President Ariel Henry of Haiti last week asked the international security system to rescue Haiti. He admitted the obvious – that disorder had engulfed his long battered country and that criminal gangs had overwhelmed the nation’s police and military forces. The Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the United States all need to respond rapidly with a plan to restore some semblance of order to Haiti. Otherwise, Haitians will continue to sink into the bottom pools of Dante’s Hell.
“I ask the entire international community, all the countries friendly to Haiti, to help us, to help us to fight this humanitarian crisis,” he said on Wednesday in a speech. “We need them to give all kinds of support to prevent a lot of people from dying.”
Rwandan military might and Francophone Canadian civilian intervention could put the Humpty Dumpty of Haiti back together, as Henry requests. Such rescue parties should be integral to a UN decision to make Haiti a temporary ward of world order.
In the past year, Haiti’s security and humanitarian situations have spiraled dismally downward. Criminal gangs effectively control the ports and half of Haiti. They have close ties to the political classes and the economic elite, and engage freely in kidnapping and sexual-and gender-based violence. Nearly 1,000 Haitians have lost their lives in the past year from gang attacks.
Henry’s request came at the end of a day in which the United Nations and its humanitarian partners pleaded with armed gangs, the government of Haiti and the international community to allow for “a humanitarian corridor” so that fuel could once more flow throughout the country. Since Sept. 12, the country’s main fuel terminal has not been operable, forcing hospitals to close their doors, schools to delay the start of the academic year and water treatment facilities to announce a halt in production.
Even before President Juvenal Möise was assassinated more than a year ago (See 56 – “Haiti: Mayhem Close to Our Shores,” May 27) by mercenaries recruited by fellow Haitians, the country had lost whatever little cohesion it had achieved in the aftermath of two American interventions, many years when Brazilian and Nepalese peacekeepers attempted to keep order and help Haiti prosper (and gave cholera to Haitians), and the governance of several weak indigenous presidents. However, even before Möise was assassinated in his presidential palace, the country’s legislature had forfeited its law- making role to the executive. Corruption, long pervasive, had become far more enveloping than ever before. Most all, narcotics trafficking had become central to Haiti’s veritable existence. Gangs, mostly based in the fetid slums of central Port-au-Prince, vied for control first of drugs and, in more recent years, for control of everything commercial. Extortion is rife.
The Haitian government, such as it was, lost control of Port-au-Prince, and now most of the rest of the beleaguered nation, to gangs about five years ago. How to get it back – how to reduce the power of gangs and boost the authority of a national entity – is now the key question. President Henry and everyone outside the gangs are desperate. Although Washington and Ottawa are rightly focused on Ukraine, and wary of Putin, North American leadership is still essential if such a near neighbor, and a neighbor whose peoples flee to our shores, is to be saved from further misery.
Haiti has always been the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It endured a despotic dictatorship of the Duvaliers, François and Jean-Claude (Papa Doc and Baby Doc), from 1957 to 1986; rule by a military junta; three attempts by popular but erratic Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Jesuit priest, to right the country beginning briefly in 1991, from 1994 to 1996, and then from 2001 to 2004; and finally the corrupt and gang-ridden years ever since
The catastrophic earthquake that flattened much of Haiti in 2010 hardly helped. Much of urban Haiti has still not yet recovered from that event’s destruction. Indeed, as poor Haitians tried to fend for themselves after the earthquake, so gangs gained more leverage and fought against each other for agency in an increasingly fragile environment.
Many outside observers have long advocated making Haiti a type of trust territory of the United Nations or the Organization of American States. Doing so would enable Haiti to be secured and Haitians to be made safe. If the country could be thus pacified and an outside-financed and externally-responsible executive be installed with sufficient peace-enforcement power to quell the criminal gangs, then Haiti might (over a decade) be brought back into the family of nations and her people’s social welfare be improved. Such a hopeful result could then lead to the economic revival of a country that is now impoverished. Haiti once had a thriving garment industry and was an assembler of industrial products for American firms. Exploiting its bauxite will not re-occur, but it could resume growing consumer crops to feed some of its desperate people. Only with security can anything even remotely like that re-occur.
What is the radical answer? The UN needs to invite French-speaking troops capable of curtailing gang power to take control of Port-au-Prince, Gonaives, Cap- Haitien and other cities. The Rwandan army is tough, experienced in Africa, less corrupt than most, and capable of taking on the dangerous thugs of Haiti. Its officers and soldiers speak French. They would be perceived as outsiders, but not outsiders of a different color.
A civilian administration could follow, perhaps led by Canadians from Francophone Canada, Costa Ricans, Chileans, or Uruguayans -- Western Hemispheric polities with the ability to manage and govern themselves and therefore, presumptively, to rehabilitate Haiti. American, Canadian, and French funding would be essential. Spending on such an endeavor ought to be welcomed everywhere, especially in countries worried about asylum seekers and other refugees. Ottawa and Washington should now organize a Western Hemispheric coalition to save Haiti and Haitians from themselves.
First one has to question the origin of these intractable problems; the reparations that freedom fighters were made to pay to their French enslavers. It's too reminiscent of the Belgian Congo.
Linda Agerbak