Will Haiti be at peace after a global intervention?

Vélina Élysée Charlier, a resident of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, said that she frequently passes by dead bodies on the streets of the city on her way to work. It’s the result of fights between violent gangs that control large swaths of the city.

We live in a world where gang violence is normal,” she said. You prepare for the day with the knowledge that it may be the last time you can leave the house, and the knowledge that you may not return home alive. That’s how bad it is.

Charlier, a Haitian anti-corruption activist, expressed concern for her four young daughters in light of the recent spike in kidnappings, particularly of girls and women.

Things in Haiti have been getting worse for a long time, but the last few months have seen a particularly sharp decline.

A third of the population lives on less than $2 per day, according to the World Bank, and armed groups are said to control much of the capital. Nearly 3,000 Haitians have been killed by gang violence this year alone, and hundreds of women and children have been kidnapped.

Military assistance was requested nearly a year ago by the government of the United States. After that desperate appeal, Kenya, an African country with a history of sending peacekeepers to troubled areas, volunteered to lead a multinational effort to help Haiti combat the violent gangs.

The United Nations Security Council agreed Monday to send in these troops for a year. It marks the first time in nearly two decades that a force would be deployed to Haiti.

“This mission comes at the request of the Haitian government and Haitian civil society to address the insecurity and dire humanitarian crisis the country has faced for far too long,” said Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the United States’ deputy ambassador to the United Nations.

Jean Victor Geneus, foreign minister of Haiti, reacted to the news by saying, “it is a glimmer of hope for this country.”

Following parliamentary approval, Kenya has pledged to send 1,000 police officers. The United States has pledged $100 million in logistical support, and Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Jamaica and the Bahamas, have offered to deploy troops.

Renata Segura of the International Crisis Group warned that there will be significant logistical challenges that make it unlikely that the mission will be successful.

It will be difficult for the troops to identify gang members because they are not uniformed and because they are hiding among civilians.

She also mentioned that Port-au-Prince has a lot of rough terrain and poor urban planning. Since the majority of the troops would be coming from English-speaking countries, communication could be difficult.

However, Segura stated that at this time there is no better option: “an international intervention is certainly the only way in which the spiral of violence in Haiti is going to stop.”

The history of foreign interference in Haiti is long and tangled. When the United Nations was last present in the country, a sexual misconduct scandal erupted. Cholera was accidentally introduced to Haiti’s water supply in 2010 by the peacekeeping mission. Many people in Haiti perished as a result of the epidemic.

Since 1994, there has been an ongoing series of interventions in Haiti. Charlier stated, “It’s pretty clear that this isn’t working.” It has been our experience that as soon as the mission leaves, things get even more unsafe.

Juan Gabriel Valdés, the Chilean ambassador to the United States and a former member of the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), has speculated that the fact that there is not a single elected official left in Haiti presents an additional challenge for this mission.

The gangs that MINUSTAH encountered at the time are not affiliated with these groups. These gangs are much more violent. They have superior weapons and are much more violent. So you’ll need to be tough if you have to confront them,” he warned. To do that, however, foreign troops need to be authorised to use force by a legitimate government in Haiti.

He said that there needs to be progress both on the military and the political sides.

William O’Neill, an independent consultant on Human Rights with the United Nations who travelled recently to Haiti, said the intervention is urgent.

To paraphrase what he said: “I think it’s one of those really tough situations where we decide, ‘I have to live first,’ and then, we’ll sort out the politics. Because “the people are so endangered and terrorised that something needs to happen as soon as possible.”