Kenyan Police Force Struggles to Restore Order in Haiti

An armed gang member at the heavily fortified road barricades in the downtown Delmas 6 area in Port-au-Prince on May 9, 2024. (Photo by Giles Clarke/Getty Images)

Last week marked the anniversary of the Haitian Revolution, when the Caribbean nation won independence from France after a successful slave revolt. More than two centuries of often troubled history later, Haiti is trying to win its freedom from gang violence and chaos that has paralyzed the country since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

The Haitian National Police (HNP) and part of a U.N.-sanctioned force led by Kenyan police officers battled with criminal groups on Tuesday near some of the gang-controlled neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. The operation was the first major joint effort of the police and the long-delayed international force that began arriving in June but has struggled to make significant progress against gangs that still control most of the capital. Only a small fraction of the promised force has made it to Haiti, leaving Haitians frustrated as the country still teeters on the brink.

The security situation in Haiti took a turn for the worse this spring when then-acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry was outside of the country for international meetings regarding the crisis. Gangs attacked public infrastructure in Port-au-Prince, including the airport, carried out a huge jailbreak, and took control of government buildings and police installations. Amid the chaos, Henry agreed to step down following pressure from regional actors, and a transitional council of political and civil society stakeholders in May selected Garry Conille, a former prime minister and UNICEF official, to lead the country.

One of Conille’s first moves was to replace the head of the Haitian National Police (HNP). But despite the leadership change, gangs still outman and outgun the police and maintain control of much of the capital. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in May that the country was “on the precipice of becoming an all-out failed state.” At the Henry government’s request, the international community and the U.S. had settled on an intervention plan to restore order led by Kenya.

As we explained in May:

Kenya first offered to dispatch nearly 1,000 police last July, and the U.N. Security Council authorized the deployment of a “Multinational Security Support Mission” (MSS) led by Kenya last October. The Haiti mission is U.N.-sanctioned, but it is not a U.N. peacekeeping force, in contrast to previous interventions in Haiti. The West African nation of Benin promised to contribute 1,500 trained personnel to the mission, and several other countries—including Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Barbados—have offered smaller numbers of troops and police.

“I want no one to doubt the purpose of the mission,” Conille said in June as the first batch of Kenyan police arrived in Haiti. “The state will regain power and reaffirm its authority so all Haitians can live peacefully in this country.”

But two months later, Conille acknowledged the lack of progress. “The circumstances of Port-au-Prince and, more generally, Haiti, have not evolved much,” he said earlier this month. “We’re still very much hostage to these thugs. Eighty to 85 percent of the capital is still very much under their control.” He added, “We’re doing our very, very best to put in place the systems to be able to respond and answer to the needs of the Haitian people who have been incredibly patient for us to actually meet their expectations.”

The U.S. has provided much of the funding and nearly all of the logistical support for the MSS, including building and securing the base out of which the Kenyan police operate. But the Biden administration has shot down any talk of U.S. troops intervening in Haiti, partly due to the optics. “There’s a lot going on in this hemisphere,” Biden said in May, “and we’re in a situation where we want to do all we can without us looking like America, once again, is stepping over and deciding this is what must be done.”

But if you were paying attention to the behind-the-scenes machinations or simply watching the planes landing in Port-au-Prince, you could tell that the MSS is “U.S.-designed, funded, and planned,” said Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research focused on Haiti. The U.S. has provided armored vehicles—MRAPs—to the police force, including an additional 24 that were announced on Friday. But the omission of gun turrets in the first batch of MRAPs called into question the level of U.S. tactical involvement in the MSS and HNP operations: U.S. Southern Command said American contractors—who currently secure the base for the Kenyan force—will install turrets on the full fleet of MRAPs once they arrive in Port-au-Prince.

Expecting the MSS to quell the gang violence in short order may always have been unrealistic—and even more so now, given the limited size of the police force currently on the ground. Some 400 Kenyan police officers are in Haiti right now—fewer than half of the planned 1,000. The MSS proposal called for a total of at least 2,500 troops to reinforce and strengthen the Haitian police—Haiti does not have a military—but it’s unclear when the remaining forces will arrive. “It’s coming in too slow and people are growing impatient,” Conille said in August, referring to the international assistance.

But even with less than a sixth of the expected force on the ground, there have been some positive developments, William O’Neill—an independent human rights expert on Haiti appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council—told TMD. O’Neill, who assisted in establishing the HNP in 1995, said the MSS and the HNP have been able to make some small but significant gains. “The downtown part of the city, which was pretty much run by gangs, isn’t anymore,” he said. The Kenyan police said they’ve secured “critical infrastructure,” including the main airport, and “opened critical roads that have enabled the return of thousands of Haitians earlier displaced.”

