Backed by whirring helicopters and 20 armored personnel carriers, the United Nations force descended on the waterfront slum of Cit� Soleil looking like a battalion headed for Fallujah.

In the dead of the night, some 400 Brazilian, Jordanian and Peruvian soldiers fanned through the maze of tin shacks and sewage canals to take out Emanuel "Dread" Wilm�, a gang leader who had refused to surrender one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the hemisphere.

When the sun rose after a five-hour battle, Wilm� and at least five of his crew were dead. So were dozens of men, women and children caught in the gunfire, community leaders and residents said.

UN officials hailed the July 6 raid as a turning point in ridding this shantytown of gangs loyal to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist former priest who was ousted by armed rebels 23 months ago.

But Operation Iron Fist, as the raid was called, became an Operation Band-Aid. A new gang leader quickly replaced Wilm�. And bandits and UN peacekeepers trade gunfire in the slum almost daily, injuring or killing civilians in the process.

"A SORE ON THE BODY OF HAITI"

"Cit� Soleil is a sore on the body of Haiti, a problem for both Haitians and the international community," said Juan Gabriel Vald�s, chief of the UN mission here.

Cit� Soleil is the most visible symbol of the lawlessness that has raged since Aristide's ouster, posing the greatest single challenge to planting democracy in the poorest and one of the most troubled countries in the hemisphere.

Unless someone restores law and order, no amount of effort and money will create jobs, rebuild institutions and restore hope, foreign policy analysts say.

More insecurity also could increase the flow of refugees and cocaine from this country to U.S. shores and make Haiti a potential haven for terrorists.

Though he's exiled in South Africa, Aristide remains a key reason a UN force of nearly 8,900 troops and police can't stop the political violence that has killed an estimated 1,600 people since his departure 23 months ago. Aristide retains strong loyalty among the poor and is widely believed to have armed the gangs in slums such as Cit� Soleil during his final years in power, using them as his private militia.

Adding to peacekeepers' worries, the only legal security force in Haiti is the 5,600-member national police, which is so poorly trained and so corrupt it is widely considered part of the problem.

Even if it were effective, the Haitian police force is woefully undersized for this Maryland-sized nation of 8 million. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, has nearly 40,000 police and 50,000 troops to protect an equivalent population.

Moreover, the pro-Aristide gangs are far from the only armed groups the UN peacekeepers confront. Others include: Gangs that rule slums elsewhere, many with a ruthlessness befitting their names - the Little Machete Army, the Cannibal Army, the Vampires and Clean Sweep.

Police involved in crimes including kidnapping and murder. Police frequently fire straight into demonstrations, human rights groups say. In August, police aided by machete-wielding thugs killed 10 suspected pro-Aristide gang members during a U.S.-sponsored soccer match. Former death-squad members and ex-soldiers from Haiti's decommissioned army who remain armed and ready to fight if elections don't go their way.

The former military has a long history of toppling leaders, including Aristide, whom it unseated during his first term in 1991. He was returned to power by the United States in 1994 and dissolved the military soon after. But many former soldiers rose up again and helped lead the armed revolt that unseated him a second time in February 2004.

Though he became mired in alleged corruption, Aristide was the only modern Haitian leader to champion a largely illiterate, marginalized and desperately poor majority. Many supporters, even today, are demanding his return, seeing his ouster as the latest chapter in a long battle between haves and have-nots.

"Aristide must come back," declared Amaral Duclona, the baby-faced gang leader who succeeded Wilm� in Cit� Soleil. If Haiti's elite tries to stop his return after elections or to fix the vote, "the people will take to the streets," Duclona warned.

But while many armed groups pledge political fealty, others are for sale to the highest bidders. Some protect drug traffickers who transport nearly one-tenth of Colombian cocaine bound for the United States through Haiti - and who allegedly are bankrolling some presidential candidates. Others provide corrupt candidates with muscle for impending elections or to kidnapping rings, which have turned Port-au-Prince into the hemisphere's abduction capital with up to 10 people a day - including missionaries and school children - being kidnapped, authorities say.

