‘Intolerable risks’: Haiti’s escalating violence, including sexual attacks, shuts hospital

Escalating gang violence in Haiti is once more forcing the closure of medical facilities.

Citing “intolerable risks,” the French medical charity Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said Wednesday that ongoing violent clashes between armed gangs have left it with no choice but to temporarily close its hospital in Cité Soleil, the country’s largest slum, which is located in Port-au-Prince.

The announcement of the hospital’s temporary closure came two weeks after the international organization warned that it was becoming increasingly difficult to provide care in Haiti without putting staff and patients at risk, and on the same day that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission heard testimony about the widespread sexual violence being directed against women and girls in Haiti. Both took place as the Biden administration’s top official for the Western Hemisphere, Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols, flew to Port-au-Prince to meet with government officials and civil society leaders about the country’s protracted security and political crises.

Since Feb. 28, armed gang clashes and kidnappings have been escalating, ripping through Port-au-Prince, regardless of the neighborhood. Haitians are being abducted out of their homes. Farmers are being shot at randomly in once-peaceful neighborhoods, now invaded by gangs, and unsuspecting Haitians are being raped.

“We are looking at a war scene just meters from our hospital,” said Vincent Harris, MSF medical adviser. “While the hospital has not been targeted, we are a collateral victim of the fighting since the hospital is right on the front line of the fighting. We realize that closing the hospital will have a serious impact on the people of Cité Soleil, but our teams cannot work until security conditions are guaranteed.”

This is not the first time that MSF has announced the temporarily closure of a facility in Haiti due to gang violence. But the escalation is now leading to a growing sense of despair, where those who once managed are increasingly feeling that the situation has become too dangerous to go on.

The uncontrollable, spreading gang wars risk collapsing Haiti’s already weak healthcare system. If staffers are not ducking stray bullets, they are forced to deal with ransom kidnappings. Several abductions last month led to at least one hospital, Gheskio, temporarily closing its downtown facility and another, Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in Deschapelles in the Artibonite Valley, suspending operations. In the case of Gheskio, which reopened after its staffers were released, the hospital is now faced with a shortage of medical staff due to people fleeing the country.

Doctors Without Borders’ decision to temporarily close will have devastating consequences. In addition to treating gunshot and rape victims from Cité Soleil, the French medical charity also has been on the front lines of the response to cholera, the deadly waterborne disease that made a resurgence in Haiti last year. The first confirmed cases were detected in the Cité Soleil neighborhood of Brooklyn, where violent gang clashes in July 2022 cut off deliveries of potable water and trash pickup to the community.

MSF said that in recent weeks, the number of patients has increased significantly at its emergency center in Turgeau in central Port-au-Prince. In recent days, MSF teams also have admitted up to 10 times the usual number of people with gunshot wounds.

“It’s terrible to see the number of collateral victims of these clashes. It’s hard to tell how many people are wounded in total across the city because many people are too terrified to leave their neighborhoods,” said Dr. Frandy Samson, MSF medical activity manager.

Those individuals, however, aren’t just gunshot victims but also victims of sexual violence.

During a public hearing Tuesday from Los Angeles, more than a half dozen representatives of Haiti-based human rights groups detailed for members of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission how Haitian women and girls are increasingly on the front lines of the violence being carried out by armed groups.

The horror being experienced by women and girls “is a daily occurrence,” Rosy Auguste Ducena, a lawyer and program manager for the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights, said. “It’s because Haiti represents an extremely dangerous space for us.”

Pascale Solages, who represents the feminist organization Nèges Mawon, said that since May 2022 the organization has registered 652 cases of women and girls who are victims of individual and gang rape in four neighborhoods of the capital, including Cité Soleil.

‘Of the cases, there are nine women who were murdered; 14 who became pregnant as a result of the rape, and eight women who had complications from unsafe abortions,” which remains illegal in Haiti, Solages said. “Ninety women contracted sexually transmitted disease.”

But the story of violence in Haiti against women, isn’t just isolated in the capital. In the Grand’Anse, located in the far western reaches of the country, 149 cases of rape were documented last year in the department, Yvon Janvier said. Janvier, who is with École Supérieure Catholique de Droit de Jérémie, said the victims included 131 girls between the ages of 3 and 17.

Among them was a young teenage girl who was raped by 14 boys. Only one of her alleged assailants was apprehended, and he was soon released without and vanished without a trace. “This is also the case of this minor raped in the city of Dame Marie by a married man and whose images [were shared on] social social networks,” Janvier said.

“Despite formal complaints and denunciations, Haitian justice has remained passive, paralyzed by three major handicaps: corruption, inefficiency, and the lack of resources allocated to the sector by the Haitian state,” he said. “The result is a low rate of prosecution and conviction of the perpetrators, creating a culture of impunity across the country that tends to normalize what is unacceptable. Now all of these women and girls are at the mercy of armed gangs.”

Tuesday’s hearing as well as two others focused on deportations were requested by a number of organizations, including the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti to address the ongoing violence taking place amid an acute governance crisis.