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A special commission named by President Rene Preval will decide whether such a force should take the form of a reconstituted military or act as a supporting unit of Haiti's outgunned police, said Sen. Yuri Latortue, president of the Senate commission on justice and security, on Thursday.
Preval is expected to appoint the commission next week and the commission's report would be due eight months later, Latortue said.
An 8,800-member U.N. force provides the only real security in the impoverished Caribbean nation, which is still recovering from a violent uprising that toppled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.
Latortue, the nephew and former security chief of ex-interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, said his Senate colleagues support creating a new military force.
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 "We can't provide our own security yet. But once the U.N. soldiers leave, the country will need a military force to keep the peace and protect our borders," Latortue, a former officer in the Haitian armed forces, told The Associated Press in an interview.
Preval has said he prefers creating a police force similar to that of France's national police over reinstating the military, which orchestrated several coups throughout Haiti's history.
Aristide dismantled the military in 1995, after a U.S. military intervention restored him to power following the 1991 coup that first ousted him.
[Associated Press] |
