Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness recently headed up a one-day Caribbean Community (Caricom) special mission to Haiti. The mission had been hotly anticipated amid ongoing discussions as to how the international community should respond to Haiti’s multifaceted security and political crisis which has intensified since the July 2021 assassination of president Jovenel Moïse (2017-2021). The Caricom mission produced pledges of support for Haiti’s national police (PNd’H) but no mention of deploying a foreign security mission which Prime Minister Ariel Henry has requested and for which United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly declared his backing.
A Caricom statement released on 6 March, following the mission’s deployment to Port-au-Prince on 27 February, said that it met with “a broad range of Haitian stakeholders to hear their views on the way forward to a Haitian-led solution” and highlighted that the Caricom heads of government agreed to support the PNd’H to address the security situation. It added that the focus will be the “provision of training” for PNd’H and “humanitarian assistance to [PNd’H] and the wider Haitian society”.
As with a 15-17 February Caricom meeting which took place in the Bahamian capital, Nassau, in which Haiti featured high on the agenda, there was no mention of sending a foreign military deployment, serving to once again illustrate the controversial nature of the proposal. Indeed, while Prime Minister Holness previously suggested his government would support a united international effort in Haiti, to which Jamaica’s military and police had “been alerted”, there appears little appetite for this elsewhere.
A 27 February report by Latin America Advisor, a daily publication of the US think tank Inter-American Dialogue, suggests “some attention may have been paid to Ralph Gonsalves, the Prime Minister of St Vincent & the Grenadines, who said in November that his country won’t send troops to Haiti”. It cites Gonsalves as saying that “such a move by any country…could be seen by the Haitian people as propping up a government that the majority of Haitians see as illegitimate”. With Caricom appearing to tout the 21 December 2022 political agreement launched by Henry, which involves the establishment of a high transition council [WR-23-01], albeit while calling for it to be “more inclusive”, the international community continues to respond to the crisis in Haiti with more equipment for the PNd’H and sanctions targeting gangs and their backers. The latter is in line with an October 2022 UN Security Council resolution [WR-22-41] and continues to be applied by the US and Canada.
More sanctions
Last month the Canadian government announced that it had imposed sanctions relating to the financing of armed gangs on Haiti’s former interim president (2016-2017) Jocelerme Privert and lawyer Salim Succar, the former chief of staff of former prime minister Laurent Lamothe (2012-2014), who himself has also been sanctioned by Canada. The media notes that Canadian sanctions now affect 17 Haitians from political and economic elites.
- Sanctions
Also last month the US Department of State announced visa restrictions on five individuals and seven of their relatives in relation to the sanctions regime targeting gangs and their backers. This brings the total number of individuals on which the US has slapped visa restrictions to 44.
Meanwhile, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – who has resisted a push for his country to lead an international military force – discussed the Caricom mission with Holness on 1 March, having attended the Nassau summit. Both the US and Canada have delivered equipment such as armoured vehicles to strengthen the PNd’H, while last month Trudeau, who announced back in January that Canada had airlifted Haitian-purchased vehicles to Haiti to support the PNd’H, highlighted the recent deployment of a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) CP-140 Aurora long-range patrol aircraft to disrupt gang activity in Haiti. He also noted the delivery of three additional Haitian-purchased Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles and plans to deploy two Royal Canadian Navy Kingston-Class ships to Haiti in the coming weeks.
Gang situation worsening
Amid ongoing discussions regarding a foreign response, the security situation in Haiti continues to deteriorate. In one sign of this, on 24 February the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (Binuh) issued a statement warning of a rise in gang violence in Artibonite department, with 69 people killed and 83 injured since October 2022. This has drawn particular alarm given gang activity had previously been concentrated in Port-au-Prince, where gangs are believed to control an estimated 60% of the capital.
Binuh attributes this violence in Artibonite, which has led thousands to flee their homes in the communes of Liancourt, Verrettes, Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite, and L’Estère, to a local gang called Baz Gran Grif which has “established a climate of terror, characterised by looting, assassinations, kidnappings, destruction, extortion, hijacking of goods and trucks, and acts of rape on young girls and women”.
The Binuh statement adds that the latest wave of violence began on 25 January when the gang launched a series of attacks on a police station in Liancourt commune, Artibonite department, killing seven PNd’H officers. It notes that a hospital in Deschapelles town, which served around 700,000 people in the region, suspended all of its activities on 16 February while various schools in the town remain closed and commercial activity and public transport has been considerably reduced.