Editorial | Confronting Haiti’s crisis

When it comes to Haiti’s security, the international community, especially countries in the Caribbean and Africa, ought not to make the perfect, or even the best, the enemy of the good.

Ordinary Haitians, for the most part, exist in abject insecurity, in a state teetering at the brink of collapse and total failure. Criminal gangs operate with impunity, orchestrating murder and mayhem and impeding humanitarian assistance to people.

Haitians need a respite from their long, painful travails. But critically, too, the country needs breathing room and space within which to expand and deepen the dialogue on how to rescue itself.

Which is why this newspaper again welcomes Kenya’s offer to lead a multinational, non-United Nations, policing operation in Haiti, and endorses the latest call by the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, for the deployment of such a force.

The UN Security Council should urgently give its imprimatur to this force; and other countries, especially in the Caribbean Americas, especially members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), should join Jamaica and The Bahamas in pledging to contribute members to the security contingent, to which Kenya has already said it will provide 1,000 police officers. The Organization of American States would partner with CARICOM in promoting and participating in this initiative.

CRISIS DEEPENED

Haiti’s long-standing political and governance crisis deepened with the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. It has worsened further as criminal gangs became increasingly ascendant, beyond the capacity of the country’s depleted, compromised and overwhelmed National Police to manage.

As Mr Guterres told the Security Council this week: “Gangs have become more structured, federated, and autonomous in their efforts to confront state authority, weakening state institutions, and consolidating control over the population. They target police stations, courts, prisons, schools, hospitals, and strategic installations such as ports, oil terminals and major roadways.”

That is part of the context within which Haiti’s caretaker prime minister, Dr Ariel Henry, last October appealed to the international community for “specialised armed forces” to help confront the gangs.

We appreciate why some people, in and outside of Haiti, are wary of endorsing or becoming involved in this proposal. They have been down this road before. And previous international deployments, after political crises and/or national disasters, changed little, and may have even left things worse.

Moreover, as bits of the analysis go, building security and constitutional order in Haiti cannot be divorced, or addressed separately, from the country’s economic and social development. Indeed, some of those who would now be party to efforts to bring order and security to Haiti were, by their previous actions, architects of the impoverishment that is at the root of its instability.

SHORE UP

Additionally, there is the possibility of this new deployment merely serving to shore up and entrench a corrupt political elite, whose historic behaviour contributed to the underdevelopment and corrosion of the institutions of politics and democratic order in Haiti.

This newspaper is not unsympathetic to these views. Indeed, it fully embraces most of them.

We, however, make the following observations:

• Haitians are enduring a humanitarian crisis that demands urgent action;

• There can be no giving up on Haiti, especially by the countries of the Caribbean and of Africa, the majority of whose citizens would be lost in a crowd in Port-au-Prince;

• This region of mostly post-slavery/post-colonial societies, as well as the countries of Africa, have an historic and ancestral obligation to help Haiti; and

• For some in Europe and the Americas, that obligation is profoundly moral.

Obviously, any lasting solution to Haiti’s past failures in democratic governance has to be crafted by the Haitians themselves. They have to own the process and be invested in its outcomes.

That is the backdrop against which we view the efforts of CARICOM’s Eminent Persons Group, comprising three former regional prime ministers – Kenny Anthony of St Lucia; Perry Christie of The Bahamas; and Bruce Golding of Jamaica – to coax Haitians stakeholders into a dialogue and fostering an environment in which those discussions are maintained and broadened. In that respect, we see the recent launch by seven of Haiti’s former prime ministers of an initiative to promote solutions to Haiti’s problem as a positive extension, rather than competitor, to CARICOM’s project.

But as the more complex, longer-term issues are being worked through, ordinary Haitians face a humanitarian crisis that is in need of immediate attention. If that problem goes unattended and the Haitian state is allowed to totally collapse, it will be difficult, and worse, to put it back together.

CARICOM does not have the muscle to itself address Haiti’s security needs, but it can be the honest broker that Haiti needs to help ensure that the mistakes of the past do not repeat themselves.