Police officers patrol near the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024. (Odelyn Joseph/AP)
Shortly before Haiti’s new ruling presidential council took office earlier this year in a deal brokered by Washington and the Caribbean Community, one of its incoming members discussed the plan to take back control of Port-au-Prince from armed gangs and declared that within a 100 days the road to the south of the country would re-open.
That road, a 15-mile stretch known as Route National 2, was the first major highway to fall in June 2021 when gangs began occupying sections of Martissant, a community of single-family homes and streetside lottery kiosks.
Seven months after the council member’s bold declaration — and five months after the first contingent of foreign police officers from Kenya arrived in Haiti — the dusty highway through Martissant remains the “road of death.” Gangs shoot at anyone trying to pass through, and neighboring Carrefour and Gressier are now among at least five areas of the capital and the neighboring Artibonite region that have fallen as gangs audaciously gain ground.
The upsurge in violence in the face of an international armed force in Haiti has raised questions about the effectiveness of the Kenya-led mission, as well as whether the deployment of a formal United Nations peacekeeping operation would make a difference.
Security experts and those on the front lines say there is no simple answer. While acknowledging the shortcomings of the Multinational Security Support mission, backed by the United States, observers say Haiti faced a daunting numbers dilemma from the outset.
The Haiti National Police has one officer for every 1,000 residents, based on its claim of a total force of 12,000. In the developing world, the standard is twice as many officers per 1,000 people. Meanwhile, an analysis by the recently ousted prime minister, Garry Conille, showed that to open just 15 miles of road to the south, Haiti would need 700 police and military officers, plus attack drones, hand grenades and armor vehicles that can engage in combat.
The required force is almost double the 416 foreign police officers who currently make up the security mission, and significantly more than the Haitian police’s small specialized forces can spare.
But the inability of Haiti and the international community to stem the tide of violence, which escalated this week with the attempted gang attack on one of Haiti’s wealthier suburbs, Pétion-Ville, isn’t just about the numbers. It’s also about lack of a security strategy on the part of all involved, and an underestimation of the urban warfare the country finds itself embroiled in.
Experts say the U.S., which has provided more than $300 million so far for the multinational mission, failed to ask a basic question at the start: What would it take to win this?
More gang violence
Haiti’s armed gangs should have been under pressure over the past few months. But they are in fact stronger today than in March, when they launched coordinated attacks throughout the capital under a new alliance called Viv Ansanm — Living Together. Since then, gangs have conquered more territory, become even better equipped and been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians and the displacement of more than 40,000 people since last month. That’s in addition to 700,000-plus who have been forced to flee their homes over the last three years because of the violence.
“There is a level of underestimation of the power of the gangs, not only the way they operate, but their capacity to hold the terrain, their capacity to know the terrain, their capacity to fight or not fight, and their ability to control different areas in different theaters,” said Romain Le Cour, senior expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, a civil-society organization based in Switzerland.
On Wednesday, the Kenya-led mission’s struggle to stabilize Haiti came under scrutiny as the U.N. Security Council met to discuss the push by the U.S. to transform the undertaking into a formal peacekeeping operation. The measure, which would mean the U.N. would take over sending troops to Haiti and paying for them, has been endorsed by at least 16 Latin American nations, along with the 15-member Caribbean Community bloc.
But such a peacekeeping mission is opposed by Russia and China, which have veto powers in the security council and have expressed concerns about sending peacekeepers to Haiti. The focus, they said, should remain on the under-resourced and understaffed multinational mission. Neither country has contributed financially to the mission. which was recently re-authorized for another year, until October 2025.
“Deploying a peacekeeping operation at this time is nothing more than putting peacekeepers into the front line of the battles with the gangs. This will expose peacekeepers to great security risks,” Geng Shuang, China’s’ deputy permanent representative to the U.N., said.
Kenyan National Security Adviser Monica Juma, who spoke via video link from Nairobi, said the multinational mission’s success in Haiti would include the reopening of schools and the international airport, which was recently closed. However, she acknowledged that the gangs’ coordinated attacks on multiple fronts have significantly challenged the capacity of both the Haitian police and the mission’s forces to respond.
The mission’s current deployment figure is a mere fraction of the 2,500 security personne originally planned, she noted. Kenya, which had promised to deploy 617 additional cops by this month, has yet to do so and Juma did not provide the Security Council with a timeline. Jamaica, which is leading a Caribbean contingent to Haiti that includes members of its defense force and police, has not said when it will deploy the rest of its promised forces.
The stalled deployments are all taking place against a backdrop of increased fighting between police and armed gangs on the streets of the capital that has devastated communities and led to more than 4,000 deaths this year.
“They are committing terrifying abuse, murders, abductions, rapes and burning of homes,” Haiti’s U.N. representative, Antonio Rodrigue, said. “Children, women and men are caught and entrapped in this indiscriminate violence.”
