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Haitian police raid leaves bitterness in poor community

Hours after an aggressive police operation in an impoverished neighborhood of the Haitian capital, few residents ventured into the streets, but bullet holes in walls and spent cartridges littering a blood-stained pavement spoke clearly of the events.

Defiant youths gave a visitor hard looks and angrily denounced UN peacekeepers who, they said, watched the raid by Haitian police without lifting a finger.

"They were here when the police opened fire on us and burned houses," fumed one man, pointing to a pile of smoking sheet metal that once formed the roofs of humble, now ruined homes.

A UN source said two people were killed and 35 questioned in the Bel Air neighborhood, home to some 300,000 people. But relatives of victims said the number was much higher, around 18.

Only four bodies were brought to the main morgue in Port-au-Prince, a source there said.

Seated on a collapsed wall, a woman in her 70s told how "men dressed in black" -- Haitian police -- torched her modest home.

"I have no family. Where am I going to spend the night?" she whimpered.

No-one could give a certain toll of the three-hour raid.

"They killed 18 people," a teenager said, while another offered a figure of 23.

A woman cried in front of the remains of her shack, strewn with shattered crockery. In her absence, police broke down the door and turned her home into a heap of ruins.

"They took my husband. I've heard nothing," another woman said.

She immediately rushed to the police station, but soldiers of the UN stabilization mission had no record of her husband.

"The people being questioned are here. But other people taken by the police, we don't know," she said a peacekeeper had told her.

Friday, after eight people were kidnapped for ransom, at the end of a particularly violent week in Port-au-Prince, Justice Minister Bernard Gousse called for a permanent posting of UN soldiers in "hot neighborhoods" like Bel Air, and at police posts.

Released hostages said their kidnappers hide in densely populated areas like Bel Air, a stronghold of supporters of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide, now in exile in South Africa.

The police operation in Bel Air came four days after unknown assailants attacked a police station and a market in Port-au-Prince, killing ten.

"There are not only thugs here. There are also peaceful people who want nothing more than to live quietly," said a man with dreadlocks.
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