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Mar 12, 2004 Email this article
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WASHINGTON – US Marines in Haiti, in an expansion of their mission, plan to hunt down caches of illegal firearms as part of efforts to disarm militants and prevent violence, a senior US commander said on Wednesday.Army Gen. James Hill, who oversees the Haiti operation as head of Miami-based US Southern Command, told a Pentagon briefing that Marines now will confiscate weapons from any Haitian they encounter in the capital Port-au-Prince “unless he has a valid permit by Haitian law and is in the process of conducting some valid security job anybody.”
“In addition to that, as we develop intelligence and can find weapons caches, we are going to go after those,” Hill said. “This is to do two things. First, it’s a force-protection issue for my forces. And, secondly, it is to help develop a more secure and stable environment inside Haiti,” Hill said.
Hill said the 1,600 US Marines leading a multinational stability force in the impoverished Caribbean nation had new written instructions ensuring they “had the ability to go and intervene (in) Haitian-on-Haitian violence.” Hill said the Marines were not “going to stand there and watch one Haitian kill another Haitian without trying to intervene in that.”
“We will simply not tolerate acts of violence against our multinational forces or innocent Haitians,” Hill said.
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