The first UN-backed contingent of foreign police arrived in Haiti on Tuesday, nearly two years after the troubled Caribbean country urgently requested help to quell a surge in gang violence.
A few hundred police officers from Kenya landed in the capital, Port-au-Prince, whose main international airport reopened late last month after gang violence forced it to close for nearly three months.
It was not immediately known what the Kenyans’ first assignment would be, but they are to face violent gangs that control 80 percent of Haiti’s capital and have left more than 580,000 people homeless across the country as they pillage neighborhoods in their quest to control more territory. Gangs also have killed several thousand people in the past few years.
Photo: Reuters
The Kenyans’ arrival marks the fourth major foreign military intervention in Haiti. While some Haitians welcome them, others view the force with caution, given that the previous intervention — the UN’s 2004-2017 peacekeeping mission — was marred by allegations of sexual assault and the introduction of cholera, which killed nearly 10,000 people.
Romain le Cour, a senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, urged the international community and government officials to share details, including the mission’s rules of engagement and concept of operation.
“What is going to happen vis-a-vis the gangs,” he said. “Is it a static mission? Is it a moving mission? All those details are still missing, and I think it’s about time that there’s actually transparency.”
Hours after the Kenyans landed, Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille thanked the East African country for its solidarity, saying that gangs have made Haiti “unlivable.”
“The country is going through very difficult times,” he told a news conference. “Enough is enough... We’re going to start working little by little to retake the country.”
Conille said the Kenyans would be deployed in the next couple of days, but he did not provide details.
He was accompanied by Kenyan National Security Adviser Monica Juma.
The Kenyans would “serve as agents of peace, of stability, of hope,” Juma said.
“We stand united in our commitment to support Haiti’s National Police to restore public order and security,” she said. “It is our hope that this will not become a permanent mission.”
The deployment comes nearly four months after gangs launched coordinated attacks, targeting key government infrastructure in Haiti’s capital and beyond. They seized control of more than two dozen police stations, fired on the main international airport and stormed Haiti’s two biggest prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates.
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