Since spring, more than 2 dozen Americans have been taken and then released for ransom. Three other Americans were killed trying to resist being nabbed. Exacerbating the violence, the justice system barely functions, creating a situation that Thierry Fagart, a French lawyer who heads the human rights office of the UN mission here, calls "catastrophic."

Courthouses are in shambles. Corruption is rampant. And thousands of former Aristide supporters who've been jailed by the interim government of Prime Minister G�rard Latortue have languished for months without charges in what many human rights groups call a political witch-hunt.

The inmates include Aristide's former prime minister, Yvonne Neptune, and the Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, a militant priest who supporters say has developed leukemia in prison and whose incarceration thwarted his bid to run as the candidate of Aristide's Lavalas Family party. Latortue denies any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, more than 1,500 political and common prisoners who escaped during Aristide's ouster remain on the lam.

Given Haiti's history of political violence - only one elected president has peacefully transferred power to another - many international experts are calling for a more effective UN force.

"Until the United Nations peacekeepers act aggressively to demobilize the gangs and ex-military and to clean out killers within the police, these forces will pose a threat to whatever government takes office," said Mark Schneider, vice president of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.

But to many impoverished Haitians and grassroots organizations, the UN forces are part of the problem, underscoring the complexities in quelling violence here.

In slums like Cit� Soleil, where jobs are nonexistent and people are lucky to eat one meal a day, residents and community leaders accuse the UN forces of indiscriminately firing on crowds. They say peacekeepers have killed scores of children, old people and pregnant women in their hunt for bandits.

"Are these gang members?" demanded John Joseph Joel, a Cit� Soleil leader for Lavalas, as he angrily brandished photos of a bullet-riddled woman and her two young children who he said were among victims of the raid that killed gang leader Wilm�.

A coalition of human rights and legal groups, some of whom are pro-Aristide, contend peacekeepers' gunfire killed 63 civilians in Operation Iron Fist alone - a charge that the UN adamantly disputes. In November, the coalition filed complaints before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an investigative arm of the Organization of American States, accusing the peacekeepers of needlessly killing or wounding innocent civilians in several operations.

The wounded included Edeline Pierre Louis, of Cit� Soleil, who was seven months pregnant and lost her unborn child after a bullet struck her in the stomach during the July 6 raid. She said she saw the gunfire coming directly from a Brazilian peacekeeper in a UN armored personnel carrier as she stood in the doorway of her house.

"If it weren't for God, I would have died because my guts were hanging onto the ground," said Pierre Louis, 30. "They say the blancs [whites] came here to give us security, but it's they who are breaking our heads," she said, using a Haitian Creole term for foreigners. "I don't have any problem with anyone. I didn't do anything to them."

A single mother of five, Pierre Louis said she lost her job cooking at a rice-and-beans street stall because she was too injured to work. She's living with a cousin because she had to sell her sheet-metal shack for $125 to feed her children. The UN has not offered her any compensation and she thinks it is futile to take the peacekeepers to court.

"A Haitian court will never judge Minustah," Pierre Louis said, using the French acronym for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti.

Since the complaints were filed with the Inter-American commission, several more civilians say they've been shot and wounded by UN forces. Meanwhile, more than 1,500 political and common prisoners who escaped during Aristide's ouster remain on the lam.

Several Haitian police also say peacekeepers fired on them at a checkpoint here last month, wounding two. A UN spokesman said the accusation was "apparently" true.

DEFENDING THEIR ACTIONS

UN officials defend their actions overall, insisting they use force as a last resort. The peacekeeping mission "does not want to wound or kill civilians," said Vald�s. "But the blue helmets [peacekeepers] can't stand still with their arms crossed playing the martyr." Though a small number of innocent people may have been caught in cross fire, most casualties are the work of gang members who've executed civilians they suspected of being informants, UN officials say.

