Here is a fascinating article that I came across about the safety in Haiti:

Trying to stay safe in Haiti

As the United Nations decides to keep its peacekeepers in Haiti for another 12 months, Nick Caistor travels to the country to find out how dangerous the situation is for himself.

Whenever possible, I like to travel into Haiti by bus from the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
It is a long seven-hour ride, but it allows me to take the political temperature at the border and to see if there is any improvement in the crippling poverty immediately obvious in the Haitian countryside before I am submerged in the sprawling mess of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

I also get to meet interesting travel companions and this time was no exception.
The man I fell into conversation with was Charles, a retired engineer from New York State. Since his retirement, Charles told me, he has been spending his time on projects sponsored by the International Rotary Club.

At the moment, he is working hard in Haiti to bring proper drinking water to some 200,000 school children who at present - like most of the Haitian population - have no access to safe water.

This was interesting enough but it was Charles's other news that particularly caught my attention.

Random ransom

The last time he had been in Haiti, he said, he had been kidnapped.
While his car was held up in one of the inevitable Port-au-Prince traffic jams, four men had pulled up alongside in a jeep, fired shots underneath his vehicle and forced him out.

They held him for several days, while they tried to get somebody to pay a ransom.
They called all his Rotarian friends and anyone else whose business card he happened to have on him.
When the first group of kidnappers was unsuccessful, they passed him on to others who tried again. In the end, though, all they got was the money he had in his wallet, and his captors set him free.

As Charles proudly told me, the US embassy reckoned his was the only case of someone being released by kidnappers in Haiti without a ransom being paid. When I asked why he thought he was an exception, Charles modestly reckoned that it was because the gangs got fed up with him talking so much.

Returned criminals

But he also confirmed what many people in Haiti believe - that his captors, who spoke English, were people who had been deported back to Haiti from jails in the United States.

The Bush administration has been sending back an average of 50 Haitians a month and, although this may ease their prison population problems, many of the returnees are wreaking havoc in the slums of Port-au-Prince.

The Haitian army was demobilised in 1995, after the United States intervened to help overthrow the last military dictatorship. This was a good move, except for the fact that the Haitian state now has no monopoly on force or weapons in the country.
The small police force is hopelessly outgunned and will hardly ever venture into the worst slums of the capital, where gangs and drug-runners are in control.

Continued...