The land that law forgot: Can outside forces turn the tide of violence in Haiti?
Haiti's police are outnumbered and outgunned — and gang leaders are promising a fight for power
"There's no question of (the gangs) having a seat at any table," said Bob Rae, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations and its envoy to international talks on rescuing Haiti from its nightmarish descent into anarchy.
But there's an unanswered question hanging over the complex political negotiations on the future of this failed state — if the gangs are to be excluded from power, who is going to take power from them?
While the outlines of a political accord leading to elections are now coming into sharper focus, the question of who will bell the cat remains as difficult to answer as ever.
Haiti's new Presidential Council has few resources to establish its authority on the lawless island, even if it manages to achieve legitimacy and win acceptance from the broader Haitian population.
"There simply isn't enough strength in the state of Haiti to respond to the level of violence that's being perpetrated by these gangs," Rae told CBC News.
While Haiti's security problems are complicated and multi-dimensional, they can also be summed up in a single phrase: too many criminals, not enough cops.
While the neighbouring Dominican Republic has about the same population as Haiti, it has about five times as many police officers. It also has armed forces with 56,000 troops — more than fifty times the size of Haiti's military.
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Even if all of the countries that have talked about joining the proposed multinational security force follow through and deploy, their combined numbers will not be enough to change that dynamic.
The country's national police force is down to about 6,000 to 7,000 officers; no one is quite sure how many are still reporting for duty. Even if 3,000 foreign police officers arrived tomorrow, that would only bring the force's strength back up to what it was about two years ago, when it began to lose ground rapidly to the gangs.
A nation holds its breath
Although the capital has seen three days of relative calm this week, following last week's disastrous losses of government control, police are almost nowhere to be seen on the city's streets, said Étienne Côté-Paluck, editor of Haiti Today.
"Everybody's being hiding in their place, in their home. All the schools are out for now. We're waiting to see what's going to happen," he said. "But today it was calm. We're all waiting to see what's going to be the reaction of those criminal groups."
Police are focused on defending those national symbols and institutions that are still in government hands, such as the presidential palace and the airport (which is unusable because it's under fire from nearby gangs, but is not actually in gang hands).
Meanwhile, some of the country's gangs have warned that they will resist any outside force that attempts to restore order to Haiti.
"There are a lot of threats against the multinational force that's supposed to come," Haiti-based freelance journalist Anne-Marie Schoen told CBC News.
"Barbecue, one of the gang leaders, already said that he will defend his country against any international force."
On the weekend, Jimmy "Barbecue" Cherizier held an impromptu news conference wearing body armour and toting a Galil assault rifle.
"Either Haiti becomes a paradise for all of us, or a hell for all of us," he warned.
Vitel'homme Innocent, the Kraze Barye gang leader who won himself a spot on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, also rejected the new council. "We are not going to let the foreigners decide our fate," he warned.
Former cop "Barbecue" Cherizier is merely one of Port-au-Prince's gang leaders, although he's perhaps the most talkative and certainly the best-known.
His G9 alliance of gangs has its base in the Martissant area south of the city centre and in the Chancerelles and Delmas areas near the port. G9 and Barbecue have a long history of working for politicians, particularly the Parti Haitien Tet Kale (PHTK) of former President Michel Martelly.
More recently, as the gangs have grown more powerful, Barbecue has turned against his former political sponsors and tried to position himself as a leader in his own right — a kind of Robin Hood who articulates the grievances of Haiti's poor.
That pose is a cynical farce, said Rae.
"Mr. Barbecue is not interested in this country. He's not defending anyone but himself," Rae told CBC News. "We have to come to grips with these guys. These are really bad criminal gangsters, responsible for the murder and mayhem that has been prevalent in the country for far too long."
Barbecue and his G9 gang alliance have been implicated in two of Haiti's most savage massacres: Bel Air in 2021 and La Saline in 2018. Its members live off the proceeds of kidnapping and extortion, and enforce their rule over the city's slums through murder and rape.
But that doesn't mean the gangs don't have allies.
A council of seven to rule Haiti
The Presidential Council announced in Kingston, Jamaica this week doesn't include any gang representation.
Instead, it envisages seven voting members who will govern jointly, alongside two non-voting members representing Haiti's civil society and its churches — Catholic, Protestant and Voodoo.
