PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Like many residents of Cite Soleil, Marie-Maude Fabien knew enough to stay clear of the main avenue and close to home when she heard the sound of gunfire.

Reed Lindsay, special to the Post-Gazette This 47-year-old woman, who asked not to be named, was raped by gang members. She said she is very grateful to the U.N. peacekeepers. Click photo for larger image.

But the morning of April 23 in the seaside slum was quiet, and Fabien felt safe enough to leave her bare concrete and rusty sheet-metal home with a five-gallon bucket to fetch water that was being sold a few blocks away.

As she was returning home, shots rang out. Fabien and the bucket full of water fell to the ground. When her husband found her, the 28-year-old mother of five was dead and the gunmen were gone. The bullet had pierced her breast and exited through her back.

Add one more name to the list of victims in Cite Soleil since a ruthless gang war broke out last September. But it was not the gangs who killed Fabien, according to witnesses and family members. They say it was United Nations peacekeepers.

"There were no other gunshots," said Osner Paul, 30, Fabien's widower, as he jiggled their wailing 2-month baby boy on his knee, trying in vain to coax him to sleep.

"I can't go out to work now because I have to take care of him. I have nothing," he said, lifting a curtain to reveal his one-room home, which was small and empty except for an aged tiny television perched on cinder blocks. "I just want a little money from [the U.N.] to pay for her burial. I don't need anything else."

	Reed Lindsay, special to the Post-Gazette Brazilian peacekeepers hold back thousands of women from Cite Soleil jockeying in line to receive one of 500 food handouts. Click photo for larger image.

Five months after U.N. peacekeepers marched into this grindingly poor seaside slum, violence rages on and the death toll climbs higher every day.

Residents complain that the gangs, now unified, continue to commit murders, rapes, robberies and extortion in the slum's alleyways, out of sight of U.N. peacekeepers who rarely leave the main avenues or the safety of their white armored personnel carriers.

Meanwhile, a monthlong campaign by the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (Minustah) to hunt down gang leaders has had few visible results except frequent gun battles between the peacekeepers and the gangs and an increasing number of civilian deaths.

"Things were calm when Minustah first came, but now it's becoming violent again," according to coffin maker Pierre Wilfrid, 32, who said his business is no better as a result because most people cannot afford to buy a casket. "It doesn't seem like Minustah has a plan to make things better here. And now they're shooting people every day."

In mid-December, Brazilian and Jordanian peacekeeping soldiers put a partial end to the scorched earth battle between two rival gang leaders, Emmanuel "Dread" Wilme, who claims to be fighting for the return of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Thomas "Labanye" Robinson, an unspoken ally of the government of interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue and a benefactor of millionaire businessman Andre Apaid. But gang activity gradually resumed, and in late March, Labanye was assassinated, reportedly by his second-in-command.

Since then, the fighting has reignited, although the battle lines are drawn differently. The gangs, now united under Dread Wilme, are facing off with Jordanian soldiers teamed with Haiti's national police.

While the U.N. presence was widely welcomed in December, some residents are now blaming the peacekeepers for shooting indiscriminately into the slum's warren of cinder-block and sheet-metal houses.

The U.N. and Haitian police have announced the killings of "armed bandits," but according to hospital workers and the Haitian Red Cross, some of the recent gunshot victims have been women and children.

U.N. officials deny knowing of any civilian victims, although they said they wouldn't be surprised if there had been some.

"Do you think in such a crowded city, we can have a military operation without civilian casualties?" said Lt. Col. Elouaifi Boulbars, a Moroccan peacekeeper and spokesman for the Minustah troops. "Our concern is to limit collateral damages, but we cannot stand with our hands tied without doing anything."

According to Brazilian Commander Carlos Chagas, avoiding civilian deaths is a priority for Minustah, which he said had resisted "pressure" to use even more force.

Some human rights observers are warning that while most residents of Cite Soleil would be happy to see an end to the gangs, an aggressive campaign to root them out of the tightly packed slum could result in many civilian deaths.

"Minustah is not able to distinguish between the population and the gang members, and as a result a lot of innocent people are dying" said Evel Fanfan, a human rights lawyer. "People were happy that Minustah had come to fight the gangs, but most of the victims so far have been neither the gangs nor Minustah, but the population."

Fanfan and other critics say the peacekeepers should be more assertive not in the use of force, but in trying to negotiate disarmament with gang members.

"Maybe they can't negotiate with Dread Wilme, but they should be able to convince most of the gang members around him to put down their weapons," said Jean Jorel Corneille, the mayor of Cite Soleil appointed by the interim government.

A U.N.-led national disarmament program that would provide incentives for gang members to hand over their weapons has not taken effect more than 11 months after the peacekeepers arrived because the government has not signed on to the initiative.

Meanwhile, plans by the Haitian government and international donors to spend millions of dollars to rebuild Cite Soleil, considered one of the most destitute slums in Latin America, have yet to be realized, except for a handful of projects and sporadic food handouts.

Neither the government nor the United Nations have statistics specific to Cite Soleil, where several hundred thousand people live in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the western hemisphere's poorest nation.

According to the U.N. Development Program, 65 percent of Haitians live on less than a dollar a day and malnutrition kills 28 percent of children below the age of 5, harrowing figures that are likely higher in Cite Soleil. Dr. Jacklin Saint-Fleur, director of Cite Soleil's only hospital, said he has been overwhelmed by hundreds of cases of severe diarrhea in the last three months due to contaminated water.

	Reed Lindsay, special to the Post-Gazette Osner Paul holds his 2-month-old child on the porch of his one-room home. Paul's wife was slain by gunmen last month. Click photo for larger image.

During much of last month, residents of Cite Soleil had no water at all because the public water system broke down and the drivers of private water trucks were too afraid to enter. Thousands of people had to walk more than a mile under the scorching Caribbean sun to fetch water from a neighboring slum.

Electricity was cut off for more than three weeks. Jobs are practically nonexistent, and the main economic activity is meager street vending.

Residents of Cite Soleil not only must struggle every day to find enough food to survive, they also must worry about getting shot by a stray bullet or being targeted by one of the gangs.

Aristide and his Lavalas party maintain strong support in Cite Soleil, as they do in most of the capital's poor neighborhoods. But many Cite Soleil residents who are sympathetic to Aristide are also quietly afraid and resentful of the gangs that declare they are fighting for his return while committing crimes and atrocities against the population. Some say Dread Wilme's gang and Labanye's now-defunct anti-Aristide rival gang were equally brutal.

The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti has documented more than 80 cases of women and girls as young as 13 who have been raped by gangs of all political allegiances in Cite Soleil since September.

One rape victim who asked not to be named said she was grateful to the U.N. peacekeepers.

"I was very happy to see Minustah come here," she said. "If Minustah was not here, there would not be anyone left in Cite Soleil. If Minustah were not here, many more people would be dead."

But the 47-year-old unemployed mother of three said she feels no safer now than she did when the peacekeepers established a permanent presence in the slum last December. Her cousin was killed and her 13-year-old daughter was shot in the arm by gang members in March. She is still sleeping on a worn sheet of cardboard covering the concrete floor of a neighbor's house after gangs stole everything she had last year and then reduced her house to rubble.

"Every day, my daughter cries because she wants to leave Cite Soleil," she said. "I'm afraid. If I had money, I would have left the Cite already. I could be shot at anytime. Just like others have died, I could die too."