Kenya will send its military and police to Haiti, a country that has descended into violent chaos
The leaders of Kenya and Haiti have signed a pact for a Kenya-led UN mission in the poverty-stricken Caribbean nation. Nairobi plans to send 1,000 armed men, known as police officers, to Port-au-Prince, as local authorities have almost lost control of Haiti's capital. Joe Biden's administration has been working for several years to create a United Nations force to occupy Haiti to restore order, but so far it has not succeeded also because there are no relevant economic interests in the very poor Caribbean nation.
In October, at Washington's urging, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing Kenya to lead a U.N. police force in Haiti to return power to Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who has faced months of violent unrest in the wake of the assassination of President Jovenal Moise in 2021 and who, technically, would not be the president-elect, but an acting one.
The people of Haiti did not elect the government in Port-au-Prince . Not long after Moise's murder, then-Prime Minister Claud Joseph resigned at the behest of Western pressure, allowing Henry to assume power in his place.
Since then, under Henry's leadership, armed gangs have taken control of most of the city, at times occupying critical infrastructure, including the port, the main access route to the country, including for international aid. The government has no legitimacy in the country, has no resources and has no possibility of gaining control of public order or doing anything useful for the nation.
Following the UN Security Council's approval of the force, opposition leader Ekuru Aukot challenged President William Ruto's decision in Nairobi to send Kenyans to Haiti. In January, the Kenyan High Court ruled in favor of Aukot, blocking the deployment.
The president then declared that he could circumvent the ruling by making a deal directly with Port-au-Prince. This “mutual” agreement was signed on Friday. Ruto said he and Henry had “discussed next steps to accelerate the deployment,” although the leaders did not provide a timeline for the operation.
The U.S.-backed plan to send Kenyans to Haiti has faced opposition from Port-au-Prince as well as Nairobi. Haitians protested Henry's request to send the UN, as UN peacekeepers in Haiti have a history of sexual abuse and caused a cholera epidemic that killed thousands.
“The Haitian people have retained the bitter taste of a foreign force in command of our situation: theft, rape, cholera, food addiction, deregulation of the economic system, not to mention the fact that we do not remember seeing the gang leaders of that time be arrested or rendered incapable of doing harm,” a Haitian think tank, the Groupe de Travail sur la Securite (Security Working Group), said of Henry’s initial request.
In the meantime, it is not even possible to see a country fall into chaos and total violent anarchy, also because this could, on the one hand, also destabilize other countries in the area, starting from the neighboring Dominican Republic, and could also generate flows of uncontrolled migrants to the USA.
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The article Kenya will send its military and police to Haiti, a country that has fallen into violent chaos comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-kenya-mandera-propri-militari-e-poliziotti-ad-haiti-un-paese-sceso-nel-caos-violento/ on Sun, 03 Mar 2024 09:00:18 +0000.