In an interview in his heavily guarded residence on a hill in Port-au-Prince, Vald�s described gang members as ruthless aggressors who spray peacekeepers' tanks with automatic weapons fire, hurl Molotov cocktails at them and use women and children as human shields.

Hunkered down in a school classroom a few miles and a world apart in Cit� Soleil, gang leader Duclona insisted peacekeepers always fire first.

"Minustah wants to destroy the masses of poor people to help the bourgeoisie," he said. Duclona, 26, was repeating a mantra that has spread through the slums since Aristide's ouster, but underscores class divisions that have endured since slaves booted French colonists two centuries ago.

Determining how many people died and from what side is almost impossible in Haiti's innumerable clashes because Haitian authorities and armed groups often dispose of the corpses before independent observers arrive at the scene.

But Ali Basnaci, chief of the Haiti mission of Doctors Without Borders, a nonprofit medical group that works in Cit� Soleil, said civilians, often women and young children, are wounded in most big shoot-outs between gangs and security forces, sometimes by the dozens.

"We're not here to take sides, but clearly, innocent bystanders are getting hurt," Basnaci said.

ROGUE POLICE

Armed gangs played a key role in Haiti's turbulent history even before dictator Fran�ois "Papa Doc" Duvalier created his notorious tontons macoutes in the 1960s. But the number of arms circulating now has made today's forces particularly potent, arms experts say. The country is awash in 210,000 guns, only one-eighth of them in the hands of security forces, according to the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research group.

Like their predecessors, the current crop of illegal groups is widely believed to have bought or stolen many weapons from official stockpiles. Guns also are smuggled in from neighboring countries or obtained from the United States, despite a U.S. embargo on arms sales to Haiti.

Washington imposed the embargo in 1991, after the military toppled Aristide, but kept it in place after U.S. Marines returned him to power in 1994. Since Aristide's second ouster in 2004, the U.S. government has given at least 2,600 used side arms to Haitian police, arguing that without bigger and better weapons, the tiny, poorly equipped force can't compete against machine gun-toting gangsters.

It also has let Haiti buy another $1.9 million in handguns, rifles and tear gas from American arms manufacturers, using a clause in the embargo allowing sales if they bolster Haitian security or further U.S. interests.

That sale was not deterred by the police-led slaying of 10 alleged Aristide gang members Aug. 20 during a soccer game in Martissant, a poor neighborhood in the capital. The tournament had been organized as a "match for peace" by the U.S. Agency for International Development, a foreign-aid arm of the State Department.

As spectators and bikini-clad cheerleaders shimmied to reggae and rap during halftime, about three dozen police and machete-wielding thugs, many wearing ski-masks, entered the stadium and ordered everyone to the ground.

Stepping across prone spectators, the thugs pointed to several men they said were pro-Aristide gang members, according to several independent investigations. Police handcuffed some men and shot them in the head, witnesses said. The thugs, members of a gang called Little Machete Army, hacked others to death.

"People were screaming 'Help!' and running and jumping over the stadium walls. But there were more men with machetes waiting for them outside," recalled Martissant resident Nasson Cristome Dorsey, 30, who survived four gashes to his head and arms from a man who repeatedly struck him with a machete. Dorsey insisted he is not a gang member.

Haiti police chief Mario Andresol, a former army officer and police commissioner who was exiled under Aristide, has condemned the massacre and vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice.

"Corruption is a problem at every level of the hierarchy, and I'm going to stop it," said Andresol, who estimated one-fourth of his 5,600 police are involved in illegal activity. "We have to change the culture, to teach the force to act responsibly and realize it is not normal to get people killed." Since the interim government appointed him in July - under pressure from foreign governments - to vet the force, Andresol has arrested more than 100 police for kidnapping, murder and other crimes. Fifteen of the arrests were linked to - the Martissant soccer massacre.

But, in a vivid illustration of the force's endemic corruption, Andresol still relies on UN peacekeepers - not his force - for his own protection.

