“This is a country with a lot of weapons and disarmament is not our mission. Our mission is to stabilize the country,” U.S. Marine Corp. Brig. Gen. Ronald Coleman, head of the 3,000-strong U.N.-sanctioned force, told Reuters.
Army Gen. James Hill, who oversees the Haiti operation as head of Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, told a Pentagon briefing this month the 1,600 U.S. Marines in Haiti would begin confiscating weapons from everyone without a valid permit.
Saying, “you’ve got to take guns off the street,” Hill said Marines would start going after caches.
But in an interview at his headquarters in Port-au-Prince, Coleman described a much less active role for the international force in disarmament — a thorny issue in the still tense Caribbean nation. He said it was up to the Haitian police.