Mission Missing Its Mark

A cloud of condensation billows out from the shipping container into the tropical morning air as Col. Henry Premanta Mihindu throws open the door. Inside, crates of Wenatchee Valley apples, crisp bell peppers and California carrots fill a cold storage unit the size of a train car.

Beside it, another container holds cases of U.S. beef, New Zealand lamb and Arkansas chicken parts. Except for a few rare herbs that grow only in their faraway homeland, cooks with the Sri Lankan peacekeepers can get everything from the United Nations’ supply network that they need for their spicy native dishes.

Outside the cinderblock wall separating the peacekeepers’ tidy base from a busy coastal roadway, Renette Thermitus hunches over a sputtering gas-bottle burner, stirring a dented pot of canned milk and coffee. Like the sack of rolls that she rose before dawn to bake, the tepid beverage has no takers.

“They never buy anything from us,” said the 23-year-old single mother, nodding her head to indicate the base housing hundreds of soldiers here in the poorest country in the hemisphere.

A seaside town of a few thousand with its own food shops and produce markets, Leogane had expected to benefit from being host to one of the biggest contingents of foreign soldiers scattered across this violence-racked country.

But the Sri Lankan camp, like all others that make up the 7,300-strong U.N. military deployment in Haiti, is as self-contained as a spaceship.

The staggering cost of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym, MINUSTAH, eclipses Haiti’s entire $380-million annual national budget. That price tag, and the peacekeepers’ interpretation of their mandate as assistants to fledgling Haitian police rather than primary law enforcers, grates on the purported beneficiaries.

“What I don’t like about them is that they are at ease. They don’t need anything. They eat well. They sleep well. They play cricket. It’s like they’re here on vacation,” said Fedner Sanon, an unemployed teacher. “That’s why we call them TOURISTAH.”

Although the troops are authorized by the U.N. Security Council to intervene with force to quell violence, their commanders have chosen to interpret the mandate in a minimalist fashion. The U.N. has specifically charged MINUSTAH with collecting illegal weapons, but throughout the mission’s 19-month duration, those in charge have delegated the job to Haitians. And because the poorly armed Haitian national police are no match for the powerful gang leaders, neither they nor the foreign peacekeepers spend much time in the most dangerous areas.

The nearly 1,900 U.N. police officers and 600 civilian administrators dispatched to Haiti spend more here than the soldiers, renting apartments, filling hotels and frequenting restaurants, accounting for the biggest local benefit from a mission that will cost the world body half a billion dollars this year. About $13 million of that made its way to Haitian landlords and caterers, according to a study by the Peace Dividend Trust, a U.N.-contracted agency charged with investigating ways to cut mission costs and enhance spending in host countries.

The agency’s director, Scott Gilmore, concedes that the study confirmed what relief workers had long suspected: The wealthy benefit most from the U.N. presence.

“The entrepreneurial classes in the city centers almost always are the ones to first enjoy this dividend,” he said. “But that’s not all a bad thing. They are also the ones who can pump it back into the economy by creating new jobs.”

In Petionville, the elite hilltop suburb overlooking Port-au-Prince that is home to the wealthy clique of a few hundred families that controls 90% of the economy of Haiti, real estate agents and restaurateurs are cashing in.

“The rich are getting richer, but that has always been the situation here,” said Steve McIntosh, a 30-year-old who left his banking job to tap into a rental boom that has seen owners in the exclusive areas charge extortionate prices. As he flitted about an elegant new office with French windows and wrought-iron balconies, he observed somewhat sheepishly, “I’ve made a good chunk of money myself.”

At Cafe Albert, a candlelit garden eatery so popular with U.N. officials that both sides of the street are flanked nightly with white SUVs bearing the world body’s markings, the Belgian owner explains that the half a dozen waitresses on hand weren’t hired because of the U.N. patronage so much as sustained by it after business disappeared in the chaotic months before President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled an armed rebellion in February 2004.

“We get both the civilian administrators and the officers, and their presence gives people confidence, especially the businesspeople who are worried about all the kidnapping,” Jean-Pierre Buelinckx observed as he looked over the convivial crowd with satisfaction. “We are happy to see them.”

As far as one can get from Petionville and still be in the capital, seething Cite Soleil doesn’t ring with the clinking of wineglasses but with the sound of gunfire.

