As heavily armed Haitian police officers marched onto Port-au-Prince’s main public square this past Carnival Sunday to protest their low pay and the government’s spending priorities, soldiers in the newly mobilized Haitian Armed Forces quickly deployed and positioned themselves atop a tower overlooking the plaza.
What happened next was unthinkable: Haiti’s two armed institutions faced off in a six-hour gun battle that left a soldier and protester dead, and more than a dozen others, including police officers and two soldiers, wounded.
Now, as Haiti’s 11-month-old caretaker government tries to restore some semblance of order after days of tensions, key questions remain: How did a country, whose army was abolished in 1995 after a turbulent history of corruption, coups and some of the hemisphere’s worst human-rights violations, end up with its cops and soldiers shooting at each other?
And how did the Haiti National Police, created and financed by the U.S. and others in the international community, end up so splintered that cops not only fired on the army’s headquarters, but turned on each other?
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Originally Posted by DR Spook
