A CONSTABULARY OF THUGS

It was bad enough when Jean Bernard Charles was shoved to the ground in handcuffs four months ago in Port-au-Prince and shot to death by four Haitian police officers for no apparent reason. But then his family complained that Haiti's U.S.-trained police should not be in the business of murdering civilians. This, they quickly discovered, was a mistake. First came the warnings: if the relatives didn't shut up, they might suffer the same fate. Then came the threats: one afternoon a few officers caught up with Charles' cousin and said he was going to be arrested. When he fled, they shot at him.

Fearing for their lives, Charles' cousin and brother finally did what many Haitians are doing these days when they find themselves abused, tortured or terrorized by the police. They paid a visit to the offices of an organization called the Human Rights Fund. The group offers a number of services, including a special protection program for people who have been savaged by police officers whom the U.S. recruited, trained and turned loose on the streets of Haiti in July 1995. This, needless to say, does not come cheap. But fortunately there is a ready source of cash. That's because, like the officers who commit these crimes, the program to shelter their victims is funded by American tax dollars.

Up until now this program remained a closely held secret within the community of American and U.N. officials who administer Haiti's billion-dollar reconstruction effort. But what has not been a secret is the fact that a disturbing number of Haiti's U.S.-trained cops are thugs. Last month a Human Rights Watch/Americas report offered a shocking account of indiscipline and incompetence among the 5,000-strong force. The report cited dozens of cases of beatings, torture and murder. It also highlighted the inadequate training the officers received, and drew attention to the failure of the Haitian government to prosecute rogue cops. "It's sad," a U.S. official told TIME. "Here's a force that we invested $65 million in, and from the same account, we're now using money to protect people from it."

This is certainly not what the Clinton Administration had in mind in September 1994 when the U.S. military invaded Haiti to reinstate the country's first freely elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Shortly after Aristide's return, the U.S. created the first civilian police force in Haitian history. It was to be the cornerstone of Haiti's new democracy. With trustworthy police, U.S. officials predicted, Haiti could finally begin to deconstruct its dictatorship, reconstruct its economy and build from scratch all the judicial, political and civil institutions necessary for a working democracy.

Unfortunately, the timetable for this very impressive goal was rather tight. At the time, there was immense pressure in the U.S. to pull out the 21,000 American soldiers as swiftly as possible. When it was decided that most of those troops would leave by March 1995, the schedule for assembling the police force had to be compressed accordingly. So after only four months of training (rather than the 12 months that experts had recommended), 5,000 ill-equipped rookie cadets were deployed. Looking back, a U.S. official sums up that approach as follows: "We were stupid."

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