246 - Who Can Knock Heads Hard? Will Washington or Ottawa Rescue Haiti?

Kenya Backs Off

             Normally, I never write about the same subject twice in a row. But these are hardly normal times. After I wrote Monday about Haiti's descent into gang-perpetrated anarchy, understandably anxious members of Caricom, the regional governance organization, called an emergency meeting in Jamaica, with U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (as if he did not already have too much on his plate) and Canadian representatives in attendance.

            Together, Caricom and Blinken told Haiti interim prime minister Ariel Henry, grounded in Puerto Rico after returning from negotiations in Kenya, that he had to resign, which he promptly did. That was the demand of the militant gang leaders who successfully are holding Port-au-Prince's 920,000 people hostage, raping and killing at random, dropping mutilated bodies in the street, burning and looting hospitals, terrifying the 9,000 or so official police who dare walk the streets, and defying the world. Forty percent of Haitians are food insecure. Babies are starving.

            Dismissing Henry, however, unwittingly dismissed the Africa-Caribbean security force that was poised to vault into Port-au-Prince to curb the gangs, restore order, and put Haiti back on track to some measure of stability. The Kenyans immediately said that without Henry, who had recently signed the protocols that licensed the arrival of the peace enforcing effort, they would put saving Haiti on pause. Haiti needs, they averred, some sort of government for them to come.

            That commentary, however, hardly helps relieve the Haitian catastrophe. There can be no real government without security; the gangs will only be throttled with massive outside assistance. Even the Kenyan initiative, as I said Monday, was likely insufficient and underpowered.  Slowing it down (by removing Henry) hardly helps.

            Much more muscle is going to be needed.  If the Pentagon were not focused on Gaza and Ukraine, on stilling Houthi attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, and on positioning itself to defend Taiwan, dispatching U. S. special forces to corral the Haitian gangs would be a first order of business.  They could overcome the brazen gangs quickly and then turn peacekeeping chores over to personnel from the Caribbean.

            But Washington is badly situated in an election year with a Republican deadbolt on the appropriations handle to do for Haiti what is necessary.  Canada could send troops and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to do the job instead, but there seems little appetite in Ottawa, with a weak government in charge, to take on such a challenge -- or much else.

            Caricom made matters worse by bumping Henry because it slowed the Kenyans. Doing so also unwittingly catered to the gangs, especially to the hoodlum and former police officer who calls himself Barbecue (real name Jimmy  Chérizier ) and bosses one of the more powerful of the 80 or so gangs that roam, now fiercely, through Port-au-Prince and into its suburbs. He had demanded Henry's resignation and is now further empowered by Henry's dismissal. (Henry says that he will leave when his successor is in place.)

            Henry, a neurosurgeon, had been appointed prime minister by the late President Juvenel Moise just before Moise was killed in his bed in 2021 by thirty Colombian mercenaries hired by Haitians who originally sought to hold him for ransom. Some of the Colombians are in prison in Port-au-Prince; some of the persons who set up the murder are being tried in Miami. 

            Haiti has had no legitimate government since Moise's demise. The last election was in 2016 and, although Haitian Congress members lingered on for another few years, they operated without any democratic authority.

            In order to start things afresh, and re-charge democratic proceedings, Caricom on Monday demanded that a transitional council of respected civil society persons (if any are left) should be assembled in Haiti to choose an interim national leader who could call national elections and return Haiti to some semblance of order and statehood.  But such a reasonable approach by Caricom, endorsed by Blinken, is wildly fanciful.  Security of person and safety for Haitians who fear to walk the streets must come first. And accomplishing such results depends on the kinds of steady strength that within Haiti only the gangs now possess.

            Outsiders must take over.  Months ago in this space I called for tough French-speaking soldiers to come and knock heads, preferably from Rwanda; its army is less corruptible than most and has performed well in Mozambique against Islamic jihadists. It reports to a stern-minded authoritarian commander in chief -- President Paul Kagame -- who would demand results.

            Now, as predicted, the Kenyan police have slowed their arrival, ostensibly because Henry has resigned and there is no government. The force that Kenya was to have spearheaded is leaderless and in  a holding pattern despite the willingness of the U. S. and Canada to pay its way. Clearly, the police from gentler islands like Barbados and the Bahamas (part of the Kenyan initiative) cannot themselves take control of Haiti.  And they do not speak French and are accustomed to more responsive populations.  Chad, with French speaking soldiers, has battled in difficult war zones at home;' but it now waits on Kenya, as will the 2,000 troops promised by Benin.

            Absent an unlikely North American initiative, there is the misguided but effective nearby Central American option (as suggested reluctantly and only half-seriously by me on Monday). President Nayib Bukele, who has restored order to El Salvador, until recently the homicide and lawlessness capital of the entire world, has offered to pacify the Haitian gangs if he receives authority and financial support from the UN Security Council. 

            Over the last four years Bukele, easy reelected last month, reduced murders by M-13 gangs and others from 115 per 100,000 in 2015 to 2.4 per 100,000 (the U.S. figure in 2022 was 6.3 per 100,000) in his small but dangerous country of 6.6 million people.  He did so essentially by unleashing security forces on the gangs and on anyone that looked or acted like a gang member. He unilaterally abolished all civil liberty protections and anything that provided backing for human rights. At least 75,000 Salvadorans are in prison now without any kind of judicial review.  And ordinary Salvadorans love the result. They can walk the streets of San Salvador freely again. Salvadorans in Boston wildly extoll what Bukele has done, albeit arbitrarily and autocratically.

            Desperate measures are popular when places like Haiti (or El Salvador) become hellish. Haitians now fearful of leaving their homes to search for non-existent food supplies would doubtless happily trade away their liberties for security and safety -- whatever the losses to their fundamental freedoms.

            If Washington or Ottawa refuse to squelch the Haitian gangs, and the Kenyans etc. never arrive, a Bukele-like figure, perhaps from within the gangs, may well offer unacceptable but temporarily well-received answers.

            For the sake of Haiti and the hemisphere, Washington must act before Haitian humanity perishes, many die needlessly, more migrants head our way, and an island always close to the United States destroys itself from within.