Haiti’s tailspin into humanitarian crisis and bloodshed has racked up its latest moment of horror after at least a dozen suspected criminals were beaten to death and burned in broad daylight on the streets of its capital, Port-au-Prince.
Horrifying footage of the incident showed the bloodied men being forced to lie on the asphalt by rifle-wielding police before bystanders piled tyres on top of them, doused them with petrol and set them alight.
One eyewitness told the Associated Press the lynch mob seized the victims from police after they were detained in Port-au-Prince’s Canapé-Vert neighbourhood and proceeded to beat and stone them before burning their bodies.
Hundreds of onlookers flocked to the scene – where the news agency’s reporter saw 13 burning bodies – to watch the nightmarish attack.
In a statement posted on Facebook, Haiti’s national police said its officers had intercepted a group of suspected smugglers travelling in a minibus but that subsequently more than 12 of those men were “unfortunately lynched by members of the population”. An accompanying video showed the handguns and AK47 magazines police said had been seized with the victims.
Monday’s lynching came as Haiti’s already dramatic social, political and humanitarian crisis intensified even further and the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said the security situation was “comparable to countries in armed conflict”.
In just six days, between 14 and 19 April, nearly 70 people were killed in clashes involving gangs in Port-au-Prince’s largest shantytown, Cité Soleil, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. About 40 of the dead were shot or stabbed. At least two were children.
“Fighting is raging in Cité Soleil … The population feels under siege. They can no longer leave their homes for fear of gun violence and gang terror,” the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, Ulrika Richardson, said in a statement.
That warning came a month after the UN called for the deployment of an international “specialised support force” to Haiti after more than 530 people were killed in the opening weeks of this year, causing many clinics and schools to shut down. Between January and March the UN human rights office counted 531 killings, 300 injuries and 277 kidnappings in gang-related incidents, mostly in Haiti’s gang-dominated capital.
Haiti’s desperate predicament is rooted in hundreds of years of foreign exploitation and meddling, decades of corrupt and dictatorial rule under the Duvalier dynasty, and a series of shattering natural disasters including a 2010 earthquake that levelled Haiti’s capital and killed more than 200,000 people.
But the current crisis intensified in 2021 when Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his Port-au-Prince mansion. Since then, politically powerful gangs have commandeered more than 60% of the capital, elements of the resource-starved police force have gone into open revolt, and Haitian politics has been consumed by infighting.
As of January, the country, which has been governed by former prime minister Ariel Henry since Moïse’s murder, lacked a single democratically elected government official. It is unclear when a fresh presidential election will be held. The last one took place nearly seven years ago, in November 2016.
Last month Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste newspaper reported that the veteran British diplomat Jonathan Powell, who played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace talks which led to the 1998 Good Friday agreement, had become involved in efforts to break the political deadlock.
Jake Johnston, the author of a forthcoming book on Haiti called Aid State, said it was unclear what role Powell was playing but saw little prospect of a short-term solution. “There isn’t a silver-bullet here. These are deeply rooted issues … and it takes time to change that.”
“You have this sort of paralysis that has overtaken everything and in the meantime the government has largely abdicated and withdrawn,” Johnston added. “So things are getting worse.”
On Monday, Guterres said he saw an “urgent need” for an “international specialised armed force” to combat the violence. Kenya’s foreign minister, Alfred Mutua, last week said his country was willing to send police officers “to assist in stabilizing” Haiti. However, as yet no country has stepped forward offering what would likely be a complex and violent mission.