Meanwhile, human rights officials say, dozens of police have been seen protecting Guy Philippe, a former army officer suspected of ties to drug traffickers who helped lead the rebels who unseated Aristide nearly two years ago. Philippe is among a half-dozen former coup leaders or anti-Aristide rebels running for president.

CLIMATE OF TERROR

In this security vacuum, the feeling of terror and abandonment among ordinary Haitians is palpable. Rose-Maryse Veillard, 35, a street vendor from the gritty Grand Ravine neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, trembled as she described being gang-raped in June and beaten and robbed by a different armed group in September. Yet, she scoffed at the notion of seeking help from authorities.

For one thing, the five masked men who raped her in front of her three children said they were delivering a warning to Grand Ravine residents to not become "traitors" who snitched to police, said Veillard. For another, "If I went to the police they'd probably rape me, too," she said in an interview at a downtown rape-crisis center. "They are even worse than the gangs."

A DEVASTATING RIPPLE EFFECT

Like almost every violent act in Haiti, the attacks on Veillard had a devastating ripple effect.

After the rape, she said, her boyfriend left her, telling her he was "humiliated" by her abuse. Too scared to stay in the house where she was attacked, she and her children have slept on friends' floors, moving every few nights to avoid wearing out their welcome.

During the September assault, armed youths grabbed her and beat her as she left a market where she was selling packets of dry spaghetti and canned cheese.

Then they stole her unsold food, and her savings, which she was carrying in her pocket because she had no safe place to leave them, and the school uniforms she'd bought that day for her children. Now, she's so broke she can barely feed her children and can't scrounge the tuition to send one of them to school.

Grand Ravine is up a steep hill from Martissant. As in most poor neighborhoods in Haiti, just about every street in both areas is flanked by open sewage canals. The air is so thick with dust that laundry hanging outside decrepit shacks turns brown before it dries.

On the road to the soccer stadium on a recent day, a woman lay face-up on a mound of stinking garbage, broiling in the tropical heat. Flies buzzed around her head. She looked almost dead. The sight was so common that no one paid any attention.

Inside the stadium, a mural is painted on a wall that spectators frantically clawed their way over during the massacre. It shows two hands joined below the motto: "Let's make peace."

THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE

Achieving that goal is entirely possible, provided the international community commits to a long haul in Haiti, many security experts say.

Proposals to reactivate Haiti's military remain highly controversial, given the army's role in unseating governments. But several leading presidential candidates, international donors and security experts generally agree on a host of other measures.

Foremost among them is vetting, retraining and vastly expanding Haiti's police force, ideally quadrupling it to 20,000 or more. That could take a decade. Haiti also must rebuild its ravaged judicial system.

International peacekeepers must stay for at least five to 10 years, most political analysts say. Some recommend a more agile, robust force in the short-term to rout hard-core criminal elements, similar to the British unit that brought peace to Sierra Leone in 2001.

Some security experts also recommend more foot patrols of troops who speak Haitian Creole to win over the population. Foot patrols of Brazilian peacekeepers have helped curb bloody clashes between UN forces and pro-Aristide residents in the poor Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Bel Air.

"Lots of other failed states have been revitalized, some that were bigger basket cases than Haiti, so I don't think it's impossible," said James Dobbins, a special envoy to Haiti and other conflict zones under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Unlike their counterparts in Somalia or Sierra Leone, Haiti's illegal armed groups are still relatively small and lack heavy weaponry such as rocket-propelled grenades, making it easier to disband, Dobbins said.

Disarmament programs must extend to all armed groups and provide incentives such as job training and low-interest loans, many political observers believe.

Some are calling for a general amnesty or a peace accord.

Nearly everyone agrees those efforts must be accompanied by a huge infusion of outside funds and expertise to create jobs, schools and other social programs.

"Our people can't get one hot meal a day," said Samba Boukman, a dreadlocked Lavalas Family leader who's helped mediate between peacekeepers and residents in Bel Air. "There is no violence worse than that."

Reed Lindsay contributed to this story.

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