The land that law forgot: Can outside forces turn the tide of violence in Haiti?

"There's no question of (the gangs) having a seat at any table," said Bob Rae, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations and its envoy to international talks on rescuing Haiti from its nightmarish de‐ scent into anarchy.

But there's an unan‐ swered question hanging over the complex political ne‐ gotiations on the future of this failed state - if the gangs are to be excluded from power, who is going to take power from them?

While the outlines of a po‐ litical accord leading to elec‐ tions are now coming into sharper focus, the question of who will bell the cat re‐ mains as difficult to answer as ever.

Haiti's new Presidential Council has few resources to establish its authority on the lawless island, even if it man‐ ages to achieve legitimacy and win acceptance from the broader Haitian population.

"There simply isn't enough strength in the state of Haiti to respond to the lev‐ el of violence that's being perpetrated by these gangs," Rae told CBC News.

While Haiti's security problems are complicated and multi-dimensional, they can also be summed up in a single phrase: too many criminals, not enough cops.

While the neighbouring

Dominican Republic has about the same population as Haiti, it has about five times as many police officers. It also has armed forces with 56,000 troops - more than fifty times the size of Haiti's military.

Even if all of the countries that have talked about join‐ ing the proposed multina‐ tional security force follow through and deploy, their combined numbers will not be enough to change that dy‐ namic.

The country's national police force is down to about 6,000 to 7,000 officers; no one is quite sure how many are still reporting for duty. Even if 3,000 foreign police officers arrived tomorrow, that would only bring the force's strength back up to what it was about two years ago, when it began to lose ground rapidly to the gangs.

A nation holds its breath

Although the capital has seen three days of relative calm this week, following last week's disastrous losses of government control, police are almost nowhere to be seen on the city's streets, said Étienne Côté-Paluck, edi‐ tor of Haiti Today.

"Everybody's being hiding in their place, in their home. All the schools are out for now. We're waiting to see what's going to happen," he said. "But today it was calm. We're all waiting to see what's going to be the reac‐ tion of those criminal groups."

Police are focused on de‐ fending those national sym‐ bols and institutions that are still in government hands, such as the presidential palace and the airport (which is unusable because it's un‐ der fire from nearby gangs, but is not actually in gang hands).

Meanwhile, some of the country's gangs have warned that they will resist any out‐ side force that attempts to restore order to Haiti.

"There are a lot of threats against the multinational force that's supposed to come," Haiti-based freelance journalist Anne-Marie Schoen told CBC News.

"Barbecue, one of the gang leaders, already said that he will defend his coun‐ try against any international force."

On the weekend, Jimmy "Barbecue" Cherizier held an impromptu news conference wearing body armour and toting a Galil assault rifle.

"Either Haiti becomes a paradise for all of us, or a hell for all of us," he warned.

Vitel'homme Innocent, the Kraze Barye gang leader who won himself a spot on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, al‐ so rejected the new council. "We are not going to let the foreigners decide our fate," he warned.

Former cop "Barbecue" Cherizier is merely one of Port-au-Prince's gang lead‐ ers, although he's perhaps the most talkative and cer‐ tainly the best-known.

His G9 alliance of gangs has its base in the Martissant area south of the city centre and in the Chancerelles and Delmas areas near the port. G9 and Barbecue have a long history of working for politi‐ cians, particularly the Parti Haitien Tet Kale (PHTK) of former President Michel Martelly.

More recently, as the gangs have grown more pow‐ erful, Barbecue has turned against his former political sponsors and tried to posi‐ tion himself as a leader in his own right - a kind of Robin Hood who articulates the grievances of Haiti's poor.

That pose is a cynical farce, said Rae.

"Mr. Barbecue is not inter‐ ested in this country. He's not defending anyone but him‐ self," Rae told CBC News. "We have to come to grips with these guys. These are really bad criminal gangsters, re‐ sponsible for the murder and mayhem that has been prevalent in the country for far too long."

WATCH: Should Canada intervene in Haiti?

Barbecue and his G9 gang alliance have been implicated in two of Haiti's most savage massacres: Bel Air in 2021 and La Saline in 2018. Its members live off the pro‐ ceeds of kidnapping and ex‐ tortion, and enforce their rule over the city's slums through murder and rape.

But that doesn't mean the gangs don't have allies.

A council of seven to rule Haiti

The Presidential Council an‐ nounced in Kingston, Jamaica this week doesn't include any gang representation.

Instead, it envisages seven voting members who will govern jointly, alongside two non-voting members representing Haiti's civil soci‐ ety and its churches Catholic, Protestant and Voodoo.

