Pity the Nation
Haiti’s Capital Could Fall to the Gangs Any Day
Every day the gunmen of the Haitian gang coalition know as Viv Ansanm (Live Together) advance, block by block and metre by metre, from their strongholds in the poor neighborhoods abutting the waterfront of Port-au-Prince and its eastern, northern and southern suburbs.
The quartier populaire of Solino fell to the gangs some months ago as have now most of Nazon, Christ-Roi and the area around the Avenue Henri Christophe. In the neighborhoods of Pacot, Canapé Vert and Juvénat, residents - many of them armed only with machetes, clubs and stones - man gates and improvised barricades as they prepare to defend their neighborhoods against any further gang incursions. Last week, armed gang members “moved within feet” of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the neighborhood of Turgeau and four of the organization’s vehicles were shot at as they attempted to evacuate staff. The increased use of explosive drones against the gangs by the Police Nationale d'Haïti (PNH) has failed to significantly alter the dynamic it and the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) in Haiti are facing against a far more numerous, determined and surprisingly resilient adversary. The gangs have been engaging in months’ long probing of the areas of strength and weakness of the security forces, seeking to overrun the areas of the capital not yet under their control.
Where are the Haitian authorities amid all this, one might ask?
Haiti’s government, such as it is, is currently composed of Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé and his cabinet and a nine-member Conseil Présidentiel de Transition (Presidential Transition Council or CPT), cobbled together with CARICOM and U.S. assistance after the Viv Ansanm uprising forced then-Prime Minister Ariel Henry to resign in April of last year. Henry had ruled the country since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Featuring a rotating presidency - the council’s last “president,” Leslie Voltaire of the Fanmi Lavalas party, spent $4 million to host Colombian President Gustavo Petro in the southern city of Jacmel and flew to the Vatican to get his picture taken with the Pope - since 7 March, the council has been led by Fritz Alphonse Jean, ostensibly representing the Montana Accord, an amalgam of civil society actors and veteran political chancers named after the Port-au-Prince hotel where they met. Having previously served a one-month stint as Prime Minister under the government of interim president Jocelerme Privert in 2016, Jean was, rather comically, previously designated “president” of Haiti by the Montana Accord folks based on the votes of a few dozen of its members even though his authority, such as it was, never extended much beyond the Hotel Montana’s lobby. Jean subsequently fell out with the group, who accused him of being part of a “plot” to undermine them, the two sides then kissed and made up and then reportedly fell out again. Jean also had a controversial stint as governor of Haiti’s central bank and served as a member of the cabinet particulier of the despotic Jean-Bertrand Aristide after the latter’s 1994 return from exile, deeply involved in a controversial programme known as the petits projets de la présidence, which Aristide described as a development programme but which many - including the slain journalist Jean Dominique, - considered little more than a slush fund of corruption.
As Port-au-Prince fights for its very existence and citizens, police and soldiers give their lives to defend the Republic, Fritz Jean took a multiday tour of the country’s relatively-peaceful north to talk about “investment, the Cap-Haïtien airport, the Chinouette free trade zone, and the Caracol Industrial Park. Committed to sustainable development!” When thousands of citizens protested yesterday calling for greater protection from the gangs, the response of the transitional authorities was to have them teargassed before they reached the government’s defacto seat of operations at the Villa d’Accueil.
The seeming lack of urgency and interest in the welfare of their fellow Haitians on the part of the transitional authorities has been striking. Writing in Haiti’s daily Le Nouvelliste, Frantz Duval assessed that “every resident of Port-au-Prince, those living in the last neighborhoods not yet attacked by gangs, is asking themselves this question as they make plans, wondering how much time they have left before suffering the same fate as the others.” And yet somehow the transitional authorities seem to believe they can luxuriate in the trappings of power without ever being touched by the catastrophe they are presiding over.
[Many of the council’s member parties have genuinely grim records. Lavalas, the political current that both Leslie Voltaire and Fritz Jean come out of, essentially created the template for the gangs in the late 1990s and early 2000s and empowered and collaborated with armed groups who committed massacres on the party’s behalf, most notably a mass killing that took place in and around the La Scierie neighborhood in the central Haitian city of Saint-Marc in February 2004. The Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK) of former President Michel Martelly has its own extensive history of corruption and violence, and three of the council’s members are also currently under investigation for corruption.]
Finally facing reality, Haiti’s electoral authorities admitted this week that they were currently unable to set a date for elections that were to be held later this year,
The citizens of Port-au-Prince have effectively been abandoned to their fate by an international community whose dealmakers lost interest in their struggles a long time and a rotten political class and system that loves to rule but loathes to govern. That being the case, the immense heroism of the ordinary Haitians on the ground, desperately trying to save their country from collapse into the hands of the gangs is all the more praiseworthy. They are truly les enfants des héros and we should, even on an individual level, do everything we can to support them.
“We know what we want,” one demonstrator taking part in Wednesday’s protests told Le Nouvelliste. “We need security restored. We are ready to die to defend our neighborhoods, our families, and our homes. We are ready to take responsibility. If we have to die, we will die standing up, without surrendering”