Dangerous world

Sago post Team,Michelet Etienne was kicking a soccer ball around the warren of cinderblock hovels where he lives when a U.N. patrol thundered by and gunmen leaped from their hiding places to spray it with bullets. When the shooting was over, the 12-year-old lay bleeding and unconscious amid piles of garbage and potholes filled with fetid water. A stray bullet had blown out part of his skull and severed his spinal cord, rendering his skinny legs useless. "I can't bring my feet together," the listless child whimpered in the crowded recovery ward of St. Joseph's Hospital a week later. "I can't move my feet." Like hundreds of other hapless bystanders over the last year, Michelet was caught in the crossfire between gunmen and besieged peacekeepers, an increasingly dangerous fact of life for the 2.5 million Haitians doomed to the teeming slums of this capital. With the approach of Tuesday's elections, the first since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled an armed rebellion two years ago, pressure has mounted on U.N. forces to break the gangs' stranglehold on the city. The crackdown has accelerated the deaths and injuries. Aristide loyalists claim that some of the casualties are victims of trigger-happy peacekeepers in league with corrupt Haitian police. Diplomats call the gunmen common criminals who are trying to protect their drug- and gun-running operations from the United Nations force, which is made up of more than 9,000 soldiers and police from three dozen countries, mostly in Latin America and Asia. It used to be that most of the shooting victims came from a couple of trouble spots, slums such as Cite Soleil and Bel Air, said Ali Besnaci, a French physician who heads the trauma clinic run by Doctors Without Borders at St. Joseph's. "Now the problem has spread all over," he said. Of the more than 300 gunshot victims treated at St. Joseph's in the last six weeks, at least half were women, children and elderly, clearly not combatants in the city's street-by-street clashes, Besnaci said. In December, Doctors Without Borders' two downtown emergency units treated 220 people with bullet wounds, 26 of those in a single, violent day after Christmas. Among the victims were a 15-month-old and a 77-year-old. Since the aid group arrived here 13 months ago, its volunteer surgeons have treated nearly 2,500 people. "It's terrible. It's simply unacceptable," Besnaci said as he visited the bedsides of the maimed, laid out in rows of gurneys and covered with stained sheets.