Please refer to the attached file.
What's new? Foreign security personnel are expected to begin arriving in Haiti in early 2024 to assist the national police in fighting the gangs besieging much of the country. UN-authorised, Kenyan-led and designed with U.S. support, this multinational mission aims to restore security and enable long overdue elections.
Why does it matter? Haiti's wave of violence and political breakdown have deepened the country's humanitarian emergency. With police outnumbered and outgunned by criminal groups, foreign assistance is needed. But the mission must overcome daunting operational and political challenges for it to be effective.
What should be done? The mission should not deploy in force until it has sufficient troops, training and equipment to overpower the gangs. It should prepare for urban combat, and develop community-level sources of intelligence, to help minimise civilian harm. A political settlement and major reforms will be required for gains to endure.
I.Overview
Answering a plea for assistance from the Haitian government, the UN Security Council has authorised a multinational force to help it break criminal gangs' grip on much of the country. Despite the chequered legacy of past interventions, most Haitians believe only foreign forces can bring respite from the violence that has upended their lives. The proposed mission may encounter several obstacles, however. While Kenya has volunteered troops, judicial proceedings could hold up deployment. The mission will also face big operational challenges, such as shifting gang allegiances that create the possibility of a united front against it; the difficulties of protecting civilians in urban warfare; and corruption among police and politicians linked to criminal groups. A small team of Kenyans arriving in early 2024 can help commanders understand the terrain and ensure they do not deploy before they are set up to prevail. In the long term, a political settlement and a robust demobilisation program, as well as plans for staunching weapons flows and severing ties between criminals and Haitian elites, are needed to sustain progress.
Already besieged by gangs, which had been tightening their control of areas throughout the country for years, Haiti suffered a further blow with the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. More than 200,000 Haitians are now displaced, as gangs seize neighbourhoods, thoroughfares and fuel depots -- choking off supplies of food and other essentials to people in need. As it endures the humanitarian and security crisis the gangs have engendered, the country is also in political limbo. There have been no elections since 2016, and the acting prime minister, Ariel Henry, who was appointed to his post and is seen as illegitimate by much of the political opposition, has shown reluctance to share power. He has committed to step down in February after elections that were supposed to have taken place in 2023, but it remains to be seen whether he will stick to his pledge since there were no polls.
Against this backdrop, the opposition worries that the arrival of an international force to help restore security and address Haiti's humanitarian crisis -- which Henry requested in 2022 and the UN Security Council authorised in October 2023 -- could help the current government cling to power. Ideally, as Crisis Group has previously recommended, the country's political forces would come together in welcoming the mission. But today's dynamics suggest that the bigger risk to the country's long-suffering citizenry would be to delay the deployment yet further. So long as legal, operational and other requirements can be met, it is safer for Haitians menaced by gang rule to move forward under sub-optimal political conditions.
Still, those requirements are no small hurdle to clear. Even getting to this point has been challenging. Approved by the UN Security Council almost a year after Henry's government first made its request, the international mission began forming only after Kenya volunteered to lead it with a contribution of 1,000 police officers. The difficulty in identifying a lead country and other troop contributors, despite U.S. entreaties, underscores just how wary governments are of becoming involved in Haiti, where foreign interventions (including the last UN peacekeeping mission to the country, which left in 2017) have left a sometimes tragic legacy. As envisioned, the new mission, which will be organised as an ad hoc coalition rather than a blue-helmeted UN operation, will seek to protect state institutions as well as critical infrastructure and transport hubs, and together with the Haitian police, launch a counter-offensive against gangs. It appears that an advance contingent of several hundred officers will deploy ahead of the rest of the force. It should arrive in Haiti in early 2024.
Major challenges lie in wait for the mission once it is on the ground. Haiti's gangs could ally to battle it together. Fighting in Haiti's ramshackle urban neighbourhoods will put innocent civilians at risk. Links between corrupt police and the gangs could make it difficult to maintain operational secrecy. For all these reasons, preparation will be of critical importance. Discussions are now under way between Kenyan and Haitian security forces about the mission's goals and rules of engagement. The projected advance contingent should continue work already begun by assessment missions that have visited from Nairobi. It should map the zones of gang control, assess the threat they pose and measure operational risks, with the aim of ensuring that when the full mission deploys it can make a convincing show of force that does not provoke the gangs or spark violent retaliation. Local experts emphasised to Crisis Group that a strong early showing in this spirit could help persuade the gangs to move to a non-confrontational posture.
Other key tasks for the mission will be to absorb expertise on civilian protection in urban settings, develop intelligence networks in the communities where it will be operating, train vetted police units with whom it can cooperate and begin devising a demobilisation program so that gang members who wish to leave their criminal outfits have a pathway out. Of utmost importance will be scrupulous attention to the safeguards built into the UN mandate to prevent the misdeeds of MINUSTAH, the last UN peacekeeping mission, which became notorious for spreading cholera throughout the country as well as engaging in sexual exploitation of local women.
Finally, both the mission and its supporters will need to turn their attention to structural issues if there is to be hope of an end to Haiti's overlapping crises. A political settlement is at the top of the list. At present, to the population's outrage, Haitian politicians are squabbling over formation of a transitional government as gangs continue their campaign of violence. Multiple rounds of negotiation between Henry and the opposition have failed to produce a stable and authentically cross-party pact. After Haiti's international partners upped pressure on Henry to make additional concessions in the quest for a power-sharing agreement, opposition groups fastened on what they saw as a sign of weakness: they are now calling upon him to make good on his promise to resign by February. Outside actors with influence will need to continue pushing the two sides to agree on the shape of a transitional government that can begin a process of institutional renewal and prepare the country for the first elections in years.
The multinational mission's deployment in Haiti could bring essential relief to a country mired in strife. But bumps in the road ahead pose a major threat to the force's effectiveness. After decades of international interventions and billions in aid, Haiti fatigue in foreign capitals is real. But rarely has the country needed help more than now. For the sake of Haiti's long-suffering people, every effort must go into helping the mission succeed.