabilize the cities, provided the 7,500 troops and nearly 1,900 police officers take a more aggressive approach to disarming the gangs and professionalizing Haiti's security forces. As Adams and others report, crime is rampant because the government is inept, many police are corrupt and U.N. peacekeepers are overwhelmed. Loyalists to ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide may not recognize the legitimacy of the interim government, but for now, civil order must be restored for any credible presidential election to take place.

International donors need to speed up the delivery of $1.3-billion in aid promised to Haiti. Residents of the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere need to see some sign the world recognizes their plight and that their own government has the means to improve their lives.

The United Nations, meanwhile, needs to carry through with Wednesday's call for the interim government to investigate human rights abuses allegedly committed by state police. Until ordinary Haitians feel secure enough to drive down the street and open their doors, no amount of aid or political reform will trickle down far enough to change public attitudes about the rule of law - a concept long foreign in Haiti.

[Last modified June 24, 2005, 00:46:17]