Is the country too dangerous to be saved?

Since the end of the last UN mission in 2019, the spiral of violence has taken the poorest country in the hemisphere to the basement of the apocalypse, to depths so dark and terrifying that we didn’t even know existed. In Haiti, one is left speechless to describe the horror. When you think it cannot be any worse, it gets worse. Even after using all possible superlatives and comparisons, the country continues to descend into an indescribable horror.

It was precisely on the ground of the UN base in Port-au-Prince, amidst the cataclysmic earthquake of 2010 in which between 220.000 and 316,000 people were killed (figures vary), where a friend from the World Food Program responded to the question of UN futility with another, grimly rhetorical one: “Do you think the world would be better off without the UN?”.

The day before, we had loaded an entire truck full with sacks of rice and other provisions that the UN stored in a warehouse whose walls were damaged by the earthquake. Suddenly the earth trembled again, and the Haitian workers fled in panic. Between him and two other journalists, we completed the task distributing the food to the masses of hungry people sleeping on the street. Was it enough? No.

In the following days, I experienced how your throat seizes closed with tear gas, which had been fired by the Brazilian peacekeepers in Cité Soleil to break up a riot for food and water. Feeling overwhelmed, they couldn’t use their rifles to defend themselves. In 2004 newly elected president of Brazil Luiz Ignacio Lula Da Silva had led the creation of the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) to prevent Haiti from becoming a narco state. Eager to test his idealism, and thirsty for international leadership, he believed Brazil’s approach was better than using guns and bombs. “We are not an occupation force. We refuse to use blind violence. We are a force for peace,” he said in 2005. A total of 37,000 Brazilian troops served in 26 rotating contingents over MINUSTAH’s 13 years. Former force commander Floriano Peixoto called it “a very successful epic,” and “a global reference” for peacekeeping missions. Certainly, the idea that a developing country without an imperial past or history of interventions may be better suited for a peacekeeping mission has persisted. History will judge.

The following year, I was in the cholera-ridden areas that were contaminated by Nepalese peacekeepers due to an inadequate sanitation system that channeled sewage containing their fecal matter from the Mirebalais base to the Meye River. The cholera that quickly spread to the Artibonite River delta killed ten thousand people and infected more than 850,000. An independent panel confirmed in 2011 that the strain of the bacteria found matched one found the previous year in Nepal, but the UN denied responsibility. It wasn’t until 2016 that UN Secretary general Ban Ki Moon acknowledged “the preponderance of the evidence does lead to the conclusion that personnel associated with [a UN peacekeeping] facility were the most likely source.” He continued, “For the sake of the Haitian people, but also for the sake of the United Nations itself, we have a moral responsibility to act and a collective responsibility to deliver.” To the present day, the organization still has not acknowledged any legal responsibility or compensated anyone. Since its reappearance in October 2022, over 81,000 new cases have been recorded, with more than 1200 deaths confirmed, although Ramsey Ben-Achour, representative of the Secretary-General’s special envoy for Haiti, said in 2020 that cholera had been eradicated in Haiti thanks to the collection of $140 million of the $400 million committed for investment in clean water and sanitation.

“Minustah merde,” was a curse spat at the blue helmets as they passed. Cholera was, until that moment, one of the few misfortunes that had avoided Haiti, having been eradicated nearly a century earlier. In its absence, the population lacked natural immunity. The bacteria now thrived, fueled by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, massacres, assassinations, fires, and gang violence. Haiti’s history is so cruel that it would be impossible to invent something worse.

Over the years, during my assignments in the poorest country of the western hemisphere, I have slept on cardboards in the open, but I have also eaten in the fine restaurants of Pétion-Ville, catering almost exclusively to foreigners working at the Republic of NGO’s and the Haiti’s tiny bourgeoisie, who according to the World Bank control almost 70% of the country’s wealth (other sources raise it to 90%). One night after dinner, I saw one of these “humanitarian workers” standing with earthquake survivors living in urban camps. The translator informed me that the Haitian man had just offered his 13-year-old daughter in exchange for pasta and rice to feed the rest of the family. My stomach churned.

A 2015 report by the UN Internal Oversight Services found that UN peacekeepers in Haiti engaged in “transactional sex.” At least 229 women said they traded sex for money and goods like food and medicine. The sexual abuses of the blue helmets have been so widely reported that, according to The Journal International Peacekeeping, 10% of those interviewed for their academic paper brought up the issue of children fathered. “Haiti is just one of many countries where peacekeepers have raped women and girls, or sexually exploited them in exchange for food or support,” wrote Skye Wheeler, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Immunity is part of the agreement negotiated by member countries to deploy blue helmets. The UN can investigate complaints, which most poor women do not, in any case, file, but only member countries can judge their troops. They are rarely held accountable. In 2015, the UN began publishing the nationality of the perpetrators to embarrass the country in question. A dozen countries contributed $1.5 million to a trust fund established to provide psychological and legal assistance globally. All of this was welcome but also insufficient. Experts ask for paternity tests that allow victims to demand child support from the perpetrators and obtain the father’s nationality for the “petits Minustahs,” as these children are called.

Despite all this and more, it is hard to argue that Haiti would be better off without the UN. In 2017, the Security Council ended the MINUSTAH mission, which had been extended for 15 years out of fear that gang violence would fill the vacuum, as it subsequently has. The Mission for Justice Support in Haiti (MINUJUSTH) became the transition to close the assistance cycle until its complete withdrawal in October 2019. A year and a half later, on July 7, 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated at his residence by a band of mercenaries. The international diplomatic Core Group convinced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to form “an inclusive consensus government” to prevent the country from spiraling down into chaos, but it was too late. Rampant inflation, 48% over the last 2 previous years, large protests, and out of control street violence from criminal gangs, which claim to be fighting a civil war, engulfed the country, blocking seaports, roads, and infrastructure, preventing distribution of fuel and goods. An estimated 80% of the capital Port au Prince is under gang control. They murder, rape women, burn entire neighborhoods at night when their inhabitants are sleeping inside, raid hospitals, pharmacies, schools. Nothing is sacred. People who already lived in abysmal, subhuman conditions are now terrorized and displaced.

