Ja: Please, spare Haiti from U.N. incompetence

Mr Aristide's Government has issued an international appeal for help, without saying specifically what kind of assistance is required.

We believe that Caricom has a responsibility to respond to the appeal of the legitimate government of a member-state. History demands it, and Caricom's increasing emergence into a seamless economic bloc widens the interest of contracting parties in each other's domestic political affairs.

We understand, though, that Caricom may be unable, on its own, to respond in the requisite fashion.

It that regard, we suggest that the community engages the United Nations to put together a peace-keeping and humanitarian mission for Haiti, whose immediate mandate must be to help the legitimate government restore order and to disarm the private militias that have taken over Gonaives and other towns.

We hope that the United States would support the mounting of such a mission, including contributing peacekeepers, for a job on its third border to help out friends.

It's a good article. Its one distressing feature is this reliance on the U.N. as an effective and viable peace-keeping and humanitarian force when the U.N. has no such track record. Instead, the U.N. appears to be peopled by quacks and invalids who are incapable of ensuring that genocide does not occur. Ask the thousands of dead Rwandans who have experience of U.N. "peace-keeping."

The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and Hutu militia (the interahamwe) set up roadblocks and go from house to house killing Tutsis and moderate Hutu politicians. Thousands die on the first day. Some U.N. camps shelter civilians, but most of the U.N. peackeeping forces (UNAMIR--United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda) stand by while the slaughter goes on. They are forbidden to intervene, as this would breach their "monitoring" mandate.

On this day, ten Belgian soldiers with UNAMIR, assigned to guard the moderate Hutu Prime Minister, are tricked into giving up their weapons. They are tortured and murdered.

The U.N. does not keep peace anywhere. Instead, it monitors the war in progress without lifting a rifle to help those who are being slaughtered. Why would anybody wish to inflict the U.N. on the Haitians after the disaster of Rwanda, when a feckless American president and an equally feckless U.N. head did nothing?

Please, spare Haiti this bureaucratic bunch of incompetents. A coalition of the willing, sure; however, it had better be a coalition of U.S.-Caricom troops who are willing to use their guns not just to defend themselves, but also the Haitians.