The international community and Haiti’s time of need

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/06/2025 (434 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To characterize the conditions today in Haiti as staggeringly grim would be a gross understatement.

Indeed, the situation on the ground in the chronically impoverished country has clearly gotten worse over the last six months. But the world has largely chosen to look away rather than to confront the problem head-on.

As a result, gang violence continues to surge and horrendous crimes go unpunished — such as murder, rape and kidnapping — while the drug trade deepens its grip on the country. These criminal gangs control almost 90 per cent of Haiti’s capital, a large portion of the northwestern Artibonite area and a handful of municipalities in the Central Plateau region.

Add to that the fact that over one million Haitians (half of whom are children) have been internally displaced and hunger is becoming more widespread (with almost six million people having trouble finding food and medicine). Hospitals have also had to close, schools are barely hanging on and there is no such thing in Haiti as a social safety net.

Furthermore, there have not been legitimate democratic elections held in Haiti for almost 10 years. And Haiti’s current nine-person Transitional Presidential Council has been plagued by internecine politics, corruption and impotence.

Equally troubling, the existing Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, led by some 1,000 Kenyan police and security officers, has underperformed. To be fair, they have come under heavy gang attack, recently lost two of their members, and are badly outnumbered and outgunned.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has, moreover, only exacerbated the situation. It has largely ignored the Haitian crisis (shuffling it off to the Organization of American States), raised questions about future funding for the MSS operation and done very little to stop deadly weapons from Florida being smuggled into the country. In addition, Trump has clearly compounded the humanitarian catastrophe by gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and slashing development assistance to Haiti.

Trump has also sought to deport distraught Haitians, to turn away asylum-seeking Haitians and has even rolled back Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians living in the U.S.

Yes, it’s true that the menace in the U.S. White House, the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East have taken up a lot of oxygen in the backrooms of power. But that’s a really poor excuse for inaction on Haiti.

There are things that can be done to ameliorate the conditions on the ground. Clearly, the violent gang activity needs to be attenuated and gradually neutralized so that the country can be stabilized and free and fair general elections can take place.

There also needs to be an acceptable, and manifestly robust, military presence in the country to ensure order and public safety. Perhaps that will require a capable peace enforcement operation with the imprimatur of the United Nations.

Most important, Haitians desperately need development assistance of all kinds (financial, medical, social, educational, governance and institutional) to get themselves back on their feet again. But we’re talking here about a massive, multifaceted aid program that needs serious financial resources from any and every country that can spare it.

Much of this, of course, requires large dollops of cash and political will, which is obviously in short supply these days. But there is nothing that says it has to be that way. Yet political decision-makers, and those with power to do something, have chosen not to act.

It seems pretty clear that a desperately poor and mostly black Caribbean country — to say nothing of its former status as a key slave colony — doesn’t much register on the international radar screen. It makes you wonder if Haiti was a predominantly white, European country whether the world’s response would be so callous and negligent.

Conveniently, Western governments and political leaders are quick to dismiss Haiti as fundamentally broken and simply beyond repair. Let’s be honest: to them, it’s a god-awful quagmire and a political minefield that they just don’t want anything to do with. So they justify their inaction and indifference by labelling Haiti a “failed state” and then blame Haitians themselves for their own misfortune.

The sad reality is that governments around the world (and here I include the so-called “Friends of Haiti” such as Canada, France and Brazil) have come to the stark conclusion that Haiti is not worth the effort to save. Stated differently, they are not going to sacrifice putting their military men and women in harm’s way (or to cough up the requisite financial resources) for the sake of Haitian lives or their overall well-being.

I have come to believe that this destitute country will have to explode into a continuous morass of violence and death before the world community will even notice. And even then one wonders whether the response to the ongoing crisis in Haiti will be sufficient to make a real difference.

Peter McKenna is professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.