PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Last Sunday, a driver of one of the ramshackle minibuses called tap-taps sped past a police car in the capital's Tabarre district. So the cops chased him and shot him. Driver Ronald Alvard died at the wheel, injuring three bystanders as he crashed.
Two weeks before, in the suburb of Carrefour, neighbors heard Michel Coutar screaming for help, then gunshots. Too frightened to venture out in the dark, they found what was left of Coutar on the roadside at sunrise--after he had been run over repeatedly all night. The police never investigated.
And two months before, in the rural town of Mirebalais, local political thugs surrounded the police station to protest the arrest of two colleagues. Police say they fired their guns in the air, but a protester was shot. Then, as the police officers disappeared one by one, the mob captured the police chief and chopped him to death.
This is life in Haiti, an anarchic land where chaos, poverty and danger still reign more than three years after the United States and the United Nations intervened to restore democracy--spending more than $2 billion in the process.
This Caribbean nation of 7 million people is mired in a dizzying array of political, economic and social crises that are undermining U.S. and U.N. efforts to help restore even the most basic institutions and human rights: justice and the rule of law.
As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright arrives here today for a one-day visit, Haiti doesn't even have a government; the last one fell 10 months ago when the prime minister resigned.
The political infighting that continues to block efforts by former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's handpicked successor, Rene Preval, to appoint a new government has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid earmarked for a country that remains the poorest and least developed in the Americas.
Inflation is soaring, while per-capita income remains frozen at 1994 levels of about $300 a year. Tens of millions of dollars are flowing through the Haitian economy, but economists say much of it is the proceeds of drug traffickers, currency speculators and corrupt politicians, netting few jobs and little development. The fastest-growing industries now are private security firms and the daily lottery.
Corruption rules here, according to diplomats, politicians, economists and average Haitians. So does crime--by the cops and the criminals--despite an ambitious U.S.- and U.N.-led effort to build the professional Haitian National Police to replace its brutal, disbanded army.
