The UN is turning to former US president Bill Clinton as its emissary to chronically unstable Haiti, where the former president is popular, unlike the peacekeepers who have provided the nation’s only real security for years.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was expected to formally name Clinton yesterday as the UN’s special envoy to Haiti, Clinton’s spokesman Matt McKenna said.
UN peacekeepers have patrolled Haiti since 2004 and are in the process of training the country’s under-equipped national police to retake control — but some here consider the blue helmets an occupation force and have called for them to leave now.
PHOTO: AP
Having Clinton as the UN’s public face in Haiti could temper such sentiment.
Clinton is still well-regarded in Haiti for using the threat of US military force to oust a dictatorship in 1994, then sending army troops and marines to pave the way for the return of elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been deposed in a coup.
Many poor Haitians — Aristide’s power base — still long for their leader’s return from exile after he was toppled a second time by a rebellion in 2004.
In March, Clinton toured the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince with the UN chief to encourage investment after a year that saw a food crisis, destabilizing riots and four devastating tropical storms.
The following month, he attended a donors conference in Washington that resulted in pledges of US$324 million for the struggling country. Haiti is the hemisphere’s poorest nation and has been mired for decades in political and social turmoil.
Because of his marriage to US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, State Department lawyers must approve and review some of Clinton’s international activities under an agreement between the US Senate and the Clinton Foundation, which works in Haiti on a number of issues including healthcare, AIDS, the environment and economic development.
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