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Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Haitian gangs that have been waging daily firefights with United Nations troops from a Port-au-Prince slum say they're ready to surrender their arms, removing the last major obstacle to national elections this fall, UN and government officials said.

Hocine Medili, deputy head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, said gang leaders sent messages within the last week from their impoverished sanctuary, which houses as many as 500,000 people. The UN met yesterday with leaders of Haiti's transitional government to discuss how to respond, Medili said.

Disarming the gangs inside Cite Soleil and permitting the people there to register to vote is crucial to the credibility of the election of local leaders, a parliament and president, Medili said. The slum is a stronghold of supporters of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was forced out of office during a February, 2004, rebellion.

``It will be a fragile government anyway, because of the lack of state institutions and the level of the economy,'' Medili said in an interview in his office at UN headquarters in Port-au- Prince. ``If the next government has a wide political and social base there will be a chance in the next four-five years to really make this transition successful.''

New Election Timetable

The government is to announce a new election timetable today, moving the first round to early November from Oct. 9, according to Jean-Junior Joseph, spokesman for the office of Gerard Latortue, prime minister of the transitional government that is to turn over power to elected leaders on Feb. 7, 2006.

``For now, there is a lot of concern that the shantytowns are not going to be able to participate because of the violence, and there is also the notion that they represent the Lavalas Party, followers of Aristide,'' Medili said.

Lavalas is one of 50 political parties that gained the 5,000 signatures needed to participate in the election, and 2 million of Haiti's 4.5 million eligible voters have been registered.

Joseph confirmed the messages from Cite Soleil and the government's desire for a political solution, while saying Latortue won't ``negotiate with terrorists.''

``We have been attempting to get these people to talk,'' Medili said. ``They initiated the contact and we think it is serious. Obviously, there are issues with people who have committed serious crimes, but this is the best solution.''

Dangerous Patrols

UN troops consider foot patrols inside Cite Soleil to be too dangerous, and their armored personnel carriers can't get through the narrow streets. They are forced to monitor the area from checkpoints on roads leading into area, and from a sandbag- reinforced concrete fortress that is fired on every day, according to Colonel Elouafi Bourlbarse, UN force spokesman.

UN soldiers from Peru patrolling an oil storage facility just outside Cite Soleil came under fire yesterday from inside the slum, according to Bourlbarse. He said a Peruvian officer was shot in the leg and the two sides exchanged fire for an hour before the troops left the area.

Haiti, which has lurched between periods of violence and fragile peace for the past 20 years, is calm outside Port-au- Prince and the UN achieved a breakthrough in stability inside the capital by disarming gangs in the Bel Air slum that is next to the port and the presidential palace, Joseph said.

Removing Garbage

General Eduardo Lugani, deputy UN force commander, said his troops are ready to begin removing garbage from the streets of Bel Air and deliver humanitarian aid to people there who have no electricity, sanitation or access to clean water. Tap-taps, the brightly hand-painted pickup trucks that serve as public transportation in Port-au-Prince, have returned to Bel Air, as has some commercial activity on the streets.

At the same time, less than half of the $1 billion pledged at a donors' conference for Haiti in Washington last year has been disbursed in the Caribbean nation, which is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

Almost 1 million of the nation's 8 million people depend on the UN's World Food Program for food, spokeswoman Anne Poulsen said in an interview.

Even with an increasingly assertive and expanding UN force, Haiti is also the most violent nation in the hemisphere. Haitian police said nearly 50 kidnappings occur in the capital each month, and reported that six gang members were shot and killed at a soccer match in a Port-au-Prince suburb on Aug. 20.

Out of 170,000 weapons that were unaccounted for when the Haitian army disbanded, 20,000 have been recovered, Bourlbarse said. Overall, six UN soldiers have been killed and 24 wounded since the mission was established in April 2004.