Haitians were on edge on Friday awaiting the naming of a transitional governing body meant to restore stability to the country, wracked by gang violence and largely isolated from the outside world.
Attacks in the capital, Port-au-Prince, continued overnight, targeting the airport and a top police official’s home, while residents mounted roadblocks in two spots to impede criminal gangs and signal their own frustration, a reporter saw.
Some are hoping a transitional council can fill the void left by departing Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who is leaving amid pressure from an offensive by gangs that control 80 percent of the capital.
Photo: Reuters
Yet many have decried the pending establishment of a transitional council, a move supported by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the UN and the US.
“I’m in the street now and I’m very angry,” resident Francois Nolin said, adding that “the Americans are imposing certain conditions on us to run the country.”
“White people have no right to meddle in our affairs. Instead of making things better, they’ll make them worse,” said Jesula, a Haitian woman who declined to give her last name.
The country has a long, brutal history of foreign interventions, from a 20-year US occupation in the early 1900s to a deadly cholera outbreak linked to a UN peacekeeping mission in the 2010s.
An overnight curfew was extended until today in the Ouest Separtment, which includes Port-au-Prince, in an effort to “retake control of the situation,” the prime minister’s office said.
A state of emergency is set to end on April 3.
“There are great numbers of prison escapees in the streets,” Port-au-Prince resident Edner Petit said. “The situation is getting steadily worse. The decision to impose a month-long curfew is to be praised ... but it shouldn’t have had to come to that.”
Henry, whose term in office was marked by rising gang violence, announced Monday he would resign once the transitional council is stood up.
Then-Haitian president Jovenel Moise, who appointed Henry, was assassinated in 2021, and was never replaced. The country has not held elections since 2016 — another source of political frustration among the Haitian population.
CARICOM was holding an emergency meeting with representatives of Haiti, the UN and concerned countries including the US.
The meeting charged Haitian political groups with establishing the transitional governing body, and most of those groups have submitted the names of their chosen representatives, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday.
Members of the so-called Dec. 21 Accord, the group supporting Henry, have struggled to agree on a single nominee, but are in talks aimed at doing so.
The transition council is supposed to comprise seven voting members representing key political and private-sector forces in Haiti. It has been tasked with selecting an interim prime minister and nominating an “inclusive” cabinet.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS