314 - Let's Get Serious About Haiti

            I have been writing often over the last year about how best to rescue Haiti. I have suggested that the intervention of African and Caribbean police and soldiers would not be adequate or powerful enough to repress gang violence. Now we have reached another major inflection point.

Gang warfare in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas has triggered a killing spree that has forfeited the lives of nearly 5,000 civilians since January; pushed Haiti into a catastrophic humanitarian emergency, with 5 million people hungry and starvation coming; and perpetuated a cascade of kidnappings, rapings, and widespread mayhem. More than 700,000 Haitians have fled their homes, fearing gang assaults. Haitians have suffered sufficiently. It is long past time to set aside Gaza and Ukraine, and focus on what Washington can do to end the Haitian tragedy.

            Last week gangs fired at U. S. scheduled airliners arriving and departing from the country's main airport; all U. S. airlines and the UN cancelled air travel into Haiti for at least thirty days. 

            A major American intervention is needed, urgently.  The outgoing Biden administration needs to act now, before Haiti collapses completely and recovery becomes impossible.

            Last week, vigilantes in one Port-au-Prince suburb fought back, killing two dozen gangsters.  But it is unlikely that such citizen actions can successfully take Port-au-Prince back from the 10,000 to 12,000 gangsters in twenty or so gangs who are said by the UN to control at least 85 percent of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding area.  A few weeks ago, gangs spread their control north of the capital city to Gonaives and St. Marc, plus much of the fertile Artibonite Region, heading north.

            More than 1,100 Kenyan police, more police from Jamaica, Belize, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, plus soldiers from Benin and Chad -- a total force numbering about 5,000, were supposed to arrive in Haiti to overwhelm the gangs, assist Haiti's own compromised and out-gunned national police force of 9,000, and bring order back to the Western Hemisphere's poorest and most bedraggled nation. But, as I intimated a year ago and since, too few foreigners have come.  Of the promised 1,100 Kenyan police, only 430 are in place, plus two handfuls of Jamaican and Belizean police.  Kenya's President William Ruto promised in October that another 600 Kenyan police would appear in November, but they have not.

            These outside forces are two few, too poorly equipped, underpaid (despite U.S. financial backing for the anti-gang exercise), and unsure of how they can counter gang power without massive reinforcements.  Washington has proposed to replace this ad hoc African/Caribbean contingent with a proper UN peacekeeping force, but Russia and China say that they will veto such a proposal, stymying both increased financing and the recruitment of military detachments that could stop the gangs in their tracks.

            What is needed, urgently, is the insertion of U. S. and Canadian battle-ready troops. As many as 10,000 special forces from both countries could, I suggest, quickly decimate the gangs and restore Haitian order. Then, ideally, French-speaking Canadian police, preferably Royal Canadian Mounties, could continue to keep order with Haitian police after militaries break the gangs. When and if Haiti is at peace, with citizens able to go about their daily business, Haiti will then require help, preferably from Canada, to reestablish its government and devise appropriate ways to start once again providing services such as security, electrical power, potable water, money and banking availability, schooling, and medical care to its long suffering population of 11 million,  A Canadian assistance mission would also reopen the port and ensure the arrival of food and consumer goods for Haitians.

            The U. S. will doubtless be asked to continue to finance such an effort, perhaps with Canada (and France?). It could become a multi-year assistance effort. Haitians cannot be expected to do much of this themselves.

            And what will happen to the gangsters?  Once vanquished by an overwhelming force of well-trained professionals, the captured gang members should be sent to a special new holding facility on Isle de Gonave, out in the Gulf of Gonave. In their thousands, they should be subject to schooling and, conceivably, vocational training for new technical careers.  Their leaders, however, the consuming menaces to Haiti, should all be tried either in special Canadian-assisted courts or sent to The Hague for trial by the International Criminal Court. It will be important not only to end gang violence and disruption but to set a solid example for other weak countries where warlord-led special militias run wild, as in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

            Haiti can be pacified only by well-trained forces such as those the U. S. and Canada have at their ready disposal. The Africans and Caribbeans cannot do it themselves for want of numbers and because they will remain less powerful than the gangs. Stopping guns from entering Haiti from Florida would also prove necessary.

            The U.S. and Canada have very large Haitian diasporas in their countries. The U.S. also could use a peace enforcement operation now as partial recompense for its many state-building failures during the 1915-1934 American occupation of Haiti.

            As Haiti crumbles and its citizens perish from violence and hunger, there is no time to lose. A joint robust North American military intervention is needed now.