273 - Saving Haiti from Gangs: Another American Leap into the Security Unknown
The Kenyans are finally arriving to save Haiti. But whether such an unlikely and unprecedented posse from across the ocean can really do in the gangs who terrorize Haiti's civilians is unclear and a major imponderable.
This week, 400 Kenyan police arrived at the country's main airport in Port-au-Prince, thanks to massive U. S. infrastructural preparation, military hardware readying, and costly funding. Washington has promised this proxy force $300 million, but whether that will be enough and whether other donors will pony up is doubtful.
U.S. forces airlifted 2,600 tons of material and materiel to Haiti's main airport and the new Multinational Security Support Mission's staging area. Housing has been built at the airport for the newcomers and the area around the airport has been cleared of structures so that gangs cannot attack the new force's headquarters from close at hand.
In theory, this first batch of Kenyans will soon be joined by 600 more Kenyan police and 1,500 soldiers and police from the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Chad, and Jamaica. Bangladeshi soldiers have done a lot of UN peacekeeping in Africa, Jamaican police have fought tough gangs in their own country, but only Chadian soldiers have truly seen the kind of combat that may be required sustainably to reduce gang control of the Port-au-Prince region. And only the Chadians and the Beninois are native French speakers; none, presumably, speak Kreyol, the true language of Haiti.
The Kenyans and their allies, none of whom have ever worked together, taken orders from an unfamiliar leadership, or tried to restore security to a land almost totally destroyed by relentless gang marauding, have a major operational and conceptual task to accomplish. They must gain control of highways, roads, and mere streets -- all of which are now controlled by one or more of the most powerful gangs, each with its own territory and methods of extorting substantial toll payments from drivers.
The new security force will also need to prevent kidnapping for ransom -- a lucrative and destructive method of financing gang purchases of machine guns and rifles smuggled from Miami, Caracas, or Bogota. It will also want to re-gain control over the country's main port (in Port-au-Prince) so that food and other commodity imports can arrive to feed Haiti's hungry and ill-clothed population. Fuel arrives in the port, also; for months earlier this year several local gangs prevented goods arriving in the port from reaching the civilian population.
Many of the gangs also live off narcotics trafficking from profits, transshipping cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela to the U. S. The new multinational force will need to stanch the relentless flow of drugs.
Gangs also control the main hospital in Port-au-Prince, the capital city. The Kenyans need to break that stranglehold. The gangs have at times successfully themselves distributed privately generated electricity to city- and slum-dwellers. The Kenyans and their allies have that task ahead of them as well. Earlier this year, the gangs busted into the country's main penitentiary and released 4,500 prisoners, many dangerous.
The UN says that this year alone the gangs have killed 2,500 people. Between March and May violence forced at least 200,000 Haitians out of their homes. Several million have fled to South America, Mexico, and across flimsy borders into the U.S. No neighborhood in the capital region has been spared and some rural areas have also fallen under the thrall of gangs. The gangs fight for turf among themselves, too.
So far only perhaps half of Haiti's 9,000 person, under-equipped, police force has been on the front lines fighting gangs. Some of its members, too, have taken bribes from gangs or otherwise aided and abetted gang predations. With its machine guns, even rocket launchers, many of the gangs are also better armored than the police. Last week, too, the very new interim administration (government) of Haiti sacked the police chief and put his predecessor in charge. Whether the local police will consequently take fewer illicit payments and put up a stronger resistance to the gangs is not yet certain.
But at least the Kenyans and their comrades ought to be able to count upon cooperation from the local police, the transitional council of Haitian notables who now ostensibly run the country, and the recently installed prime minister, a technocrat.
Kenyan President William Ruto, once indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC), dispatched his first detachment of Haitian peacekeepers with fine words: “You are undertaking a vital mission that transcends borders and cultures. Your presence in Haiti will bring hope and relief to communities torn apart by violence and ravaged by disorder.” He did so, too, at a time when his administration at home is battling daily rounds of mass protests against sharp rises in tax rates. Two dozen Kenyans were killed by police and the army was ordered to patrol the streets of Nairobi, Kenya's capital. Nairobi, and most of Kenya's other urban areas, continue to boil today. Ruto called the mostly youthful protestors "treasonous." And then he backed down, removing — for now — the new imposts.
What Ruto, who recently visited Washington, is trying to achieve by sending his police to far-off Haiti, is not clear. Admittedly, if the mixed group that eventually (we hope) restores law and order to Haiti, Ruto will be saluted on the world stage, be envied by other African heads of state, and be strongly praised by Washington (which largely alone is funding the enterprise).
Success, however, is hardly guaranteed. Over the last three years gangs, especially a powerful one led by a colorful former police officer called "Barbecue," have amassed wealth, men, weapons, and expertise. They have their fingers, Mafia-like, in anything that produces cash or marginalizes safety in Port-au-Prince and much of the rest of Haiti. The gangs have pledged to resist the Kenyans and their allies. Their own wealth and power at stake.
Moreover, Haitians have suffered under bad interventions before, from the French and the United States, and suffered a cholera epidemic attributed to Nepalese peacekeepers earlier in this century.
The newly installed transitional government led by Prime Minister Garry Conille lacks authority, legitimacy, and experience running a nation in dreadful turmoil. Haiti has not had an election since 2016 and its last elected leader, President Jovenel Moise, was assassinated by Columbian mercenaries paid by Haitians in Florida and Haiti in 2021.
If the Kenyans and their allies can bring peace and security to Haiti, every country in the Americas will be greatly relieved, and so will suffering Haitians. A restoration of democracy and the rebuilding of the Western Hemisphere's poorest polity could follow. But Haiti in this century has known too little stability for a good future to be assured. There is massive work to be done by Haitians, by the Haitian diaspora, and by well-intentioned neighbors like the U. S. and Canada.