Violence also seems to have decreased between April and June, when, according to the U.N., 1,379 people were killed or injured by gang violence. Though large, that figure still represents a 45 percent decrease from the preceding three months. But gangs continue to terrorize many communities in and around Port-au-Prince. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project reported in August that the number of incidents where civilians were targeted declined during the first six months of this year compared to the previous six months, but the total number of reported deaths was similar.

A challenge for the MSS and the HNP has been the shifting centers of violence. As the government has taken control of some of downtown Port-au-Prince, the gangs have pushed out to the perimeter of the city and surrounding towns, areas that security forces can’t hold.

The HNP and the MSS responded to a gang attack in late July on Ganthier, a town 25 miles east of the capital, but the criminal groups simply left before the police arrived—and returned soon after they left. O’Neill said that with more manpower, the police should eventually be able to take and hold more territory. “The hope is that with bigger numbers and more capacity, the Haitian National Police, with the support of the internationals, will be able to expand their areas of operation and effectively go after the gangs wherever they are,” he said.

Even if the MSS and HNP do manage to stem the violence, Haiti’s government—long plagued by mismanagement and corruption—will face a challenging road ahead. The U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions last week against former Haitian President Michel Martelly over alleged drug trafficking and supporting Haitian gangs, and news of a bribery scandal allegedly involving three of the seven members of the Transitional Presidential Council broke late last month. “Even if they get way more troops, way more resources, the reality is that this is not something that can be addressed by security alone,” Johnston told TMD, citing the lack of trust of the Haitian people in civil institutions.

“If they’re bogged down in [scandal], then they’re not going to be proactively restoring trust in governance,” he said, “because it just looks like more of the same.”

Worth Your Time

For the Washington Post, David Ignatius spoke to former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin about his decision to resign from Congress in April. “The story turns on a gruesome moment the night of Dec. 30, 2023, in Gallagher’s hometown of Green Bay,” Ignatius wrote. “The local sheriff had received an anonymous call claiming that Gallagher had been shot in the face and that his wife and two young daughters, 3 and 1, had been taken hostage. A SWAT team arrived at the house to find Gallagher and his family safe. His anguished wife, Anne, somehow had the presence of mind to ask the SWAT team to take their shoes off before they searched the home. But for the young couple, trying to build a family in the town where they were born and raised, the cruel hoax was a deeply upsetting event. For Gallagher, it proved to be a breaking point. … ‘I signed up for this, but my family didn’t,’ he told me in one of a series of interviews. ‘That was a moment when we felt we needed to make a change and take a step back from politics.’”

Young children generally find playtime to be the highlight of their day—and schools would be wise to bear that in mind. Writing for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack, public school teacher Kevin Stinehart explored the importance of childhood free play. “Much of life’s most important content may be taught in a classroom,” he argued. “But life’s most important skills are acquired naturally through unstructured time with peers. Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist who has spent decades researching play, has concluded that ‘The presence or absence of play, particularly in child development, has a great deal to do with competency, resiliency, [and] emotional health. … Play is not ‘frivolous.’”

Presented Without Comment

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaking with TMZ about the reaction of his wife—actress Cheryl Hines—to his recent endorsement of former President Donald Trump:

I would say that Cheryl’s reaction was the opposite of encouraging. … She did attend a meeting—a subsequent meeting with President Trump. She attended that meeting mainly to make sure there were no hasty decisions made at it. This is a really difficult issue for Cheryl. This is the opposite of what she would want to do. She went along with it because she loves me and wanted to be supportive of me, but it was not something she ever encouraged. I would say it was, her trepidation about this and her discomfort with this was, I would say, were the dominant feelings. … She’s a lifelong Democrat, and the idea of me supporting Donald Trump as president was just, like I said, it’s something that she would have never imagined, that she never wanted in her life, that, I think, causes her a lot of discomfort.

Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: [J.D.] Vance Opens Up On Running With Trump: ‘We’re Each Trying To Talk To Different People In Different Ways’

In the Zeitgeist

We’re about to embark on the first college football season without Nick Saban on the sidelines in decades, but we’re glad to see the longtime head coach is keeping busy in retirement doing … Vrbo commercials.

Toeing the Company Line

In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team explained why Democrats might not be all that devastated by Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, Scott emphasized why (🔒) government regulatory solutions often cause more trouble than the market problems they seek to correct, Jonah went on an extended riff (🔒) kicked off by some signs he saw from the road, and Nick explored (🔒) the bizarre Trump coalition that somehow includes both Tulsi Gabbard and Nikki Haley.

On the podcasts: Sarah and David are joined on today’s episode of Advisory Opinions by Yuval Levin to discuss his new book on the Constitution and Mike Warren fills in for Jonah on The Remnant, speaking with Semafor’s Dave Weigel.

On the site: Joe Pitts writes about masculinity in an age of individualism and the importance of civil society.

Let Us Know

Should the U.S. intervene more forcefully in Haiti?

Correction, August 29, 2024: The Biden administration’s student debt cancellation initiative is called the “Saving on a Valuable Education” plan, not the“Saving on a Value Education” plan.