Haiti

WASHINGTON -- Under pressure from the Pentagon and Republicans in Congress to reduce military commitments overseas, the Clinton administration plans to withdraw the last U.S. troops stationed in Haiti, even though peace there remains tenuous at best, Defense Department and administration officials said yesterday.The U.S. troops -- 480 people, including engineers, doctors and nurses and a security force from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division -- are the remnants of the force of 20,000 that occupied Haiti beginning in September 1994 to restore the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Dr. Gerard-Marie McGuffie Woel, a bow-tied surgeon who left his native Haiti for Baltimore and fathered a family full of doctors, died Thursday at Sinai Hospital after a short battle with cancer. He was 66.From 1960 to 1966, Dr. Woel worked at Sinai, where he was chief resident in the emergency room, before entering private practice in Northwest Baltimore. He worked from his Rogers Avenue office for 31 years, until his retirement in February 1997.A general surgeon, Dr. Woel specialized in biliary tract and pancreatic operations, but he was best-known for cheering patients with his bow ties and flowers from his wife's garden.

REMEMBER Haiti? That's the Caribbean island-nation where the United States intervened militarily five years ago with 20,000 troops to restore democracy and billions of dollars in assistance.Currently, it is being threatened by the very leaders who were the beneficiaries of our military intervention and financial largess. If left unchecked, Haiti's trouble could boil over and hurt Vice President Al Gore's presidential campaign.Of course, there have been some improvements. Haiti now has an elected government, though, in January, President Rene Preval closed down the parliament that had the temerity to question the executive branch.

BAYARA, Haiti -- The kicks to his head during 16 hours of interrogation left Verdier Eli deaf in one ear, suffering from blurred vision and dizziness. But it was a sacrifice he says he made proudly in 1990 for the sake of Haitian democracy.But the 43-year-old peasant farmer says he is ashamed of the "mockery" Haiti's elected officials have made of the sacrifice he and thousands of others made to rid the country of a brutal military dictatorship.Four years after 20,000 U.S. troops invaded Haiti to restore democratic rule, "everything is falling apart," Eli said.

HELPING the less fortunate never tasted so good. Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church has found a sweet way to help its sister parish, St. George in Bassin Bleu, Haiti.On Saturday and Sunday, the church hall at 7436 Baltimore-Annapolis Blvd. will be filled with cakes, pies, cookies and breads. All proceeds are earmarked for outreach work in the impoverished nation.Holy Trinity has sponsored three project trips to Haiti, with another planned for the spring. According to David E. Smith of Hanover, project manager of the Haitian outreach, work has included building a chapel and repairing existing facilities.

Food for the Poor, a Christian international aid organization, has opened an office in White Marsh. The office, at 8019 Belair Road, is one of five U.S. offices of the nonprofit organization, which has headquarters in Deerfield Beach, Fla. Food for the Poor also has operations in Haiti, Jamaica and Central America.The organization was created to assist the indigent of the world, primarily in the Caribbean, through self-help projects and establishment of small businesses. Since 1982, it has distributed more than $433 million in food and medical, educational and other supplies to 27 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America.

WASHINGTON -- The commander of U.S. forces in Latin America and the Caribbean has recommended the withdrawal of American troops from Haiti, saying the country's increasing political turbulence is placing them in danger.In closed-door testimony last month to a defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, Marine Corps Gen. Charles Wilhelm, head of the Southern Command, said that the deployment of 500 U.S. troops should be "terminated" and replaced by periodic visits by U.S. military personnel.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The government is broke. Parliament is paralyzed. The president is politically crippled. And the country has been without an official prime minister for more than 18 months.So where is an ordinary Haitian to turn when the hamstrung bureaucracy can't help?Try knocking on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's door. That's where thousands of poor Haitians are finding help.The former priest and president -- who likely will run again next year -- operates an all-purpose foundation that in effect substitutes for at least four key ministries of government.

LAST WEEK, parishioners of St. Louis Roman Catholic Church in Clarksville welcomed three visitors from their sister parish in Haiti.The visit was part of a continuing exchange program between St. Louis and St. John the Evangelist Center in Gonaives, Haiti. The center runs an elementary school, a trade school and a medical dispensary."We've tried to establish in this sister-parish relationship a cultural, spiritual, educational and financial relationship," said the Rev. Rich Bozzelli, associate pastor at St. Louis.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Drug traffickers taking advantage of Haiti's location, weak institutions and inexperienced police force have turned the country into a major transshipment center for cocaine en route from Colombia to the United States.In 1996, an estimated 5 percent to 6 percent of the cocaine destined for the United States was moved through Haiti. By the end of 1997, the figure had increased to 19 percent and climbing. By some estimates, that means up to 50 tons annually pour through Haiti.

