189 - Saving Humanity in a Post-Unipolar World: Exercising a Robust Responsibility to Protect
There once was a unipolar world where Washington could effectively shut down uncomfortable internecine conflicts and compel makers of military coups to retreat to their barracks. No longer, especially because Russia’s game-changing invasion of Ukraine preoccupies the Pentagon and the National Security Council and exhausts the energies and much of the expertise of the State Department. Supporting, supplying, and funding Ukraine’s freedom struggle rightly is our first priority. That is why it has been difficult to focus on a sea of far-ranging and difficult problems such as Haiti’s state capture by gangs, Sudan’s devastating internal war between competing military warlords, Ethiopia’s resumed battles between ethnic militias and the central state, and West Africa’s most recent army putsch in Niger (a critical segment of the Islamist resurgence in the Sahel). Nevertheless, such varieties of mayhem demand attention and strong responses.
Haiti is close to our shores and millions of Haitians live in Miami, New York, and Boston. We ourselves ruled Haiti for twenty-nine years in the early twentieth century and later intervened twice more to boost the chances of democratic leadership. President Clinton sent troops to oust a narcoautocrat and to install a priestly president. We helped the UN to install Brazilian peace keeping troops in this century; they left only in 2017.
Ever since then, Haiti has slid rapidly downward into a viper pit populated by more than 200 powerful gangs. Eighty percent of Port-au-Prince, the country’s storied capital across troubled waters from Cuba, is now under gang control. The state and its 9,000 policemen are mostly powerless to disarm gangs in the El Salvadoran manner. The gangs have more firepower (using guns shipped illegally from the U. S.) and cash with which to bribe the police. The army is also weak, with barely 1,000 soldiers in its ranks.
Last week a New Hampshire nurse married to a Haitian social entrepreneur, both active saving lives near Port-au-Prince, was kidnapped and held for $1 million ransom. She was neither the first nor the most prominent resident of Haiti to be kidnapped and held for ransom in 2023 or 2022. Since January, there have been 1,014 kidnappings as well as 2,094 homicides. Rapes and sexual intimidation are common. More than 160,000 Haitians have been displaced, fleeing their homes and gang violence. The gangs, especially, the dominant ones like G9 and G-Pep, fund their weapons’ purchases by kidnapping mostly local businessmen for biggish payoffs. They even kidnap poor Haitians, of which there is an endless supply, demanding lesser amounts.
The gangs kill slum dwellers and middle-class Haitians to show that they can, to impress other gangs, and to extend their territories. They slaughter indiscriminately and wantonly. They extort small and large businesses, preying on any and every Haitian and Haitian enterprise that arouses their attention. Anarchy prevails.
A vigilante movement of anti-gang Haitian civilians began pushing back against the gangs in recent months, stringing up gang members on lampposts and stoning and burning others in the street. About 264 gangsters were killed in June, many beheaded, others with chopped off limbs. None of this anti-gang activity has any sanction except widespread anger and – in Port-au-Prince – a desire among hard-pressed civilians to regain control. The result has been violence on top of violence, but no retreat by the gangs and gang culture has as yet occurred.
The Haitian state hardly exists since it no longer provides security or safety or controls its borders. The gangs also facilitate drug trafficking by and air sea from Colombia and Venezuela, thence onward to the U. S. Haitians flee when they can, preferably to the U. S.; given the futility of staying at home, that surge of immigration will continue indefinitely. Haitians in Haiti hardly have salubrious alternative choices.
Interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry is the only extant representative of what might be termed operational authority. But like the police force, he has no power, no agency, no legitimacy. There is no legislature, in part because regular elections for parliament have not been held and all terms have expired. But Haiti is so profoundly dysfunctional, thanks to gangs and gang warfare, that pretending to express the power of the state would be pointless.
Haiti is more than a failed state. It is a collapsed state, along with the remnants of Somalia, and conceivably Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Henry pleaded with the UN, and world order more generally, in October for outside intervention even though many of his people might not want foreigners to intervene, no matter how dire their plight. With the war in Ukraine, neither Washington nor Ottawa have seen fit to answer Henry’s call. Nor do they know how or have the bandwidth to cope with crises outside Europe. In the older unipolar world, Washington would have mustered a strong response by now.
Distant Kenya, for reasons that are decidedly opaque, has offered 1,000 troops to calm Port-au-Prince. The Bahamas has promised an additional 100 soldiers. Both offers are presumably contingent on a UN vote to authorize a new, Kenyan-led, gang suppression exercise. And perhaps other nations, especially those from countries in the Caribbean basin, will supplement the Kenyan and Bahamian troops.
Neither of those to militaries speak French. Swahili, spoken by the Kenyans along with English, will hardly assist their mission. This column has called repeatedly for African intervenors, preferably French-speakers (since Haitians speak Kreyol and understand French, especially French commands). This column suggested Rwandans, experienced as they have been knocking heads in Mozambique, Somalia, and the Congo. The Rwandans, reputedly, would be less prey to corrupt advances than the Kenyans. They are more disciplined, too, with the Kenyans being accused in East Africa of many repeated humanitarian abuses.
Haiti desperately needs a force that arrests gang leaders, disarms the gang followers, and restores order and the rule of law. Thereafter – but only once security is restored to Port-au-Prince and outlying areas -- French-speaking Canadians or a collaborative Caricom administration could begin to administer a restored state.
It is not evident that 1,100 Kenyans and Bahamians can do the job. The Haitian cauldron requires many more restorers of peace, perhaps a force of 10,000 or more. Who will supply so many? Kenya? Rwanda? Or a collaboration of francophone African countries? The UN mandate, when it is constructed, needs to be thoughtful and finely calibrated. Making Haiti a ward of the UN and world order is timely.
Washington will have to supply funding for the intervention in Haiti, especially since it is now constrained to supply personnel or much materiel. But, for the sake of Haiti’s future, and for the human lives and fundamental dignities that must be restored before Haiti and Haitians can begin to breathe more easily, bringing the Western Hemisphere’s poorest and most downtrodden polity back from the dead is absolutely essential.
If, spurred by the Kenyans, resuscitating Haiti succeeds, substantial lessons could be learned about how best to employ UN auspices temporarily to take control of failing or collapsed states and to bring them back to stable order. Haiti is unique, but its problems are not. In this post-unipolar world the West must save humanity from its enemies - gangs, dictators and despots, greedy autocrats, and those who would make war to aggrandize personal power and ambition.
Next time: The West African coups, and the civil war in Sudan