SUBCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — The U.S. military transport jets arrive almost daily, 87 so far, landing at Haiti’s newly reopened Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport and bringing in nearly 2,500 tons of supplies and scores of civilian contractors to build a base for a Kenyan-led international police force.
An advance security team from Kenya has already visited to plan the deployment of the UN-authorized mission, which will be led by 1,000 Kenyan police and may include as many as 1,500 representatives from other countries. Meanwhile, Haiti’s fractious political leadership has agreed on an interim prime minister, whose government took office on Tuesday with a mission to restore peace and security.
All the pieces would seem to be in place for the force to arrive, and for Haiti to at least begin to reverse the tide of lawlessness and gang violence that has plagued the nation since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise.
There’s only one thing missing: the Kenyan police themselves. They’re still 7,500 miles away, with no fixed date for their arrival. On Sunday, Kenyan President William Ruto said the force would begin deploying “by next week or the other week.” He said the same thing in May. And for the second time this year, a lawsuit brought by a Kenyan opposition leader threatens to block the deployment on procedural grounds. The opposition figure, Ekuru Aukot, blasted the government for a deployment he said would “play into the hands of globalists and imperialists” who want to “plunder Haiti.” The case is being heard this week.
“It’s increasingly obvious that the Kenyans are somewhat skeptical and not fully committed,” Sophie Rutenbar, a former UN official in Haiti and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Cipher Brief. Instead, she says, the U.S. and Jamaica have been doing the planning and pushing the project forward. “This is concerning because as President Biden has said, the U.S. has a long history of meddling in Haiti.”
The U.S. has worked to keep its boots off the ground in Haiti, and it took nearly a year to reach an agreement on the nature and scope of the international mission. That agreement came in October 2023, along with the hope that the force might restore some semblance of order to Haiti – and avoid both a humanitarian disaster and a failed state on the doorstep of the U.S.
Speaking in Nairobi on March 1, after signing an agreement with Kenya to let the police in, Haiti’s then-Prime Minister Ariel Henry was guarded.
“We hope the deployment will occur very soon because the people cannot anymore suffer,” Henri said. “What this mission is bringing is hope for the future.”
Just three days later, gangs seized the airport in Port-au-Prince, and Henry – unable to return home – resigned from office.
The spiral to “failed state”
To some extent, statistics help tell the story of Haiti’s recent downward spiral.
Gangs now control about 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Since January, more than 2,500 Haitians have been killed or injured in gang violence, according to the UN, and an additional 90,000 people in the capital have been forced from their homes. The total number of displaced Haitians in the last three years has reached 360,000 – among a population of 11.5 million.
The chaos has led to an exodus. U.S. border guards report stopping or sending back 145,000 undocumented Haitians through the end of April, compared with 164,000 in all of last year, and only 57,000 in 2022. Meanwhile, the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime says the erosion of law enforcement has made Haiti “a trans-shipment country for drugs, primarily cocaine and cannabis,” an industry that also brings revenue for Haiti’s gangs.
Beyond the statistics, there are the human stories. On Sunday, the Delmas 6 gang, led by a former Haitian police officer named Jimmy Cherizier who calls himself “Barbecue,” ambushed an armored police car, setting it on fire with the officers inside. Three Haitian police died. Press reports say gruesome videos of the attack have circulated on social media, with Cherizier displaying police weapons seized in the attack, and suggesting it was merely a taste of things to come. “It’s a warm-up,” Cherizier said.
The Kenyan-led deployment, agreed to under a United Nations Security Council resolution, is intended to support Haiti’s underfunded, under-armed, and – many analysts say – under-appreciated National Police force, and help them stop or at least curb the influence of the gangs.
While no one has laid out specific parameters for the Kenyan-led mission, it’s generally agreed that their first duty will be to secure ports and the international airport, government buildings, and other key installations in the capital. The aim is to keep the gangs away from these places, restore some sense of normalcy, and in the process free up several thousand Haitian police who now guard these places.
“The center of gravity is getting the gangs to stand down long enough for the political process to advance. That’s a huge mission,” Keith Mines, a former U.S. diplomat and now vice president for Latin America at the U.S. Institute for Peace, told The Cipher Brief. Mines has spent more than 25 years working on reconstruction and governance in Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The country’s latest interim prime minister, a UNICEF official named Garry Connille, was sworn in last week. His job—like that of numerous prime ministers and presidents before him – is to wind down the violence, ease the humanitarian crisis, and get all parties to agree on elections before a deadline of February 2026.
The hope is that the international force can give his government a chance at success.
