Sidestepping deployed Kenyan forces, Haiti gangs continue reign of terror
MIAMI – In the predawn hours on a Sunday in late July, members of one of Haiti’s largest armed gangs attacked the town of Ganthier, about 25 miles east of the capital and on a road that authorities say is used to smuggle weapons.
When police reinforcements arrived in armored vehicles hours later, officers found the streets deserted, the gang members having left after destroying Ganthier’s police station and torturing and killing several residents, according to the town’s mayor and police.
“The whole town of Ganthier is emptied; there is no one left,” the mayor, Jean Vilonor Victor, told the New York Times.
Weeks after the arrival of a United Nations-backed international security force in Haiti, the gangs who have brought the capital, Port-au-Prince, and other regions in the country to their knees show no signs of letting up.
The international effort to reinforce Haitian police and a transitional government has alleviated conditions in some sections of Port-au-Prince, experts say, but gang members have refocused their attacks on the outskirts, marauding towns that had escaped their campaign of killings, kidnappings and rape.
The attack on Ganthier, a town of 60,000 people on a major highway linking the capital to the border with the Dominican Republic, is emblematic of the persistent security problem Haiti’s government faces as it tries to rebuild the shattered country, which has seen three years of violence, mass migration and economic ruin.
The first wave of Kenyan police officers to deploy in Haiti as part of the multinational force lacks the numbers or the armaments to dismantle the powerful gangs, experts said.
To make matters worse, three members of the Presidential Transition Council, a governing body that took office in late April, tasked with paving the way for national elections, is under investigation by an anti-corruption government agency over the handing out of government jobs to members of its coalition of political and economic groups.
Council members have denied any wrongdoing.
But Nixon Boumba, a Haitian human rights advocate, said: “Corruption and security go hand in hand. For most of us, the more things change, the more things remain the same.”
The appointment in May of a new prime minister – a respected technocrat, Garry Conille, with experience as a senior United Nations executive – is part of a tricky transition back to democratic rule, with elections scheduled for next year. Haiti has been in turmoil since July 2021, when the last president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his bedroom.
The arrival of 400 Kenyan police officers this summer was meant to reinforce the beleaguered Haitian police force, which has been fighting a coordinated gang offensive since late February.
For now, the Kenyans are not straying very far from their base, built by U.S. contractors, at Port-au-Prince’s international airport, which reopened to commercial flights in May after being closed for more than two months because of gang violence outside the airfield.
The commander of the Kenyan mission, Godfrey Otunge, said his men were helping bring about a “gradual return to normalcy.”
He claimed credit recently for helping patrol and clear the road to Ganthier, where in a statement he said efforts were underway to “unshackle” the town from gang control.
But Victor said that security forces left soon after arriving and that gang members quickly returned. “Nobody can go home yet,” said Victor, who also fled.
A video that circulated recently on social media showed a gang leader in Ganthier wearing a police officer’s cap as an abandoned police vehicle burned in the background.
Haitian police have helped reduce violence overall in recent months, analysts said. From March to June, at least 1,379 people were killed or injured because of gang violence throughout the country, a 45% drop compared with the previous four months, according to the United Nations.
“It’s much quieter in central Port-au-Prince,” said William O’Neill, the United Nations-appointed human rights expert for Haiti.
With Kenyan officers providing support, Haitian police have entered parts of the capital they had abandoned, said Diego Da Rin, who monitors Haiti for the International Crisis Group.
But large parts of Port-au-Prince, including downtown, are still no-go zones where residents fear to tread and businesses are boarded up. When Conille, a TV news crew and a heavy police escort went last month to Port-au-Prince’s main public hospital, which has been abandoned because of gang violence, they came under fire and had to make a speedy getaway.
“The government needs to act quickly to reassure the public,” O’Neill said. “People want to see results more quickly.”
As part of his first moves, Conille fired Haiti’s police chief and several top commanders, promising bold action to regain control of “all areas controlled by gangs, house by house, district by district and city by city.”
But many Haitians remain unconvinced.
“There are a lot of promises being made but no positive signs of change yet,” said Kesner Pharel, a leading Haitian economist. “The capital is still cut off from the rest of the country by the gangs. They control the roads, and they are still taking territory.”
Conille acknowledged in a recent interview with the BBC that Haiti’s police were “undermanned” and that international support was arriving too slowly.
The United Nations says that over the past year, at least 578,000 people have been displaced by violence, with roughly 5 million people, nearly half the population, lacking enough food to meet their daily dietary needs.
More than one-fourth of the schools in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area cannot operate because of the insecurity, according to a recent UNICEF report.
The health care situation in the capital also remains dire, with most hospitals closed after being looted by gangs.
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Dr. Ronald LaRoche, who runs the Jude-Anne Hospital, part of a private health network. “I haven’t even been able to visit our buildings to evaluate the damage. The government surely has good intentions, but they have no power to take on the job.”
Benoit Vasseur leads a Doctors Without Borders team in Haiti with several mobile clinics that often operate in gang-controlled areas. “We see some improvement in security, but it changes from day to day,” he said.
As pressure mounts on the government to take on the gangs, Vasseur said his medical teams were bracing for even worse mayhem. “We fear we’ll see more patients,” he said.
The new Haitian police chief, Rameau Normil, said in a statement that recent operations had killed 104 “bandits,” a word used to describe gang members.
While the Kenyan reinforcements are welcome, they still number well below the 2,500 personnel that were expected to make up the international contingent. At least six other countries have committed to providing more security forces.
U.S. diplomats say the force’s final size is still unclear because of limited resources on the ground in Haiti, including housing at the Port-au-Prince airport.
But the biggest problem is funding.
“We urge countries to dig much more deeply than they have,” Brian A. Nichols, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told reporters recently.
The United States has already pledged $360 million of the estimated $600 million annual cost of the deployment, but U.N. authorization for the mission expires in October, and the United States will need to secure Chinese and Russian support to extend it another year.
The Kenyan force is equipped with armored vehicles but has no air or sea assets, limiting its ability to respond to gang attacks, experts said, adding that the 400 officers already in Haiti need significant beefing up.
“It’s a small force under any account of what is needed,” said Keith Mines, the vice president of the Latin America program at the United States Institute of Peace, who follows Haiti closely.
“It’s a restraint on what they can do,” he added. “We just have to accept that’s what’s there.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.