Dr. Mojtaba Gashti, the Baltimore surgeon who brought a Haitian boy to the U.S. to remove an enormous tumor that might have otherwise killed him, has been named 2009 Public Citizen of the Year by the Maryland Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. Gashti, chief of vascular surgery at Union Memorial Hospital, was honored by the group for his humanitarian missions to Haiti, an annual medical pilgrimage he has made to the impoverished country since 1994. In February, Gashti brought 13-year-old Osly St. Preux and his mother to Baltimore, put them up at his Ellicott City home and arranged for the boy's surgeries.

Four weeks ago, Osly St. Preux arrived in Baltimore from his home in Haiti wearing summer clothes and too-tight shoes and with an ugly, gnarled, cancerous mass - one that ended up weighing 3 1/2 pounds - growing out of his right armpit. The 13-year-old was brought to the United States by Dr. Mojtaba Gashti, chief of vascular surgery at Union Memorial Hospital, who met the boy on a medical pilgrimage he takes to the impoverished nation each spring. Knowing he couldn't help him in Haiti, Gashti slogged through red tape, begged other doctors to volunteer their services and ultimately arranged for Osly and his mother to travel to Baltimore.

Osly St. Preux and his mother hopped on the back of a truck and rode for hours along rutted roads in northern Haiti before they finally arrived, barefoot, at the hospital run by nuns and often staffed by American volunteers. When Osly, then 12, took off his shirt for a surgeon from Baltimore, the doctor couldn't believe what he was seeing. The tumor growing out of Osly's right armpit was enormous, a gnarled, bulbous mass larger than a grapefruit and getting bigger by the month. Dr. Mojtaba Gashti knew almost immediately that he and his team, who every spring make a pilgrimage to Haiti to perform surgery, would not be able to save Osly - not there, in fairly primitive conditions in one of the poorest places on the planet.

Here's a safe bet: For many years, no one born in Haiti is going to be named Fay or Gustav. Definitely not Hanna. Absolutely not Ike. In that stricken Caribbean nation, the list of names associated with misery and death is long indeed. Jeanne, a tropical storm that didn't even make landfall, took twice as many lives in the Haitian city of Gonaives in 2004 as all the Americans killed by Katrina the following year in the U.S. Today, Gonaives, painstakingly rebuilt over the past several years, is again a wasteland.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Girls as young as 13 were having sex with U.N. peacekeepers for as little as $1. Five young Haitian women who followed soldiers back to Sri Lanka were forced into brothels or polygamous households. They have been rescued and brought home to warn others of the dangers of foreign liaisons. The young mother of a peacekeeper's child had to send the toddler to live with relatives in the countryside after other children and parents taunted him with the nickname "Little Minustah," the French acronym for the United Nations mission here.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Christelle-Melenchy Fortius' first chance at a reasonably normal life ended badly, with the surgery on her mouth aborted before it began and a Haitian doctor apologizing that the anesthesia didn't work. Her father, Dieumaitre Fortius, said he tried to earn money to pay for another doctor but never got far, and some days he couldn't even afford food. Last month, Christelle's second chance came unexpectedly, from the United States. The USNS Comfort, a Navy hospital ship, appeared one morning in Port-au-Prince harbor, and three days later 4-year-old Christelle was asleep on an operating table inside, with an oral surgeon and a plastic surgeon taking turns making the tiny cuts and stitches to repair her double cleft lip. "That ship was like a benediction for me," Fortius said.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The massive white ship that appeared one morning in the city's polluted harbor was wondrous on its own, but few Haitians could have dreamed of what was inside. There were nurses and surgeons, X-ray machines, cases of clean bandages and medicines. And, most incredibly, there was hope. Within sight of the city's squalid waterfront slums, the Baltimore-based hospital ship USNS Comfort dropped anchor to dispense free medical care, its ninth stop on a 12-country tour of South and Central America.

Haitian voters went to the polls in droves last February determined to elect a new president and end the political stagnation and violence that have paralyzed their country. Last week, they continued that process and selected legislative representatives from a slate of 127 candidates and laid the groundwork to seat the first functioning parliament in nine years. Although serious challenges lie ahead, the elections are a hopeful turn of events after two bloody and politically fractious years.

WASHINGTON -- With the declaration of Rene Preval as the elected president of Haiti, a narrow window of opportunity is open, yet again, for consolidating democracy there. The citizens of the beleaguered country cast their ballots for president in this seemingly never-ending saga of election after election that began with the departure of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1987. As with previous elections, the latest round was marked by allegations of vote fraud and mass street demonstrations, the refusal of the opposition to accept the declared results and a concerted intervention by the international community to bring the process to a close without further chaos and violence.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- A late-night deal over blank ballots ended Haiti's latest political crisis yesterday, leaving Rene Preval as president-elect of this troubled Caribbean nation after a week of mass protests over mismanaged elections. The 1:30 a.m. agreement between the United Nations-backed interim government and election officials gave the presidency to Preval by allocating blank ballots proportionally to each candidate. That pushed Preval over the 50.1 percent mark needed to avoid a presidential runoff that many feared would erupt into violence.