In the past two months, gangs have become even more audacious, he said. Last week, they shot at three U.S. commercial aircraft flying over Port-au-Prince, prompting a 30-day ban on flights to Haiti by the Federal Aviation Administration. The incident has also forced the closure of both the international and domestic airports in the capital for the second time this year.
On Tuesday, at least 28 suspected gang members were killed by police and residents as they attempted to invade the upscale Pétion-Ville community. The gang attacks underscored Haiti’s continuing instability amid a deepening governing crisis. The ruling Transitional Presidential Council fired the prime minister last week, after he’d been in office for just six months, and replaced him with local businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé.
On Thursday Fils-Aimé addressed the recent attacks. His office said he’s “determined to guarantee the free movement of goods and people” and reaffirmed his desire to unblock all roads.
“The most tragic part of what’s happening right now is that it feels like we went back to March, back to a situation in which there is a massive vacuum of political power and institutional representation,” said Le Cour. “It feels like the situation in terms of public security is absolutely out of control,” he added, despite the presence of the multinational mission.
The armed international force, he said, lacks a clear strategy built around a “deep, precise assessment of gang activity, neighborhood by neighborhood, group by group.
“There is absolutely a lack of knowledge and analysis at the very local level, with granular information that would allow everybody ... to actually know much better the dynamics on the grounds in different areas,” Le Cour said, echoing sentiments that have been shared by others critical of recent movements within the Haitian police and the lack of military strategists in the mission. “The more you think about it, the more you feel like there was no strategy, there was no plan, or maybe there was one, but it’s apparently not working at all, and we haven’t reassessed.”
Pleas to Washington
During a visit to Washington over the summer, Conille told U.S. officials that even at its projected full strength of 2,500, the multinational mission’s personnel would not be enough to take on the gangs. On top of that, he stressed, the Haitian police’s weak force lacks training and officers. Some reports have put the force’s real numbers at between 4,000 and 7,000 officers on public-safety duty for the country’s nearly 12 million people.
The effort also lacked the proper kind of equipment, Conille said.
“I keep on wondering, why did we send a type of armored vehicle... that does not fit with the terrain that we see in Haiti?” Le Cour said. “How is it possible that you end up using vehicles that can’t move around, for example, or are very densely constructed?”
U.S. officials finally agreed to allow Haiti to purchase some military-type equipment just before Conille’s firing. They intend to provide nearly $628 million in financial and in-kind support to the multinational mission, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said earlier this month. This would include armored vehicles, radios, night-vision goggles and drones. On Friday, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti began evacuating its staff.
“We’re literally back to March 1 and 2 when the airport was attacked and was closed, and the country is left to drift away,” said Le Cour, noting not one major gang leader has been arrested despite police assertions that gang members have been killed during operations. “It is very hard to find progress, although we know that... everybody has put tons of effort in trying to do something over the summer. I think this is why, maybe, people are so paralyzed right now and feel that what has happened over the past seven months has led to absolutely nothing.”
For the multinational mission to achieve its envisioned strength, donors have to step up immediately, Miroslav Jenča’s, assistant secretary-general for the region, told the Security Council. He noted that the U.N. Trust Fund for the mission has a pledged amount of only $96.8 million, which is way below what is needed.
The failed effort in Solino
On the ground the mission’s weakness plays out in its operations.
Like Martissant, the working-class neighborhood of Solino in central Port-au-Prince is considered a key target by both the government and the gangs. Its strategic location provides access to various neighborhoods, including Delmas and Pétion-Ville.
In late August the government decided to focus on the area after Haitian Police Chief Rameau Normil nixed a plan to deploy forces into Ganthier. The rural town east of the capital had fallen under attacks by the 400 Mawozo gang, and the government had unblocked the equivalent of $59.4 million for the operation.
The about-face on Ganthier in favor of Solino, a knowledgeable source told the Herald, was made more out of desperation than any strategy by the police, which believed it could succeed given Solino’s location and the presence of cops who had spent two years successfully resisting gangs. They were wrong.
After four weeks of intense daily exchanges of gunfire, the Haitian security forces and the multinational mission never controlled more than 50% of Solino. A security analysis shared with the Herald showed that to succeed in Solino the government would need about 200 specialized officers to fight the gangs and another 300 to hold the territory.
“We keep on reproaching the Haitian national police and the [multinational force] for not conducting a mission, although we never really gave them the means and the time to succeed in conducting that mission,” said Le Cour, noting that regardless of what decision is made about a U.N peacekeeping operationn, Haiti needs the right strategy.
“The gangs have personnel. They have people available to conduct operations. They have the will to conduct the operations. They have the coordination,” he said. The situation over the past few weeks is that the Haitian police and the multinational mission, he added “are caught between a rock and a hard place. We’re stuck, really, in the middle of the river. We’ve crossed and we advanced until the middle of the river, but we are very far from the horizon, and we can’t go back to the bank.”
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