Haitians continue to flee gang violence in the capital, as U.N. prepares to vote on its role

Haitians continued to flee deadly violence Thursday from warring rival gangs in Port-au-Prince’s largest slum, as food and water became more scarce and a fuel shortage aggravated by the violence continued to fan tensions inside the crisis-wrecked country.

Along the airport road, a group of angry motor-taxi drivers, wearing their helmets, attempted to lock down the capital by setting tires on fire to barricade a road. Police were able to control the situation, but more fiery barricades were erected in other areas even as gas and diesel were starting to get distributed. Protesting moto-taxi drivers said they remain angry over the shortage, soaring prices and the unending violence.

In the city of St. Marc, just north of Port-au-Prince, hundreds of protesters took to the streets to demonstrate against the fuel shortage and demand that police clear the gang-ridden National Road No. 1 connecting the rural town and the capital.

As they marched, demonstrators condemned Haiti’s latest gang-led terror campaign that has led to at least 680 documented kidnappings since January, according to Haiti National Police statistics, and the ongoing killings in the capital’s Cité Soleil slum.

In another worrisome sign, Haiti National Police announced that its officers were at the port in nearby La Saline where an ongoing check of the first of several suspicious containers revealed 17 automatic weapons, 43 ammunition magazines and rounds. The arms shipment arrived on Wednesday night, the police press office said.

According to the National Human Rights Defense Network, a local human rights group, at least 89 people have been killed since last week in Cité Soleil. The bloody siege started when the powerful G-9 Family and Allies gang attacked the neighborhood of Brooklyn in the middle of the night. The neighborhood is the stronghold of the armed gang coalition known as “G-pèp-la.”

Though the shooting had quieted down Thursday morning, the bursts of automatic gunfire resumed in the afternoon.

“They are still fighting,” interim mayor Joël Janéus told the Miami Herald, describing the situation as “urgent” for Cité Soleil’s 300,000 residents. “We remain in a delicate situation. The people still do not have water, still do not have food.”

Janéus said neither food nor water has been delivered by the central government despite assurances that they would come. Medical charities have managed to gain access inside to evacuate some of the injured. The French medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders said it had treated 70 residents from Cité Soleil who were shot or stabbed since the fighting started a week ago.

Janéus said Haiti needs foreign troops to put down the violence.

“That is the only thing that is going to get us from underneath this organized gang violence,” he said.

Members of the United Nations Security Council, which held a closed-door meeting on Wednesday to discuss the crisis in Haiti, are scheduled to vote on the U.N.’s future presence in the country on Friday. That’s the day the mandate of the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti expires.

While the U.S. and others on the council are in agreement about the need for elections in Haiti, they haven’t been able to agree on how to get there, or on how best to tackle the unchecked power of well-armed gangs that have taken advantage of the political vacuum left by last July’s assassination of Haiti President Jovenel Moïse.

The Biden administration has been pushing for Haiti’s politicians to agree among themselves on a way forward to allow Haiti to hold elections. However, the administration’s support of the current interim government led by neurosurgeon Ariel Henry, and its expulsion of more than 24,000 Haitians from the U.S. since September back to their homeland, have left it open to criticism.

“Dialogue with whom? Who is actually speaking for the Haitian people? There is always a danger when... our approach is dialogue that we assume the people who are speaking are truly the voice of the Haitian people,” said Mark Green, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. “In the west, throughout our history, we have made the mistake of speaking with whom we would like to speak to instead of speaking with whom we have to speak to.”

Green, who last visited Haiti in 2019, said the U.S. needs to think about what kind of success it wants to see in Haiti.

“I am not quite sure what our policy is in Haiti. Someone has to define it for me,” said Green, who is now head of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington-based non-partisan policy forum.

Green was among several Latin America and Caribbean region experts and leaders in Miami this week attending the Concordia Summit of the Americas at the University of Miami. Haiti wasn’t on the agenda at the summit, which looked at regional issues such as migration and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But a number of attendees, including the prime minister of the Bahamas, who at one point grabbed his cellphone to check on the latest developments, were closely following events in Haiti.

“It’s worse than chaotic,” Green told the Herald. “It’s spinning out of control.”

Green’s sentiments, which echoed those of the World Food Program’s director in Haiti earlier this week, comes as Henry prepares to meet in Port-au-Prince with members of the Commission for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis. Also known as the Montana Group after the Petionville hotel where it signed a two-year transition accord last year, the civil society-led coalition has been pushing to take over the reins of government.

The U.S. has insisted that the two sides engage in dialogue and come up with a political agreement that would allow for elections. That message also has been reiterated by other countries, but there is disagreement about how to help Haiti achieve the peace and order needed to hold a vote.

Green says the current public discussion on Haiti worries him.

“People are measuring their compassion by how much money they put in. It’s not about the dollars going in. It’s about creating conditions that allow hardworking, long-suffering Haitian families some semblance of a normal life,” he said.

“When people are afraid to go to work, when people are afraid to go to school, when people are afraid to walk to a clinic or a healthcare facility, we’re not going to succeed,” Green said. “No one is going to succeed.”