Only six months after the installation of 
Haiti
’s latest interim government, the idea of dissolving it to make Haiti a U.N. “protectorate” buzzed through Haiti policy circles. Marcella advocated the idea on Nov. 8, 2004, to the Defense Department’s Florida-based Southern Command. 
Marcella and other see a protectorate as the only hope for ordinary Haitians, noting they have not seen sustained improvements from Haiti’s governments — either the early 20th-century dictatorships or the governments elected since the late ’90s. Haitian politicians, Marcella says, “don’t engage in government, but in co-optation and coercion.” The result, he adds, is the deforested, violent, ill-fed and undereducated country that is Haiti.
The situation is so desperate that the nature — or name — of the precise takeover mechanism doesn’t matter, Marcella argues. Along the same lines, Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer endorsed setting up a protectorate, perhaps by some other name to appease critics. 
Secretary-General Annan seemed to favor a protectorate as well, although he couched the idea in diplomatic subtlety. In a March 2004 op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Annan referred to the “irresponsible behavior” of Haitian politicians and dismissed the idea that Haiti’s history of colonization and occupation should stand in the way of an international rescue project. “Haiti clearly is unable to sort itself out, and the effect of leaving it alone would be continued or worsening chaos.” 
But many Haitians find the notion of foreign control too much to swallow. “You cannot talk like that to a country with the past of Haiti,” Bajeux says. “We were one of the founders of the United Nations. Of course we need the help of all the international community institutions, but it’s very slow to arrive. A lot of times it’s only speech not action, with no real effort to understand our problems.”
Rejection of U.N. control usually goes hand-in-hand with impatience for a tougher attitude by U.N. troops. “Over the past two, three weeks they’re starting to be more aggressive; they’re showing their muscle,” Rotchild François Jr., news director of Port-au-Prince’s Radio Metropole, says approvingly of U.N. peacekeepers during a telephone interview. He would welcome foreigners working in government agencies, but only as advisers. “They would have to respect the Haitian way of doing things,” he says. “Otherwise, it won’t work.”
The Rev. Jean-Juste, a leading supporter of Aristide, argues against a protectorate on moral grounds, noting that Haiti once sent arms and money to South American independence leader Simón Bolívar, as well as to revolutionaries in what is now the United States. 
“Haitians have been free for over 200 years,” he says. “When we helped the U.S. and Latin American countries, there was no self-interest in it. Now it seems some of our so-called friends are offering help in order to take over.”
In a new twist on the intervention question, James Morrell, executive director of the Haiti Democracy Project, in Washington, argues that the United States lacks the moral standing to push for a takeover. “If we here in the U.S. had gotten our Haiti policy right, we’d be in better shape to call for foreign tutelage,” he says, citing the quick end to the U.S. intervention that restored Aristide to the presidency in 1994. “We needed to be there with troops and an obtrusive program of nation building throughout the ’90s.”
Chargé d’affaires Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s top diplomat in Washington, opposes a protectorate on practical grounds, estimating it would require a far heavier presence than the 7,000 soldiers and police officers and 300 civilians serving in the current U.N. mission. “They will have to send 100,000 troops,” Joseph argues, because the U.N. would have sole responsibility for the country.
Joseph draws a parallel with the current situation in Iraq, where the disbanding of the army gave occupying U.S. forces a king-size problem. A U.N. protectorate in Haiti, similarly, would have to cope with Aristide’s disbanding of the army in 1995. “It’s much better for nationals to build their own destiny,” Joseph says.
