According to Write to Joe Lauria at newseditor an offer of troops from the Dominican Republic to help peacekeeping operations in Haiti was thrown into confusion Wednesday, as senior Western diplomats initially said Haiti rejected the overture.
Later Wednesday, diplomats said Haiti had reversed its decision, and would accept a small contingent of Dominican troops as part of a broader U.N. buildup in Haiti to protect aid supplies and provide security following the earthquake.
At the same time, U.N. officials said Haiti had never rejected the offer.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, have had a long history of tense relations.
Earlier Wednesday, Leo Merores, the Haitian ambassador to the U.N., said in a telephone interview that he couldn't comment because he hadn't been officially informed of a decision to reject the offer.
A Western diplomat said Haitian President René Préval had made the decision on his own, given that Parliament isn't functioning, and had informed the U.N. in Port-au-Prince.
The press office at the Dominican mission said they were unauthorized to comment.
Several calls to the presidential press office in Santo Domingo went unanswered.
The size of the Dominican force is unclear.
Alain Le Roy, the U.N. undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations, said on Tuesday that the Dominican Republic had offered 800 troops as part of 2, 000 more peacekeepers approved by the Security Council.
Late Wednesday one U.N. official said that Haiti had agreed to only 130 Dominican troops.
The U.S. military is sending about 10, 000 troops under U.S. command to assist in the recovery effort after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12, which has killed as many as 200, 000 people.
The U.S. has rarely operated as peacekeepers under the U.N. flag. The U.S. had a number of soldiers in the U.N.'s mission in Haiti and in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in the 1990s.
The Security Council authorized the deployment of the additional blue helmets and 1, 500 new U.N. police to guard humanitarian aid corridors and food distribution points in Haiti.
The new U.N. troops will guard five humanitarian aid corridors that the U.N. is establishing from Santo Domingo and northern Haitian ports to Port-au-Prince, Mr. Le Roy said. The police will help keep order at food distribution points.
Mr. Le Roy said Tuesday that the Dominican troops would guard the corridor from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince.
Sir John Holmes, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said the Santo Domingo-Port-au-Prince corridor, guarded by already-deployed U.N. peacekeepers, was being "intensively" used by aid convoys.
The Dominican troops would free the blue helmets to go to Port-au-Prince to provide additional security there.
Mr. Le Roy said talks had begun with Brazil for two more battalions and the European Union is discussing sending police.
The new deployments will raise the total number of U.N. troops and police in the country to more than 12, 500. Brazil already has the largest contingent.
Early racial problems between Spanish colonists and African slaves on the western part of the island worsened after Haiti became an independent republic in 1804 after a slave revolt against France.
In 1822, Haiti occupied Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, until the 1844 formation of the Dominican Republic.
Resentment over the occupation and racial and religious tensions marred relations for many decades even after Haiti ceased trying to reoccupy the country.
A massacre of Haitian migrants—some reports put the number at 17, 000 dead—by Dominican dictator Rafael L. Trujillo in 1937 and the use of anti-Haitian policies to prop up his regime hurt relations further and to some extent lingered after Trujillo's death in 1961.
Dominican citizens have donated to the relief effort over the past week, and the Dominican government has delivered fuel to Haiti.
But some Dominican intellectuals have been quoted in the national press as warning that a Dominican contingent in the U.N. force would be seen as an intervention.
Write to Joe Lauria at newseditor at wsj.com
