Jamaica Prime Minister Andrew Holness is making a one-day visit to Haiti on Monday along with government ministers and ambassadors from two other Caribbean countries as part of a long-awaited visit to see how Caribbean leaders can help Haitians find their way out of their gang-ridden country’s crisis, which has brought the health care system to the verge of collapse.
Holness and the delegation of ministers and diplomats from the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago plan to spend the day in Port-au-Prince meeting with Haitian political and civil-society leaders in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the effects of the ongoing armed gang violence. The visit comes amid an alarming rise in kidnappings in the capital, and gang violence that is now spreading to rural communities.
Caribbean leaders’ offer to help Haiti dates back to before the July 7, 2021, assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. As Moïse faced a a wave of anti-government protests and calls for his resignation, the 15-member Caribbean Community known as CARICOM offered to help mediate the political impasse. Moïse never acted on the offer and after his death, Canada and the United States pushed for CARICOM to be more engaged in Haiti.
Getting Caribbean leaders to visit has been difficult because of concerns about security. In a tweet over the weekend, Mark Brantley, the premier of Nevis, which is one-half of the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis in the eastern Caribbean, asked: “Is it possible that the Caribbean has been so consumed with the outrage about the war in #Ukraine that we have not paid attention to the clear and present danger posed by the situation in our sister #Haiti?”
Late last month, Holness expressed his willingness to have Jamaican soldiers and police officers participate in a foreign military intervention in Haiti, and it is presumed that his visit will explore this possibility even though CARICOM recently decided that such a deployment is premature. The regional bloc, of which Haiti is a member, opted during a three-day meeting in the Bahamas not to support a request by Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry and United Nations Secretary General António Guterres for the rapid deployment of a foreign intervention force to assist the Haiti National Police take on gangs.
The visiting delegation will meet with Henry as well as other political actors in hopes of getting broader involvement in a Dec. 21 political accord that Henry put in place to guide a transition and create a road map to elections. The coalition of civil society groups and leaders known as the Montana Accord has remained critical of the agreement.
Caribbean leaders and Canada would like to see broader consensus on the political agreement in Haiti to make a troop a deployment more legitimate.
The Caribbean delegation will also meet with leaders of the Haiti National Police, which has been struggling with defections and deaths. Over the past few weeks police officers have rioted over police deaths at the hands of armed gangs., The cops have also abandoned posts because of a lack of equipment and stood in line at the capital’s passport center hoping to qualify for a new immigration parole program launched by the Biden administration.
At least 78 officers have been killed since July of 2021, and 14 were killed last month, according to a local human rights group. The majority of the deaths were the result of gang ambushes.
Downplaying the pull of the new U.S. parole program in contributing to the force’s high attrition rate, a senior State Department official said last week he believes that the attrition in the Haiti National Police “is driven by morale issues and security issues.”
“We need to continue to recruit and train and equip police officers through the police academy,” the official added. “Every organization has some level of attrition in every country. It happens to forces in the United States. It happens to businesses and it happens to the government”
In the case of Haiti the issues run deeper than people leaving for better jobs. They are leaving the country, legally or not, which is a top concern for Caribbean countries like the Bahamas.
Last week, the international humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières warned that the gang violence and police inability to stem it is threatening the country’s already weak health system. The United Nations also said that the brutality and violence is leading to devastating consequences for victims.
The U.N., which estimates that gangs control at least 60% of the metropolitan Port-au-Prince, said Friday that it’s “alarmed” at the speed by which gangs are also entrenching themselves outside of the capital, particularly in the Artibonite Valley,where seven police officers were killed last month in three attacks on a police substation in one day.
At least 69 murders have been registered in the region, located just two hours north of Port-au-Prince, since October 2022 and at least 83 people have been injured as a result of armed gangs, the U.N. said.
“The gangs have established a climate of terror, characterized by looting, assassinations, kidnappings, destruction, extortion, hijacking of trucks and acts of rape on young girls and women in the communes of Liancourt, Verrettes, Petite Rivière de l ‘Artibonite et L’Estère,” the U.N. said. “Farmers’ crops and livestock are systematically stolen. Tired of the violence by the gang, nicknamed “Baz Gran Grif” in the area of Savien, thousands of Haitians in the region have fled their homes.”
In the statement, the U.N. added that fear of reprisals, stigmatization and the lack of appropriate medical and social services are aggravating the situation.
In late January the gang Baz Gran Grif launched large-scale attacks against the sub-police station of Liancourt, leading to the deaths of the officers. In early February, in the city of Deschapelles in the Artibonite, at least eight people were shot to death and about a dozen others wounded during an attack perpetrated by the same gang. During the same attack, at least 18 people were kidnapped, 50 houses looted and thousands of people forced to leave their homes.
As a result of the violence, the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer has been forced to suspend all operations. Several schools in the city also remain closed and commercial activities and public transportation have slowed down.
“Despite the measures taken by the high command of the national police, the police officers assigned to the police stations and sub-stations such as Liancourt, Petit-Rivière de l’Artibonite, Désarmes, Verrettes and l’Estère were forced to close the doors from the institution under the threat of armed gangs operating in the department of Artibonite,” the U.N said.
“This cycle of violence must absolutely be stopped,” the U.N. added. “We enjoin the authorities to do everything to protect the inhabitants of the region as well as their property, and to provide the means to track down these criminals and punish them according to the law.”
Mission Aviation Fellowship said it will be suspending local fights because of the violence. The charter airline service is the only way some people have to get to rural communities that are increasingly being cut off due to gang-controlled roads.
Doctors Without Borders said security issues and threats circulating on social media are jeopardizing the medical charity’s ability to provide care in Haiti without putting staff and patients at risk.
But its warning wasn’t just about gangs, it’s also about the behavior of police officers.
Doctors Without Borders said that on Feb. 22, police blocked entrances and exits to its emergency center in the Turgeau neighborhood and searched an ambulance. Police entered the facility to check the identity of all registered patients, the organization said in a communique. On Feb. 7, an ambulance clearly marked as a Doctors Without Borders vehicle was stopped and searched. Police pointed weapons at the people inside the vehicle while their identifications were checked, stopping the ambulance for more than 45 minutes before it was allowed to resume its journey.
In addition, two violent clashes between armed groups have occurred since the beginning of the year a short distance away from the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Cité Soleil, resulting in the temporary suspension of medical services and the temporary evacuation of some staff. In the face of repeated clashes, and the fact that the front line between armed groups is getting closer to the hospital, the charity said it fears it will no longer be able to safely continue providing medical care to the community.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to work in these conditions, and the recurrence of these incidents is endangering the safety of our medical staff and patients,” said Mahaman Bachard Iro, the medical charity’s coordinator in Haiti.
One of the few international organizations still delivering care in Port-au-Prince, Doctors Without Borders was forced to temporarily close its hospital in Drouillard in April 2022, permanently closed the doors of its emergency center in Martissant in June 2021, and suspended its support for the Raoul Pierre Louis hospital in Carrefour in January — all because of the violence and lack of security.
“We ask all parties to respect the medical mission we have,” Bachard Iro said. The entire Haitian health system is on the verge of collapse, he added, noting that the charity has been providing medical care in Haiti for 30 years.