Five of the seven voting seats will go to Haitian political parties and coalitions: Pitit Desalin, led by Sen. Moïse Jean Charles; Fanmi Lavalas, the left-wing party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide; EDE/RED, a party led by former prime minister Claude Joseph; the Jan. 30 Collective, an alliance of parties centred on the PHTK of former president Michel Martelly; and the Dec. 21 Agreement, an alliance that supported outgoing Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
The remaining two votes are reserved for members of an anti-Henry civic alliance called the Montana Accord — named for a Port-au-Prince hotel where its members came together — and for a grouping that represents Haiti's private sector.
Those seven voting seats have yet to be filled by individuals, who will then have to elect a new acting prime minister.
Haiti's Finance Minister Michel Patrick Boisvert has been Haiti's acting prime minister since Henry left the country on February 25. There is no consensus among the members of the transitional council on who should replace him.
Most of the groups appeared to meet a deadline on Wednesday to provide the names of their representatives. There was public infighting within some of the groups over who should speak for them.
However, Pitit Desalin appeared to reject the idea of the governing council altogether. Its leader Moise Jean Charles held a chaotic news conference in Port-au-Prince where he said that "the decision of CARICOM is not our decision," referring to the regional trade bloc whose leaders presented the plan to create a transitional council.
"Haitians will decide who will govern Haiti," he announced, adding that he preferred to govern in a three-man council made up of himself, a supreme court justice and convicted drug trafficker Guy Philippe.
A face from the past returns
Guy Philippe is a former police officer who led a national uprising against former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.
The U.S. government, which had intervened a decade earlier to save Aristide from a military coup, took a very different view in 2004 and looked on Philippe's coup with, at a minimum, benign indifference (some would say complicity).
But Guy Philippe was soon indicted by U.S. authorities for his involvement in the cocaine trade, and would spend years hiding out in his stronghold of Pestel, surrounded by his guerrilla army, which continued to launch attacks against the Haitian state.
In 2017, however, the U.S. finally laid hands on Philippe just days before he was to be sworn in as a senator, which would have given him criminal immunity. He was extradited to the States and given a nine-year sentence.
Then, at the end of 2023, he was released and deported back to Haiti, where he was soon organizing and talking about becoming prezidan.
Philippe said that if he takes over, he will offer an amnesty to the gangs.
Although he's highly unpopular in both Washington and Ottawa, he appears to have strong connections to established politicians as well as some level of popular support within the country. Those factors put him in a position to act as an intermediary between politicians and gangs — traditionally a lucrative and influential position to be in.
Carrots or sticks
It remains to be seen whether Haiti's transitional government and its foreign backers will try to defeat the gangs through force alone, or whether they will use some mix of carrot and stick.
Professional soldiers have told CBC News that the pacification of a city the size of Port-au-Prince would be an enormous undertaking, requiring a force large enough to saturate the territory.
Behind the prominent gang leaders such as Barbecue, Izo and Vitel'homme are thousands of impoverished rank-and-file members who must somehow be either removed from Haitian society or reincorporated into it.
Louis-Henri Mars of the Haitian peacebuilding non-governmental organization Lakou Lape said few in Haiti want to see a blanket amnesty for gang crimes.
"There's been a lot of pain, rapes, killings, murders, burning down of houses. You cannot, you cannot just give a blanket amnesty and an impunity ... to those who have done wrong, including to their sponsors and to those who have been supplying them with guns and ammunition. So there must be a justice component to the way out," he told CBC News.
"But is it totally about punitive justice only? Or does it have to have a restorative justice aspect to it? It's not by killing everybody or trying to kill everybody that this is going to work. There has to be a plan for the day after also."
The powerful gang leaders should face exemplary punishment, said Mars, but the young men who join gangs come from Port-au-Prince's poorest slums and many feel they have no other options to survive.
"If you intervene and the state does not occupy the space that has been made, and there's only a vacuum, the vacuum is going to be filled again by all of those young people that that do not have any alternative," he said. "And the the quickest way for them to make some cash is to grab a gun.
"So there has to be right now plans being made not only to have this intervention, but also for the day after the intervention. How is there going to be public works for temporary jobs in the neighbourhoods? How is the private sector going to be engaged in creating permanent jobs through developing businesses in those neighbourhoods?
"All of that has to be done in parallel to preparing the intervention. And so that's the only way that it's going to be a sustainable action and not just a temporary Band-Aid."
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