By Tom Phillips in Port-au-Prince.
November 7, 2007

NIGHT WAS closing in on the squalid streets of Cite Soleil as two white armoured tanks carrying members of the Brazilian army's Seventh Infantry Division rolled into Port-au-Prince's most notorious shantytown. Through the green and black haze of their night vision goggles the soldiers squinted out at their surroundings: crumbling shacks with gaping holes gouged out of them by automatic gunfire; stray dogs picking at fetid mounds of rubbish; the occasional kerosene fire flickering eerily in the darkness. A year ago this desolate setting might also have been accompanied by the crackle of gunfire. But tonight the streets were silent.

"They haven't shot at us since March," boasted Colonel Carlos Jorge, a hulking army veteran from the south of Brazil.

Until a year ago, UN peacekeepers such as Jorge were fighting street-to-street battles against heavily armed gangs in Haiti's capital. Now they talk of the end of an "operative" phase and the beginning of an "eminently preventative" one, meaning that, for now at least, the storm of violence is easing.

"We can't say that the violence problem is completely resolved," cautioned Ricardo Pilar, the commander of the Brazilian marines in Port-au-Prince. "There are still some focuses of violence to eliminate. But Haiti is moving forward slowly."

Few countries boast as turbulent a history as Haiti, the world's first black republic. Founded in 1804, this desperately poor Caribbean country has spent much of the past century immersed in bloodshed, ruled by corrupt, abusive regimes or occupied by foreign forces.

In February 2004, when president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced into exile, Haiti plunged once again into violence: roadblocks burned across the capital while rival gangs battled it out in scenes which would have shocked even the most hardened of Brazilian soldiers, accustomed to gangland shootouts back home in Rio's favelas.

Four months later, a Brazil-led UN stabilisation mission, known as Minustah, took over from an interim group of US marines and French soldiers who had been occupying the country since Aristide's departure.

Their task could scarcely have been more demanding: to contain the violence that had taken grip in sprawling slums such as Cite Soleil, where teenage gangsters roamed the streets with heavy artillery and killed with impunity.

But now, more than three years on, the Brazilians claim to have achieved a "pacification", however fragile.

An abandoned market at the heart of Cite Soleil that once served as a hideout for local gangsters has been transformed into a UN stronghold, circled by barbed wire and peace-keepers armed with Para-Fal assault rifles. In the nearby slum of Bois Neuf, a former kidnapping den has become a UN base.

Haiti also has a new president - Rene Preval, who was elected in February 2006 pledging to rid his country of the label "failed state" and now claims to be doing exactly that.

The question is how long can the "pacification" last? Robert Montenald, a 32-year-old social worker from Bel-Air, said that unless fundamental problems such as health care, unemployment and education were addressed, the peace was unlikely to last.