What stopped the deployment
Earlier this year it appeared all systems were go for the international mission. Then in February, several Port-au-Prince gangs stopped feuding and formed a united front, called with unconscious irony Viv Ansanm (Living Together, in Creole). Besides looting and burning schools, health clinics, businesses and private homes, and kidnapping anyone who might be able to pay a ransom, the new organization took on much of the crumbling authority of the Haitian state. Gangs attacked dozens of police stations and the country’s two largest prisons, freeing some 4,600 prisoners, and seized control of the ports and airport.
The Kenyan-led mission was put on hold until Haitian police could take back control of the airport. That happened in March.
The deployment was delayed again in May when the Kenyan advance team demanded better protection, medevac helicopters, and armored vehicles they didn’t have to share with the Haitian police. El Salvador said it could provide the helicopters once a new government was in place. The armored cars will likely come from U.S. military stocks, but the Pentagon hasn’t made any public commitment. The latest delay is due to the legal challenges by the Kenyan political opposition.
Can they succeed?
Almost from the moment the UN authorized the force, long-time observers have been divided as to its chances of success.
For one thing, there is its size, given the realities on the ground: A force of 1,000 Kenyans and up to 1,500 more police from West Africa and the Caribbean seems small, even if its task is limited to guarding key installations.
Others have warned of cultural issues. “The things the Kenyans are going to face are the fact that they are being dropped into a very complicated situation in a country that probably none of them have spent any time in,” Jonathan M. Katz, a former Haiti bureau chief for the Associated Press, said in an interview with The Cipher Brief. “They don’t speak the language and they are coming in with tactics that have been honed fighting (the Somali terror group) al-Shabab and doing police work in Kenya, which is a very different situation than Haiti,” Katz said. “There is all kinds of potential for all kinds of things to go wrong.”
A leading police union in Haiti has also voiced skepticism about the Kenyan mission.
“What we’re seeing is the international community working with a few sectors with no clear plans on what they’ll do and how,” the police union said in a statement issued in late May. “We believe only the Haitian police can provide long-term security for Haiti. What we need are materials and logistical support.”
Mines argues that this deployment could work, in part because it will be different from the many past deployments – and invasions – of foreign troops throughout Haiti’s history, none of which succeeded in stabilizing the country.
“The Kenyans come in with a lot of will to succeed,” he told The Cipher Brief. “They are under national pressure from their president and under international scrutiny.”
Rutenbar says she, too, is hopeful. “What you have seen in the last few months is that the Haitian National Police has not collapsed,” she said. With only a thousand or so police on the streets of Port-au-Prince, she told The Cipher Brief, “that kernel is still out there trying to push back against gangs.”
The optimists believe that the boost provided by the Kenyan-led force could be enough to turn the tide. As Mines put it, “sometimes we overestimate the strength of the gangs and underestimate the capacity of Haitian society to get behind something like this.”
Haitian politics - and the gangs
The bigger problem may be the fragility of Haiti’s politics.
The new Prime Minister, Connille, nominally reports to a cross-party coalition called the Transitional Presidential Council, but it has so little power that Mines calls it “a one-bullet regime,” a single assassination away from plunging the country back into chaos.
That’s what happened in July 2021, when Moise was assassinated by a group of Colombian mercenaries as he tried to reveal a drug smuggling ring that had deep ties to Haiti’s political elite. This past February, Moise’s wife Martine and a former Prime Minister, Claude Joseph, were arrested and charged with conspiring in the assassination.
The International Crisis Group wrote in a report last month that “Haitian institutions have been gravely weakened as a whole, and the state will need a surge of international support to consolidate its authority throughout the country and meet people’s basic needs.”
It doesn’t help that the gangs are intertwined in the country’s politics, with some acting as arms of political parties, and others with political ambitions of their own.
Jeffsky Poincy, who was born and raised in Haiti and ran an NGO there, said the gangs exist in local pockets, where they exercise near-total control over communities, effectively deciding who a neighborhood votes for in an election, collecting protection money from local businesses, and reinforcing the power of local business leaders.
“There is an entire ecosystem that fuels the gangs,” Poincy told The Cipher Brief. “If you only focus on fighting the gangs, you might kill some leaders and arrest some others, but after a few months, the gangs regenerate themselves and a new gang leader emerges in the same area.”
Katz echoed that sentiment. “The reason why the gangs have power, is that especially in Port-au-Prince they are the only thing approaching an administrative game in town,” said Katz. “In neighborhoods where they operate, people understand you have to show deference to the gangs or pay their racket because they have the monopoly on violence in your quartier so effectively they are your government, even if it’s a very tenuous and dangerous government.”
As for the Kenyan-led mission, he said, “I don't see how bringing in a bunch of police from the other side of the world, who don't speak the language and don’t know anybody, will solve that.”
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