Word: haitian
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Meanwhile, out in the countryside the disintegration of the Haitian military left a yawning power vacuum. In the north, around the country's second largest city of Cap Haitien, civil authority virtually collapsed following the fire fight on Sept. 24 in which a company of Marines cut down 10 Haitian police officers. Since then, the army and police have evaporated throughout whole sections of the region...
...vast majority of Haitians who support Aristide, freedom from the hated military was something to be welcomed joyfully. In Cap Haitien, while residents celebrated the return of electricity for the first time in three years -- courtesy of the Marines -- only one uniformed Haitian soldier remained at his post. The rest of the garrison -- from Lieut. Colonel Claudel Josaphat, the feared and brutal regional military commander, to telephone repairmen who owed their jobs to the de facto government -- had fled. Shortly after U.S. forces arrived, a delegation of local dignitaries approached Marine commander Colonel Thomas Jones. "I guess...
While U.S. troops appeared delighted at the level of good behavior, supporters of the Haitian military remained terrified by the latent potential for popular uprising. They are haunted by a vision of wild rampages in which mobs seek retribution by destroying the homes of their oppressors. Those fears were only exacerbated by the Americans' success at squelching the Haitian military, which has tended to embolden pro-Aristide forces. In several cases, the sheer presence of American troops has inspired crowds to attack stragglers from the Haitian military. To discourage this, the U.S. has actually cut the size of its patrols...
...York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly took charge of the 1,000-strong international monitoring force in Puerto Rico, which the U.S. is sending to Haiti to restrain and retrain local authorities: 300 monitors were to arrive by the weekend. But it will be months before the new Haitian police can be counted on to enforce civic order fairly. In the meantime, the U.S. wants to make clear that it will not tolerate mob violence, but is uncertain how to convey the message...
...Pentagon continues to worry that G.I.s will be forced into the gap as Haitians fight one another. An unreleased army report paints a bleak picture of the future, calling the occupation a "prescription for disaster." Author Donald Schulz, a Caribbean expert at the Army War College, writes, "We can train and otherwise try to professionalize the Haitian military and police, but as long as the dominant culture places a premium on authoritarianism, dishonesty and the use of force, the new military and police will eventually slip back into the patterns...