01/28/2004

The current political violence and instability in Haiti (see RI's Forgotten People - Haiti) despite years of UN-led peacekeeping operations, contain lessons for the present U.S.-led international effort in Afghanistan. While substantial resources were invested in establishing a professional civil police force in Haiti, less attention was devoted to improving the judicial system. Improvements to the capacities of civilian police institutions are often doomed to fail without corresponding efforts to improve the functioning of the rest of the judicial system. If judges are not fair, if prosecutors are corrupt, and if prisons are inhumane, people will not trust the judicial system, no matter how professional the police are. And the police will not remain professional for long in such an environment.

A similar situation may be occurring in Afghanistan. There the local warlords, through their militias, control the regional political, police and judicial institutions. A recent assessment mission conducted by rule of law experts at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) reports that the civilian police in Afghanistan are mostly untrained, ill-equipped, illiterate, and poorly paid. They owe their allegiance to the warlords, rather than to the central government.  The U.S. plans to conduct training for 50,000 police officers over the next several years, while Germany will train a smaller number of officers. However, in the judicial sector, USIP reports that no strategy has been developed by the coalition for reforming and rebuilding the court system or the penal system.

While Haiti and Afghanistan have vastly different political, economic, and social contexts, they have one thing in common: a history of violence and impunity. From the standpoint of increasing the effectiveness of international peacekeeping operations, Haiti’s experience over the past decade suggests that reconstruction efforts that fail to address the issue of judicial reform will fail to reduce violence and impunity.

In 1994, the U.S.-led a UN-authorized intervention force, Operation Uphold Democracy (OUD), into Haiti to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected president of Haiti. Following OUD, the UN conducted four peacekeeping operations in Haiti.  To greater or lesser degrees, all four UN peace operations in Haiti focused on the restoration of the rule of law.  In particular, these missions sought to establish and then professionalize a national civilian police force.  For instance, the UN Transition Mission in Haiti during 1997 focused on training specialized units of the Haitian National Police (HNP) in crowd control techniques and rapid response.  From December 1997 until March 2000, the UN Civilian Police Mission in Haiti placed special emphasis on assistance to the HNP at the supervisory level and on further training of the specialized police units. Other tasks included mentoring HNP officers’ performance and guiding HNP police officers in day-to-day duties.

Despite these efforts, establishing the rule of law in Haiti remains elusive. Although Aristide was returned to the presidency in 2000, parliamentary elections later that year were the subject of investigation by the Organization of American States (OAS).  The OAS advised the Aristide government to recalculate suspect vote totals for Senate seats. When the government refused, the opposition protested and international donors began withholding aid money from what they considered to be an illegitimate government.

Haiti today remains a destitute country, with few paved roads, unreliable electricity, and poor education and health services. The political system is in constant turmoil. In recent months violent civil protests have broken out, as opposition groups continue to condemn the Aristide government. According to news reports, these protests have been put down with brutality and violence by the HNP. While the reasons for a continued absence of peace in Haiti obviously go beyond whether enough attention was given to judicial reform, the lack of a holistic approach to the rule of law operations in Haiti has been a contributing factor.  

Therein lies a powerful lesson for policymakers.  A common response to the failure of multiple peace operations to bring lasting peace to Haiti is that peacekeeping just does not work, or at least does not work in Haiti. A better response would be to analyze whether a real chance for peacekeeping success was ever possible in Haiti. A wide array of problems can be pointed to, including a lack of resources devoted to the peacekeeping operations, a lack of patience for positive outcomes, the violent political history of Haiti, as well as the aforementioned failure to follow a holistic approach in efforts to rebuild and reform the governance and judicial sectors.  Peacekeeping operations are necessarily complex—consequently, the reasons for a lack of success are also complex.  Humanitarian organizations and others are increasingly concerned, however, that the inability of the UN to properly conduct rule of law operations is a key weakness of the international peacekeeping system.

For the peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan to succeed, equal weight must be given to rebuilding and reforming the civilian police, the courts, and the penal system. This will require greater resources for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, patience from the U.S. and the international community, and dedication from the Afghans themselves.  RI believes it will also require the pursuit of holistic reforms of the systems of the rule of law.  These commitments will only be met if the United States and its allies marshal the requisite political will.

Therefore, Refugees International recommends that:

• The Bush Administration place greater emphasis on improving courts and prisons in Afghanistan, and work with the UN to bring in more partners who can assist with rule of law operations.
• The Bush Administration work with the UN Secretariat and Member States of the UN to enhance the UN’s ability to plan for and conduct rule of law operations by supporting recommendations outlined in the Brahimi Report on UN Peace Operations.
• The U.S. Congress hold hearings to define the institutional weaknesses within the U.S. government pertaining to overseas rule of law operations and begin drafting legislation designed to enhance the capacity of the U.S. government to plan for, manage, and participate in such operations.