Rescuing Haiti from Gang Rule

Professor Robert I. Rotberg is a long-time CFR member. He is also the Founding Director of the Harvard Kennedy School Program on Intrastate Conflict and President Emeritus of the World Peace Foundation. He is the author and editor of two books about Haiti’s politics and several on Africa.

Just as we predicted more than a year ago, the intervention of African and Caribbean police and soldiers has failed to make a dent on the calamitous situation in Haiti. Since January, nearly five thousand civilian deaths have occurred as a result of relentless gang warfare in Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital city, and its immediate environs. The country itself has slid into a catastrophic humanitarian emergency, with five million people on the verge of starvation. Fearing gang assaults, more than seven hundred thousand Haitians have fled their homes. Mass abductions and “collective rapes” round out a picture of utter mayhem.

Two weeks ago, Haiti’s international airport had to be shut down temporarily after gangs opened fire at a Spirit Airlines flight attempting to make a landing. The flight was later diverted to the Dominican Republic. Citing “direct threat” to its nurses and doctors, including from “law enforcement,” Doctors Without Borders (MSF), on the ground in the country for three decades, has suspended its operations in the Haitian capital and its adjoining metropolitan area.

A major U.S. intervention is needed as a matter of urgency.  The outgoing Biden administration needs to act before Haiti collapses completely and recovery becomes impossible.

Last week, vigilantes in one Port-au-Prince suburb mobilized to take the battle to the gangsters, reportedly taking out dozens. While inspiring, such citizen actions are unlikely to take Port-au-Prince back from an estimated ten to twelve thousand gangsters believed by the UN to be in control of at least eighty-five percent of Port-au-Prince and its immediate vicinity. A few weeks ago, gangs spread their control north of the capital city to Gonaives and St. Marc, plus much of the fertile Artibonite department, heading north.

More than 1,100 Kenyan police, police from Jamaica, Belize, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, plus soldiers from Benin and Chad—a total force numbering about five thousand—were supposed to arrive in Haiti to overwhelm the gangs, assist Haiti's own compromised and out-gunned national police force of nine thousand personnel, and restore order to the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. But, as we anticipated, help has arrived in dribs and drabs. For instance, of the promised 1,100 Kenyan police, only four hundred are in place, plus a handful of Jamaican and Belizean police and military officers. The six hundred additional Kenyan police officers promised by President William Ruto in October have yet to arrive.

Apart from being insufficient, the multinational force is also ill-equipped, underpaid, and, without immediate reinforcements, unlikely to withstand massive gang power. Washington has proposed to replace this ad hoc African and Caribbean contingent with a proper UN peacekeeping force, but Russia and China have threatened to veto such a proposal, stymying both increased financing and the recruitment of military detachments that could stop the gangs in their tracks.

The rapid insertion of battle-ready U. S. and Canadian troops is urgently needed. As many as ten thousand special forces from both countries could quickly decimate the gangs and restore order to Haiti. Afterwards, ideally, French-speaking Canadian police, preferably Royal Canadian Mounties, could continue to maintain order with support from Haitian police. As soon as Haiti is at peace, with citizens able to go about their daily business, the country will require help, preferably from Canada, to reestablish its government and devise appropriate means to restart mundane life, including provision of services such as security, power, potable water, schooling, medical care, and banking. A Canadian assistance mission will also be needed to reopen the port and ensure the arrival of food and consumer goods for the country’s long-suffering eleven million citizens.

The United States will doubtless be asked to continue to finance such an effort, perhaps with Canada (and France?). We anticipate a multi-year assistance effort as Haitians cannot be expected to do much of this themselves at the moment.

And what will happen to the gangsters? Once vanquished by overwhelming force, captured gang members should be sent to a special new holding facility on Isle de Gonave, out in the Gulf of Gonave, where they can be retrained for new vocations. Their leaders, however, the all-consuming menace to Haiti, should all be tried either in special Canadian-assisted courts or sent to The Hague for trial by the International Criminal Court. It will be important not only to end gang violence and disruption, but to set a solid example for other weak countries where warlord-led special militias have run wild, as seen in the eastern regions of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Haiti can be pacified only by well-trained forces such as those the United States and Canada have at their ready disposal. For reasons already outlined, the African and Caribbean contingent cannot do it themselves. The United States and Canada are home to very large Haitian diasporas. A peace-enforcement operation would also be part recompense for what the United States arguably owes Haiti for its many "state-building" fiascoes, notably the 1915-1934 occupation.

As Haiti crumbles and its defenseless citizens are buffeted by violence and hunger, there is no time to lose. A robust North American military intervention is needed posthaste.