Haiti is in big trouble. As a world problem, it obviously ranks below the war in Ukraine, the internal conflict in Myanmar, and whatever China is thinking about menacing Taiwan, but no nation has collapsed so completely as Haiti. It has always been the most perilously poor, abused, dangerously corrupt failed state in the Western Hemisphere, but now it has no real government, its 12 million people are frantically insecure, and thousands of migrants flee daily to other parts of the Americas.
When President Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talked last week, understandably they failed to find a sure way to fix Haiti. President Biden is busy with Ukraine, Russia, and Taiwan. Prime Minister Trudeau is wisely reluctant to become saddled with solving Haiti’s problems; Canada has sent two frigates to patrol its northern waters and contributed materiel to Haiti’s police armaments. But Trudeau – and one can scarcely blame him – hardly wants to become responsible for restoring Haiti’s sanity and its people’s safety.
Nevertheless, something must be done to save Haiti and Canada should help. The people of Haiti cannot continue to survive without the outside assistance for which acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry, its only civilian governmental authority, has pleaded. As Canada’s and later the United Nations’ Responsibility to Protect norm mandates, Haiti’s plight demands external assistance. The UN could and should make Haiti a ward of the world body – putting Haiti under UN trusteeship for five or ten years to restore Haiti to its own government.
Such an arrangement would be unprecedented. But Henry and others see no other way of freeing Haiti from the devastating grip of criminal gangs.
Criminal gangs rule the capital city of Port-au-Prince and much of the countryside. There are said to be more than 200 gangs roaming Port-au-Prince and other cities, but a series of five or six gangs vie for control in the capital, corralling people in the slums and raiding more upscale areas in the hills above the city.
Gangsters ride around town as if they owned it, complexly overwhelming, threatening, and coopting what is left of Haiti’s out-gunned and out-financed national police force. There is a small army.
The gangs loot, kidnap for ransom, extort, and compel even what is left of Henry’s governmental associates to cower in their homes and offices. Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century described this manner of life as “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Gangs control electricity generation and pumped water. They control the streets. The murder indiscriminately, daily in the slums.
In addition to stripping what little cash is available in Haiti, and fighting viciously for “territory” (as in some North American big cities), gangs and their leaders profit by trafficking cocaine and heroin from Colombia and marijuana from Jamaica northward toward Florida and beyond. Much of this drug smuggling began in the 1990s, when landing strips in Haiti’s interior became convenient stopping places en route north.
It is since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise by hired hands from Colombia in 2021, however, that gang combat and gang violence have consumed Haiti.
There have been no elections, and the terms of the previously existing governmental functionaries all expired. Only Henry is left, and he has neither the funds, the personnel, nor the legitimacy to right Haiti’s sinking ship.
That is why in October, in despair and danger, he pleaded with the world for outside military intervention – for global order to come to his aid – to take over and attempt to restore Haiti to some measure of security and to rebuild its administration.
Washington, Ottawa, and the United Nations should heed his call. That would mean installing new outside managers to run and resuscitate Haiti, controlling its revenue stream and employing contributions from UN members to rebuild and administer the state. But even before newcomers could attempt to restore the governing mechanisms of the state, the gangs would have to be subdued. Those external security forces would have to be tough minded, strong, and incorruptible. Perhaps the Brazilian army that provided peacekeepers in Haiti in 2004 to 2017 could return? If not the Brazilians, a French-speaking African force, such as the Rwandan army? Or a mixed collection of Caribbean intervenors from Trinidad to Jamaica?
With some other force knocking heads and regaining order, French-speaking Canadians might then be able to restore the government to working order. Some or all of those Canadians could be from the Haitian diaspora that has settled in Montreal and other parts of Canada. What would be required would be committed and tough-minded administrators, even with corporate as well as governmental experience.
There is no time to spare. Haiti will fall deeper into the inner circles of Hell if the UN and North Americans fail to respond to the hemisphere’s most critical current chaos.
I also wrote last month about Haiti, but nobody is doing anything to resolve its crisis. (See 151- “Haiti is Being Eviscerated from Within, Ukraine Pummeled from Without,” Feb. 27, 2023.)
Thanks. Some great out-of-the box thinking... It also reflects some sensitivity when outlining what could be the demographics of an external temporary surgical "assistance force". An outside body made of members of Haitian origins, from French AND non-French speaking armed structures - police, army, private security, volunteers - would have credibility. French is one limited option. Second generation Haitians now communicate in Creole, by interest or thanks to the technology. English speaking, Spanish speaking regions would also have such pool.
No ideal scenarios at this point, but worth deepening, keeping time/timelines as a pressing factor...
Thank you. What can we do to help prod the US to push the UN?