Glimmer of hope shines for beleaguered Haiti

Two years after the assassination of Haiti’s president triggered a spiral of mayhem, economic calamity and gang violence, there is a glimmer of hope for the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. It arrives from the government of Kenya, which has offered to send 1,000 police officers and lead a multinational force that would help Haitian authorities restore a semblance of order.

The Kenyan proposal responds to an appeal by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, who has taken stock of Haiti’s political turmoil and humanitarian meltdown and correctly concluded that the country’s suffering will only deepen without outside intervention. That has been apparent for months. Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry asked last year for international military intervention, but until now, Guterres had failed to find a nation willing to lead such a mission. Haiti’s Foreign Ministry welcomed the Kenyan initiative.

In a statement, the Kenyan government declared its offer to send a force to Haiti reflects its solidarity “with persons of African descent across the world” and its “commitment to Pan Africanism.” Yet there is reason for skepticism in the bid by Kenya, which shares neither language nor direct history with Haiti and has struggled with its own domestic security problems.

Moreover, the legacy of past international interventions in Haiti offers little cause for optimism. It has included racism, sexual abuse and, in 2010, the introduction by U.N. peacekeepers of what became one of the world’s worst recent cholera epidemics, which killed thousands of Haitians.

It was partly that checkered history, in addition to the chaos that has seized the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, that dissuaded the United States and Canada from spearheading a stabilization mission.

Nonetheless, the moral justification for outside intervention has only become clearer since this board endorsed that course of action shortly after Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was shot to death in July 2021 in a plot whose genesis and authors remain murky. It was apparent then, and remains so now, that the resulting power vacuum would devolve into pandemonium and that the victims would be ordinary Haitians.

Today, gangs are estimated to control 80% of Port-au-Prince, a city of well over 1 million inhabitants. The government is ineffectual, and the police are outgunned. Gang violence has erupted into shootouts in the capital and paralyzed economic life. Shops and schools have been closed for long stretches.

Haiti’s civil society, a network of nongovernmental organizations, is no match for the gangs’ lethal firepower. In fact, the only significant countervailing force that has arisen has been a campaign of vigilante violence that has targeted gang members and leaders: blood for blood.

Any U.N. force deployed to Haiti would need a carefully defined mandate. It should be primarily focused in the short term on the restoration of order and humanitarian relief, not on propping up Henry’s unpopular and unelected government. The force would also likely require significant firepower to combat Haitian gangs, more than most nations’ police generally can marshal on their own.

In the longer term, a peacekeeping mission should help create the conditions for democratic elections, last held in Haiti in 2016. Without national and local officials who enjoy political legitimacy, the country would have scant hope of regaining stability and peace.