Five of the seven voting seats will go to Haitian politi‐ cal parties and coalitions: Pitit Desalin, led by Sen. Moïse Jean Charles; Fanmi Lavalas, the left-wing party of former president JeanBertrand Aristide; EDE/RED, a party led by former prime minister Claude Joseph; the Jan. 30 Collective, an alliance of parties centred on the PH‐ TK of former president Michel Martelly; and the Dec. 21 Agreement, an alliance that supported outgoing Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

The remaining two votes are reserved for members of an anti-Henry civic alliance called the Montana Accord named for a Port-au-Prince hotel where its members came together - and for a grouping that represents Haiti's private sector.

Those seven voting seats have yet to be filled by indi‐ viduals, who will then have to elect a new acting prime min‐ ister.

Haiti's Finance Minister Michel Patrick Boisvert has been Haiti's acting prime minister since Henry left the country on February 25. There is no consensus among the members of the transitional council on who should replace him.

Most of the groups ap‐ peared to meet a deadline on Wednesday to provide the names of their representa‐ tives. There was public in‐ fighting within some of the groups over who should speak for them.

However, Pitit Desalin ap‐ peared to reject the idea of

the governing council alto‐ gether. Its leader Moise Jean Charles held a chaotic news conference in Port-au-Prince where he said that "the deci‐ sion of CARICOM is not our decision," referring to the re‐ gional trade bloc whose lead‐ ers presented the plan to cre‐ ate a transitional council.

"Haitians will decide who will govern Haiti," he an‐ nounced, adding that he pre‐ ferred to govern in a threeman council made up of him‐ self, a supreme court justice and convicted drug trafficker Guy Philippe.

A face from the past re‐ turns

Guy Philippe is a former police officer who led a na‐ tional uprising against former President JeanBertrand Aristide in 2004.

The U.S. government, which had intervened a decade earlier to save Aris‐ tide from a military coup, took a very different view in 2004 and looked on

Philippe's coup with, at a minimum, benign indiffer‐ ence (some would say com‐ plicity).

But Guy Philippe was soon indicted by U.S. authori‐ ties for his involvement in the cocaine trade, and would spend years hiding out in his stronghold of Pestel, sur‐ rounded by his guerrilla ar‐ my, which continued to launch attacks against the Haitian state.

In 2017, however, the U.S. finally laid hands on Philippe just days before he was to be sworn in as a senator, which would have given him crimi‐ nal immunity. He was extra‐ dited to the States and given a nine-year sentence.

Then, at the end of 2023, he was released and de‐ ported back to Haiti, where he was soon organizing and talking about becoming prezidan.

Philippe said that if he takes over, he will offer an amnesty to the gangs.

Although he's highly un‐ popular in both Washington and Ottawa, he appears to have strong connections to established politicians as well as some level of popular sup‐ port within the country. Those factors put him in a position to act as an interme‐ diary between politicians and gangs - traditionally a lucra‐ tive and influential position to be in.

Carrots or sticks

It remains to be seen whether Haiti's transitional government and its foreign backers will try to defeat the gangs through force alone, or whether they will use some mix of carrot and stick.

Professional soldiers have told CBC News that the paci‐ fication of a city the size of Port-au-Prince would be an enormous undertaking, re‐ quiring a force large enough to saturate the territory.

Behind the prominent gang leaders such as Barbe‐ cue, Izo and Vitel'homme are thousands of impoverished rank-and-file members who must somehow be either re‐ moved from Haitian society or reincorporated into it.

Louis-Henri Mars of the

Haitian peacebuilding nongovernmental organization Lakou Lape said few in Haiti want to see a blanket amnesty for gang crimes.

"There's been a lot of pain, rapes, killings, murders, burning down of houses. You cannot, you cannot just give a blanket amnesty and an im‐ punity ... to those who have done wrong, including to their sponsors and to those who have been supplying them with guns and ammuni‐ tion. So there must be a jus‐ tice component to the way out," he told CBC News.

"But is it totally about punitive justice only? Or does it have to have a restorative justice aspect to it? It's not by killing everybody or trying to kill everybody that this is going to work. There has to be a plan for the day after al‐ so."

The powerful gang lead‐ ers should face exemplary punishment, said Mars, but the young men who join gangs come from Port-auPrince's poorest slums and many feel they have no other options to survive.

"If you intervene and the state does not occupy the space that has been made, and there's only a vacuum, the vacuum is going to be filled again by all of those young people that that do not have any alternative," he said. "And the the quickest way for them to make some cash is to grab a gun.

"So there has to be right now plans being made not only to have this interven‐ tion, but also for the day af‐ ter the intervention. How is there going to be public works for temporary jobs in the neighbourhoods? How is the private sector going to be engaged in creating perma‐ nent jobs through developing businesses in those neigh‐ bourhoods?

"All of that has to be done in parallel to preparing the intervention. And so that's the only way that it's going to be a sustainable action and not just a temporary BandAid."