Haiti Quake May Threaten Stability Achieved by UN Peacekeepers

Bill Varner

Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti has been crippled by the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, threatening progress toward political and social stability, officials said.

“Clearly it is one of the most horrible tragedies for UN peacekeeping,” Alain LeRoy, under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, said yesterday at the UN in New York. “The mission had made quite a lot of achievements as far as security and stability. Now we must rebuild and adjust to new demands.”

Hedi Annabi of Tunisia, the head of the mission, and his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa of Brazil, are among 150 UN civilian and military members of the mission who are unaccounted for and feared dead, LeRoy said. The UN confirmed the deaths of 16 peacekeepers, including 11 Brazilian soldiers and five police from Argentina, Chad and Jordan.

The UN Security Council established the peacekeeping mission in Haiti in 2004, following the resignation of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to stabilize the violence- plagued Caribbean nation, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest. There are about 7,000 soldiers and 2,000 police in the mission.

The peacekeepers have largely eliminated gang control of two slums in Haiti, allowing the peaceful election in 2006 of President Rene Preval. The UN was preparing to assist legislative elections next month and voting for president in November.

‘Nothing Comparable’

The loss of life likely will be the greatest on a single day for a peacekeeping mission in UN history, officials said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today from Hawaii that the UN had suffered “grievous losses” in the quake. She scrapped a planned trip to Australia and other Pacific stops to return to Washington and help coordinate the U.S. response to the disaster.

“No one can ever doubt again what the relevance of the UN is in the 21st century or the devotion of its employees to the common cause of humanity,” former President Bill Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti, told diplomats in New York. “We owe it to them to respond in the right way.”

The previous worst incidents for the UN were the deaths of 17 workers from a terrorist bombing in Baghdad in August 2003 and the attack on the UN in Algiers in December 2007 that also killed 17. The previous record for UN civilian deaths in one year was 42 in 2007.

“There is nothing comparable to this,” Philip Perito of the Washington-based U.S. Institute of Peace said in an interview. “This is a real tragedy because the UN had really good people who were successful. The problem is that the UN does not have a deep bench. It does not generate leadership quickly, so it will take a long time to re-establish itself.”

‘Extremely Fragile’

Perito said the progress the UN has made in Haiti is “extremely fragile,â€

UN Assistant Secretary-General Edmond Mulet of Guatemala, a former head of the UN mission in Haiti, was to fly to Port-au- Prince to serve as its acting leader, LeRoy said. UN workers from around the world have volunteered to go to Haiti, he said. He couldn’t say how long it will take to rebuild the mission, or how much it will cost.

The budget for UN peacekeeping in Haiti is $612 million a year.

LeRoy said 3,000 UN troops in and around Port-au-Prince will concentrate on securing and possibly running the airport, patrolling the capital, guarding the port and digging through the rubble of the headquarters complex. The military chain-of- command, he said, was intact and able to perform those tasks.

“Our task is to ensure that the mandate of the mission is fulfilled,” he said. “It has to continue at the present level at least until the presidential election.”