Haiti, the poorest nation in Latin America with a history of foreign interventions, is on the cusp of total anarchy — and the rest of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States, is frantically searching for ways to restore a degree of order and tranquillity to a Haitian population increasingly run by gangs and criminals.
While the numbers tell only part of the story, they are nevertheless damning. Four and a half million people, about 41% of the nation’s population, are dealing with some degree of food insecurity. Haiti ranks 163rd out of 191 on the Human Development Index, which measures quality of life. Haiti’s political class is notoriously corrupt, with some political and economic stakeholders colluding with the gangs that terrorize citizens, run entire city districts and are more than willing to use arms against police and politicians to instill fear and expand their fiefdoms.
Haiti has gone through a particularly bad stretch since its president, Jovenel Moise, was assassinated in his home last year. Gangs have always been a part of Haitian life — there are plenty of gangs in the United States as well — but their power has risen considerably since Moise’s killing. More than half of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, is controlled by gangs. Haitian security forces, either too underequipped or uninterested in doing much about the problem, have written off whole sections of the capital. Nearly 100,000 Haitians have fled their homes this year to escape the gang-related violence in their neighborhoods, adding to a humanitarian burden the Haitian government is already unable to manage.
Even worse, Haiti’s gangs are demonstrating their strength in the most unhelpful way possible. For a nation in the midst of a burgeoning cholera epidemic, the last thing Haiti needs is a hospital system on the brink of collapse. Yet that’s exactly what is occurring. The gangs have blocked Haiti’s main fuel terminal for more than six weeks, starving the generators that power everything from hospitals and schools to vehicles, in an attempt to force Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s resignation. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 17 out of 22 health facilities are at risk of shutting down due to fuel shortages; today, less than half of Haiti’s emergency departments are operating as they should be.
Normally, the police would take care of this situation by clearing out the gangs and assisting with the distribution of fuel throughout the capital. Haiti’s National Police, however, are no match for the gangs. In October, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reported to the U.N. Security Council that only one-third of Haiti’s 14,161 officers are actually operational — and those who are in the field don’t have access to the kinds of equipment, weapons, ammunition and intelligence capabilities that are integral to a successful anti-gang operation. Indeed, the U.N. suggested that some of the police ranks are actually cooperating with the very criminals they are supposed to be fighting.
The question, of course, is what to do about all of this. The Haitian government, it seems, is all but powerless to remedy a situation fast degenerating into chaos and humanitarian calamity. The U.N. Security Council recently created a sanctions regime targeting anyone who “undermines the peace, stability, and security of Haiti and the region,” but nobody seriously believes sanctions alone will turn the situation around or deter criminal elements from running roughshod over the state.
Haitian authorities are in such desperate straits that they have called on the international community to launch an intervention, of short duration, to help the state regain control of its own assets. The U.N. secretary-general is supportive of the initiative and called on the Security Council to at least consider it. The Biden administration has drafted a Security Council resolution that would set up a non-U.N. military force to assist the Haitian police with breaking the siege on fuel supplies and ensuring basic supplies are distributed to where they need to go.
Yet that U.S.-drafted resolution is at risk of being withdrawn for a lack of support. Russia and China, veto-wielding members of the Security Council, question whether the Haitian people actually want a foreign force deployed, and it doesn’t appear as if any country wants to lead the initiative or contribute to it. The U.S. is willing to expend the diplomatic capital in U.N. headquarters to establish the mission but hasn’t articulated whether it plans to assign U.S. troops to it.
You can’t blame the Biden administration for not wanting to be involved in the effort. Previous foreign interventions, often led by the U.S., have done next to nothing to make Haiti a more livable place for its own people. Whether it was the 1994 operation to dissolve a military junta or the 2004 deployment to lay the groundwork for a U.N. peacekeeping force, the interventions have had at best a very short-term impact on the security situation there.
The U.N. has a disastrous reputation in Haiti as well — its peacekeeping mission, which lasted for more than a decade and ended in 2019, left a heavy stain, with the organization having to apologize for introducing a cholera epidemic in the country and for the criminal behavior of some of its troops. With such a poor track record, one can’t fault ordinary Haitians for wondering why another foreign task force, however well-intentioned, would perform any better than previous ones.
Haiti is, to put in bluntly, a hard problem. Only the Haitian political elite can prevent it from becoming a problem from hell.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
