Haiti gang leader calls for dialogue as Kenyan police patrol the streets.Kenyan police officers were seen patrolling outside the US embassy building in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince over the weekend.
Wearing their usual uniform of body armor and helmets and holding automatic weapons, they smiled at people asking questions, and one officer responded, "We are here to bring peace, of course, not to fight."
The Kenyan police officers are the first U.N.-backed contingent of foreign police to arrive in Haiti, nearly two years after the troubled Caribbean country urgently requested help to quell a surge in gang violence.
A contigent of what was officially described as Kenyan police were deployed to Haiti on 25th June in what for many including Kenyans themselves remain a controversial move. Some 200 Kenyan personnel in military fatigues and high powered rifles disembarked a Kenyan Airways flight as part of a UN sanctioned mission in the first free black Republic in the world.
This latest intervention adds to the list of numerous military occupations of this Caribbean nation since Haitians gained sovereignty in 1804.