In less than a year, Henry was calling for UN assistance, just as Justin Boniface Alexandre did when he assumed interim power after the coup that ousted Jean Bertrand Aristide, which led to the creation and deployment of Minustah in 2004. At this point, however, there is no international appetite for another mission in Haiti. No one believes the country can be saved. Last September, Henry used his speech at the 78th General Assembly of the UN to publicly request what he had been negotiating in private for two years: “An international support mission to shore up security in Haiti.” More than a request, it was a plea of desperation. “We are not here to justify the past, we are here to ask the countries that there is something urgent to be done by reestablishing security and stability,” he implored. “I call for support and solidarity so we can turn the page quickly.”

Lula de Silva himself, back in power but less idealistic than twenty years ago, has been silent on the mission that the Security Council approved on October 2 with resolution 2699 under Chapter VII. In fact, it will not be a UN mission per se, but a “multinational mission au – thorized by the UN”. The United States will not participate. After multiple pro – posals and negotiations, the Caribbean community, CARICOM, undertook the task under the command of Kenya to secure basic infrastructure such as the airport, roads, ports, schools, and hospitals in support of the national po – lice, which has lost more than a hun – dred officers at the hands of criminal gangs. More than a thousand resigned last year, out of a force of 9.000 officers, often worst equipped than the gangs they are fighting.

The size of this mission is so small that success cannot be predicted, especially where larger ones failed. A day after Security Council vote, Kenya foreign minister Alfred Mutu, who had been vocal about the mission, was ousted. Former presidential candidate, Ekuru Aukot, challenged in court the deployment of a thousand Kenyan forces, effectively stalling the mission. “Why Kenya? What’s so special about the Kenyan police that will change the situation where previous missions failed?”, wondered Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga. The US offer to finance the operation with $300 million in the form of intelligence, airlifts, communications, and medical and humanitarian assistance to help Kenya and the rest of the contributing countries—Bahamas, Barbados, Bangladesh, Benin, and Chad- just raised more mistrust. “America is just the doorstep, why haven’t they gone? They were there before, why did they leave?”, he posed to KTN News. “When coffins start arriving here, that’s when we shall regret.” The world seems to share the skepticism. As of April 12, only $44.6 million has been collected, out of the $78 million pledged, or just 6.6% of the 673.8 million required. “Every passing day that this long-awaited support has not yet arrived is one day too many,” warned Jean Victor Geneus, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Haiti. His time ran out on March 13, when president Henry submitted his resignation, unable to return to the country. “The Haitian people have had enough of the armed gangs’ savagery,” he lamented. In 2023, murders doubled, the majority of them concentrated in the capital, from which 362.000 people -more than half children- have fled their homes, 95,000 of them only in the month of March, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Kidnappings have increased by 80%. Rapes, by 49% only in the first six months of 2023. For thousands of students, 2023 marked the fourth consecutive year of interrupted school year. An estimated one million children are out of school, heightening the risk of gang recruitment for half a million children. Almost half of the 11.7 million population, or 5.5 million, require humanitarian assistance. “A sobering picture,” acknowledged the US representative when the data was presented.

Unlike UN peacekeeping missions under the UN Department of Peace Operations, the UN designated Kenya to oversee the Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission to Haiti. The MSS Mission was to deploy one thousand Kenyan personnel to Haiti and would last one year, starting January 1, 2024. However, on January 26, Kenyan judge Enock Chacha Mwita ruled the mission unconstitutional, citing the absence of a reciprocal agreement with the host country. In February, acting Haitian president Henry flew to Kenya to negotiate an agreement believed to address the judge’s objections. Upon his return, his plane was unable to land back in Port-au-Prince. The gangs released 3,800 prisoners from two capital prisons to take over Toussaint Louverture Airport. Since then, he has been in Puerto Rico, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others persuaded him to submit his resignation. France and the US have sent special flights to evacuate their nationals. Insurance companies have refused to underwrite the facilities until the police can clear the gangs, shooting from nearby rooftops. In a country that imports between 50% and 85% of its food, as of April 11 the World Food Programme (WFP) only had enough food in the country to feed 175,000 people for one month. 

With Henry out of power, the deal with Kenya was over. The state is crumbling. There has to be an authority that can be the basis for a police deployment. “We think those are steps that will happen in the very near future, and that would pave the way for this mission to go forward without delay,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters. The creation on April 12 of a new nine-member Transitional Presidential Council challenged by gangs will hopefully provide the authority to allow that deployment and pave the way for presidential elections by early 2026. Meanwhile, the state of emergency in Port-au-Prince has been extended until May 3. “The entire country is pretty much shut down. Prices on everything from food to gasoline are climbing. Food is becoming increasingly scarce; no one is working because of the violence,” said missionary Helen Williams to World Missionary Press. “Prayers are all that is left for a country that the world considers too dangerous to be saved. 

Prayers, and the UN. Between March 1st and April 15th the WFP has distributed 663.230 hot meals in 63 sites to 88,623 displaced people, as well as 5.2 million litters of water in Port au Prince. It may be a drop in the bucket, but for half of Haiti’s population, it’s the drop that keeps them alive.”