Fresh gang violence traps over 100 school children in Haiti for a second day

More than 100 Haiti students, some as young as 6 years old, are trapped inside their Catholic school in downtown Port-au-Prince as a fresh round of violence continued to erupt between armed groups.

Late Saturday, the students were looking at spending a second night at school.

The students are among 400 children and teachers at two schools in the Grand Rue area who became trapped after armed gangs began fighting around 1 p.m. Friday. Unable to leave and with their parents unable to get to them, the students were forced to spend the night at the schools.

Early Saturday morning, about 200 male students were able to evacuate, “with a lot of risk,” by passing through a market, Sister Mickerlyne Cadet told The Miami Herald. But 115 students at the École Marie Auxiliatrice where she is the director, were still trapped as of late Saturday afternoon, Cadet said. The trapped students, mostly girls, are between the ages of 6 and 15, she said.

“They cannot leave, it’s very risky,” Cadet said.

Haiti’s Ministry of Education and UNICEF, the U.N.’s child welfare agency, were both closely monitoring the situation and trying to secure the children’s release, said Bruno Maes, UNICEF’s representative in Haiti.

“The areas surrounding the schools have turned into battlegrounds between armed groups. Stuck there since yesterday, these young children face the risk of spending another night without access to food or water,” Maes said. “It’s essential to acknowledge the immense pain experienced by parents and the fear that grips the children in the current situation.”

For months now, Haiti has been seeing an upsurge in gang violence that late Friday had intensified and spread to several Port-au-Prince neighborhoods. Automatic gunfire was reported in the areas of LaSaline and Wharf Jérémie in Cité Soleil, and in Delmas 2, 3 and 6 neighborhoods. A gang leader known as Mesidieu, who ruled the nearby Fort Dimanche neighborhood, was reportedly killed in the clash.

Maes said the ongoing violence “is a poignant reminder of the persistent violation of children’s rights due to ongoing armed violence.”

“Ultimately, children in Haiti need peace to thrive. It is critical for children that efforts to end today’s seemingly endless armed group violence are redoubled,” he said. “But children cannot wait for protection – while armed group violence continues, we must never accept attacks against children.”

Earlier this year, UNICEF reported that an estimated 1 million children are out of school in Haiti because of social unrest and insecurity, high education costs, lack of support for the most vulnerable and poor educational services. Also in the first six days of February alone, 30 schools were shuttered as a result of escalating violence in urban areas, while more than 1 in 4 schools had remained closed since October of 2022.

Haiti’s armed violence, which has exacerbated since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise, now affects all communes in the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince, including those considered safe until recently, spilling over into neighboring regions, Nada Al-Nashif, the U.N. deputy high commissioner for human rights, said this week during an address in Geneva.

“Gangs are threatening the authority of the State at an unprecedented scale, having access to sophisticated high-caliber firearms and ammunition trafficked into Haiti, with brutal attacks committed against the population, including killings, mutilations and kidnappings,” Al-Nashif said. “This is happening with complete impunity, destroying any prospect for stability and undermining Haiti’s social fabric.”

As of Sept. 30, the U.N. has recorded 5,599 cases of gang-related violence, including 3,156 killings, 1,159 injuries and 1,284 kidnappings, a sharp increase compared to the same period last year.

North of the capital, the violence has led to the closure of more than 100 schools in the Artibonite Valley, Maes recently said. Meanwhile, only a quarter of health facilities across the Artibonite region remain accessible and roughly a third of the population, nearly half of them children, now require humanitarian assistance.

Nesmy Manigat, Haiti’s education minister, said Haiti’s instability is having a worrisome effect on learning that if it continues will negatively affect the next generation. When one considers the ongoing gang violence and recent disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2019 shutdown of the country, known as Peyi lok, students have lost at least a year of learning.

“While schools in the rural areas opened and are functioning, we have two regions where the situation is very worrying,” he said. “The West, where the capital is, and the Artibonite. Together, they account for 65% of the student population.”

A study by the Ministry of Education and other partners found that the recent wave of violence is greatly affecting children’s education. The study identified 12,057 children, 11,085 of whom were already attending school, living in 43 internally displaced camps across the West region, which includes Port-au-Prince. Roughly 90% of the students were living in the city of Port-au-Prince, which accounted for the highest concentration.

According to the study, at least 44% of the displaced children and teens had experienced some kind of trauma as a result of being forced to walk across a dead body while trying to escape, witnessing a family member being killed, or seeing their home set on fire by gunmen.

Cadet said as a result of the escalating violence, her religious order has had to relocate classes at one of their locations because students could not get to it. They’ve been offering education in Haiti since 1935.

“It’s a very, very difficult situation, what we’re living here in Haiti,” she said. “Every day you wake up, you have to tell God, ‘Thank you.’ Every day a parent sends a child to school and the child returns home safely, they have to tell God, ‘Thanks’ because we are exposed everywhere.”