Haiti’s chance to end its nightmare

Opinion

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This article was published 24/06/2024 (459 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The office of Haiti’s newly appointed Prime Minister Garry Conille recently confirmed plans to replace the country’s national police chief. Conille himself — who briefly held his current role in 2011-2012 — was installed in late May by a presidential transition council. The governing body was created earlier this year to take over from former prime minister Ariel Henry, who resigned in April.

The deployment of a long-delayed multinational police force led by Kenya and funded mostly by the U.S. is imminent, says Kenya’s president. The transition council aims to organize general elections by the end of 2025. Altogether these developments provide a glimmer of hope to the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

However, reviving Haiti from its failed state status will be a tall order. Indeed, much of its current crisis stems from its torturous past.

An uprising by Black slaves led to Haiti’s independence in 1804 from then-colonial ruler France. Two decades later, Paris levied crushing economic penalties against the young republic over supposed financial losses France claimed it had incurred because of Haiti’s freedom.

Calculated to equal more than US$20 billion in present terms, it was a terrible deal for Haiti. The country’s elites nonetheless agreed to pay because it meant France would maintain recognition of their property rights — thereby preserving their unjust levels of colonial era wealth. It took Haiti until 1947 to settle this debt, siphoning resources away from its national development for over a century.

During this time and for decades afterward, the country suffered a series of debilitating power struggles and coups, culminating in 1991 when the military ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide soon after he became Haiti’s first democratically elected leader. Aristide was later reinstalled in office in 1994 with the help of Washington; he swiftly disbanded Haiti’s army.

However, military leaders had meanwhile created local militias to suppress popular support for Aristide. By the time the army was dissolved, the military-sponsored militias had morphed into semi-autonomous criminal enterprises. They then acquired new staying power as factions within Haiti’s ruling class began enlisting the gangs as proxies to further their own interests.

This laid the groundwork for how armed gangs have paralyzed Haiti today. Since the beginning of 2024, these groups have initiated massive jailbreaks, stolen humanitarian aid, torched government institutions, attacked the presidential palace and laid siege to the country’s main international airport.

In Port-au-Prince especially, regular citizens venturing out to work, school or the dwindling number of shops must navigate lawless streets filled with flaming roadblocks and gun battles. Journalists and civil society groups report simply leaving one’s home risks assault, abduction, extortion or worse.

Haitian political scientist Robert Fatton has suggested that armed gangs experience total superiority over Haiti’s police and military, the latter of which was only brought back in 2017. Gangs’ autonomy has grown so much “in the last year or so,” Fatton says, “that it is difficult to see who is in fact controlling the gangs and whether in fact the gangs have become powers unto themselves.”

A central figure to emerge in this power vacuum has been infamous gang leader Jimmy (Barbecue) Chérizier. The messianic former police officer, whose foot soldiers are responsible for much of the horrendous violence and abuses happening in Port-au-Prince, fancies himself as a folk hero — Haiti’s own mix of Che Guevara and Robin Hood.

Chérizier is credited with uniting Haiti’s myriad gangs against prime minister Ariel Henry to trigger his downfall. They argued Henry and his administration had been puppets for foreign powers ever since Henry — a neurosurgeon who had been living in France for two decades at that time — was appointed to be Haiti’s head of state in the wake of former president Jovenel Moïse being assassinated in 2021.

In early March, Cherizier threatened to spark a civil war that would “lead to genocide” if Henry stayed in office.

The arrival of the Kenya-led security forces at the invitation of Haiti’s government should help provide some immediate stability. However, only Haitians can and should determine what peace and justice mean for them long-term.

For Haiti to exit from its living nightmare will require domestic and institutional stakeholders find some shred of consensus around power-sharing within Haitian society, which the international community can support and build upon. Holding free and fair elections will be an integral part of that process.

But to achieve success, Haiti’s ruling classes — which now must also be considered to include gang leadership — need to change their instincts. They must buy into a project of nation-building, rather than destructive self-enrichment.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and political risk analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.