By JADE RUSSELL

Tribune Staff Reporter

jrussell@tribunemedia.net

FORMER Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis said a resolution to send defence force personnel to Haiti to help curb the violence gripping that country should be debated in Parliament before officers are sent abroad.

His comment came after the Davis administration reiterated its commitment to sending 150 officers to Haiti as part of a multi-national force to offer technical assistance and training to the Haitian National Police. It is far from certain that the force will be created: It requires a resolution from the United Nations Security Council, and it is unclear whether China and Russia, countries with veto power, would support the force.

Kenya, nonetheless, has committed to sending 1000 troops to Haiti and leading the force.

“If the UN,” Dr Minnis said yesterday, “is putting forth a resolution to discuss and make a determination as to individuals being deployed to Haiti, then the prime minister is showing total disrespect to the Bahamian Parliament and the Bahamian people. If the UN requires a resolution, then The Bahamas should insist that a resolution is brought to Parliament so it’s debated and discussed in Parliament with the involvement and input of the Bahamian people.”

According to the Defence Act, an order from the governor-general is the only thing needed to deploy defence force personnel outside The Bahamas, although parliaments sometimes use resolutions to formally express their intent on significant matters.

National Security Minister Wayne Munroe noted yesterday that The Bahamas sent as many as 141 defence force personnel to Haiti in 1994 as part of a UN peacekeeping mission. The multi-national force helped maintain security and stability in Haiti.

“He would do well to speak to HAI (Hubert Alexander Ingraham) about how it happens,” Mr Munroe said yesterday. “He seems to be clueless about how deployments work.”

Dr Minnis said although officers may engage in just technical assistance in Haiti, the volatile situation there should warrant local parliamentary debate before troops are committed to the cause.

“We don’t know what would be the extent of their involvement, and this is something totally different altogether,” he said when reminded about the 1994 involvement of defence force officers in Haiti.

“You talking about gang warfare. There are possibilities that we can lose individuals, whether they are in IT, whatever they’re doing there. Gang warfare, you don’t know who the gangs are, so we are sending individuals who can be exposed. It’s only fair that a resolution should be debated so that Bahamian people would know exactly whether their sons and daughters are going and what kind of danger they will be exposed to.”

“The government should bring forth a resolution so that it could be debated so that the Bahamian people could know for certain this will have no impact on our crime, no impact on migration, no impact on monitoring our waters with respect to fishing, poaching, etc. That has to be debated to ensure we ourselves are not compromised.”

Dr Minnis would not say if he would support a resolution, saying he would decide based on the facts presented.

Asked to compare the threats in 1994 to the current Haitian crisis, Mr Munroe said: “It’s gang involvement where there are only 11k members of the Haitian National Police to police 14 million people. That’s the basic issue. Back then, the situation was the same as far as I am told. The issue was to basically police where the police force was decimated and back then more divided.”

Earlier this year, Foreign Policy, an American news publication, reported that only 9k of Haiti’s 14k police force was on active duty, with the country having one of the lowest police-to-civilian ratios in the world. Eighteen Haitian officers were killed in January in gang attacks.