General Service Unit and Border police from Kenya stand in formation as they wait for the arrival of the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, near the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on July 22, 2024. (Roberto Schmidt/Pool/AFP/Getty Images via TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — A new contingent of 217 additional police officers from Kenya arrived in Port-au-Prince on Saturday aboard a chartered airplane escorted by the U.S. military, after months of uncertainty about whether President William Ruto would continue to field cops for the struggling mission in Haiti, where gang violence last year reached record levels.
After disembarking, the Kenyans, as customary, danced and chanted on the runway while carrying their rifles. Others carried a Haitian flag.
“Our commitment to this historic mission is unwavering and we will continue to mobilize all the necessary international support for it to succeed,” Kipchumba Murkomen, Kenya’s newly appointed interior Cabinet secretary, said on the social media site X, confirming that 217 officers were deployed.
The new group is among 600 trained and U.S.-vetted cops from various units of Kenya’s National Police Service whom Ruto had promised in September to deploy to Haiti before the end of the year. But the effort was stalled after Democrats lost the U.S. presidential election in November and Haiti’s ruling council days later replaced the prime minister after less than six months.
Both moves created uncertainty for Ruto, who had also expressed worries about the mission’s lack of resources, including funding and equipment, as it struggled to help Haitian police take down armed gangs.
Ruto’s uncertainties about the mission’s fate seems to have been put to rest, at last for now, following this week’s comments from President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio lauded Kenya for its leadership of the Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti, and signaled continued U.S. support.
Rubio’s comments were immediately noticed by members of Ruto’s Cabinet and on Saturday at 2 a.m. Kenya time, officials from both the interior and foreign affairs ministries waved the new contingent off as they boarded a Kenya Airways aircraft from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. The plane landed in Port-au-Prince shortly after 11 a.m., escorted by U.S. military. In November, three U.S. jetliners flying over Port-au-Prince’s airspace were hit by gunfire, fueling concerns about the safety of the capital’s skies.
The 217 Kenyan cops will join 380 of their compatriots already in Port-au-Prince, and are expected to be joined by additional Kenyan police in Haiti in the coming days. Their presence boosts the total number of foreign security personnel to just under 800. There are currently police and military officers from Jamaica, along with soldiers from the Bahamas, Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador. The Biden administration, which had been pushing Kenya to deploy its remaining officers, had hoped to bring the mission’s strength up to 1,000 officers before it leaves office on Monday.
But even 1,000 security personnel or the mission’s targeted goal of 2,500 is insufficient, security experts say. Last year, Haiti saw a record number of neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas fall to armed gangs, despite the presence of foreign forces and a new U.S.-backed transition government. As the gangs took over neighborhoods and carried out some of the worst massacres in recent memory, they also deepened the country’s humanitarian crisis as tens of thousands more Haitians were forced to flee their homes. The United Nations said more than 5,600 people were killed by gang violence last year, an increase over the previous two years, and over 1 million Haitians are now displaced.
In light of the widening crisis, security experts say there needs to be a shift both in both the national and international response.
Kenya promised 1,000 police officers as part of its offer to lead the mission. After repeated delays, including a court battle in Nairobi and congressional Republican opposition in Washington, cops began deploying in June of last year. But the under-resourced and underfunded effort has struggled to make inroads against armed groups.
As part of a shift in strategy, gangs have consolidated under an alliance known as Viv Ansanm, Living Together, overwhelming both the Kenyan-led force and Haitian police.
“Obviously any increase in the [Kenya-led] deployment is very useful. The numbers have been woefully insufficient. But numbers alone are not sufficient,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a security expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “We need to obviously have meaningful action by the... forces in combination with meaningful actions by the Haitian police. Both of these have really been elusive and the glaring lack of holding forces is especially critical and has been a factor allowing the reprisals, counter attacks, revenge attacks that we are seeing from the gangs and also from the militia forces.”
Still, she is surprised that Kenya has decided to send another group of forces to Haiti at this moment given the ongoing funding issues.
“There are still significant challenges with funding that were already there with the Biden administration, with only a small fraction of the mission funded,” said Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology in the foreign policy program at Brookings. “And those uncertainties have grown enormously as the Trump administration is coming over, and have previously not been enthusiastically about funding the mission and many Republicans members of congress very skeptical outright of funding the mission.”
The Biden administration has provided more than $629 million for the mission, while a U.N.-controlled Trust Fund has raised just over $110 million. To address the money issue, the outgoing Biden administration has asked the U.N. Security Council, which has a meeting scheduled on Wednesday on the situation in Haiti, to transform the mission into a formal U.N. peacekeeping operation. The move would guarantee funding through members’ assessed contributions and allow the force to expand and get the needed equipment. Whether this is something the Trump administration will support remains unclear. During Trump’s first term in office, a U.N. peacekeeping force was on its way out of Haiti, and despite concerns the country wasn’t ready to take control of its own security, the administration did not stop the move.
In its latest analysis of the situation in Haiti, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said that a peacekeeping operation alone will not solve Haiti’s gang problem and the structures that support the criminal groups.
“This is a far greater challenge, requiring the deployment of all available domestic and international instruments, including a mix of public security, justice, development aid and humanitarian cooperation,” the report said.
Last week, Haiti’s ruling transition made the country’s former police chief, Mario Andresol, secretary of state for national security. A former infantry officer in the Haitian Armed Forces, Andresol was tapped in 2005 to lead the Haiti National Police as it became infiltrated by drug-trafficking cops and as gangs’ foothold endangered a government transition.
He went on to head the Haitian police for seven years. As he was being installed last week, Andresol said he harbors no illusions about the magnitude of the task before him.
“I firmly believe that my experience in strategic and operational fields, combined with the expertise of carefully selected collaborators, can make a significant contribution to this vast project of security governance in the country,” he said during his installation ceremony.
On Saturday, he was among the Haitian officials including Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, Police Chief Rameau Normil and Presidential Council member Fritz Jean who welcomed the new contingent to Haiti.
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