Jordanian troops patrol the violent seaside slum in armored vehicles that thunder out of their fortified compound, plowing along streets abandoned but for burning tires, flying bullets and a few women braving the bedlam in futile attempts to hawk food and trinkets.

Jinette Delix has five children to feed, so she ventures out of her one-room hovel each morning to walk the length of the ravaged slum and buy a sack of rice at the nearest store, a mile away. She then peddles it in smaller portions to other mothers who won’t risk the perilous trek through the urban war zone.

Does the presence of foreign soldiers bolster her confidence?

“I have confidence only in God,” Delix replied with resignation.

As the Jordanian contingent prepared to rotate out in November, the soldiers invited a few women hawking wooden handicrafts, beaded sandals and frilly, faux-satin girls’ dresses into their compound. Shooting between pro- and anti-Aristide gangs made it too dangerous for the soldiers to shop at the slum’s outdoor market.

“We have made a little bazaar here,” said Maj. Mohamed Jamahnem, looking at some carved wooden bowls that he said would cost far more in Jordan. “And the dresses -- they’re very expensive at home. It’s better to buy them here and take them back with us.”

Darlene Francois sat among her spread of sandals and baby clothes, eating a plate of rice and beans. “I can’t say that sales are great, but it’s better to be here than outside,” she said as gunshots reverberated beyond the walls of the Jordanian compound.

Even in calmer venues, such as this southern region under the Sri Lankans’ control, U.N. troops are discouraged from socializing with locals to avoid the kind of sexual liaisons that have sown animosity in other communities where peacekeepers have been deployed.

That policy appears to unravel, though, in rural Haiti, where there is little stigma in engaging in casual relations or bearing a child out of wedlock. Even on a day when the Sri Lankan troops were preparing for a visit by the commanding general, teenage girls in their school uniforms of red gingham blouses and blue jumpers idled at the base reception hut, flirting with the soldiers.

“They take too many liberties with local girls,” complained Brunel Beneche, a 24-year-old Haitian trained as a barber but with no paying work. “Children are being born. Some people are upset about this, but what can they do?”

Others in the neighborhood say the U.N. mission has had some positive effect, even if the peacekeepers spend little. In October, rainy-season deluges engulfed several cars in mud, blocking the sole route to the southwest. The peacekeepers rolled out their 10-ton hydraulic crane to extract the cars and clear the roadway.

Chilean and Ecuadorean troops are helping build a road from Cap-Haitien to Limbe in the north, and a few paving projects funded by the European Union are also underway. But the mission doesn’t have a budget for major infrastructure improvements, a fact its late commander lamented in a recent interview as a hindrance to building support among the people whom the troops have been sent to protect.

(The MINUSTAH commander, Brazilian Lt. Gen. Urano Teixeira Da Matta Bacellar, was found dead Saturday in his Port-au-Prince hotel room, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.)

This lack of a long-term spending strategy is in the nature of peacekeeping, the general said. Deployments are authorized by the U.N. Security Council in six-month or, at best, one-year increments to keep the security lid on, not rebuild the country.

Graham Muir, the Canadian in charge of the U.N. police gathered from 33 nations, agrees that the six-month plans to mend Haiti’s intractable problems “don’t allow the host-nation people to get a sense anyone is in this for the long haul.”

Still, Muir points out that MINUSTAH, with its accomplishments and failures, is a reflection of the international community’s will to stabilize Haiti, not just of the foreign troops’ or police officers’ performance.

“The worst day in this mission,” he said, “is the world’s best foot forward.”

The peacekeepers, too, feel the frustration of a costly deployment that leaves little local imprint.

Anesthesiologist Kalana Badu, one of three doctors in the 900-strong Sri Lankan contingent, didn’t see a serious case throughout a six-month stint that ended in early December. Three ambulances sat idle among the sprawl of cars, trucks and trailers. A fully stocked pharmacy was intact when the peacekeepers began packing to go home.

“All this was sent for use by the soldiers, because we knew we couldn’t get anything here,” the anesthesiologist said of the contingent’s readiness to deal with health and security disasters that afflict Haitians daily but rarely intrude into the self-contained world of foreign soldiers.

Outside a cinderblock hovel a block from the base, Celude Antoine complained that she hadn’t sold a single banana or mango to the soldiers.

“They brought everything with them,” the 42-year-old mother of six groused with a dismissive wave of her gnarled hand in the direction of the peacekeepers. “We don’t even have electricity.”