Attachments
Haiti has filed a formal request for a blue-helmet force to help national police fight the criminal gangs bedevilling the country. In this Q&A, Crisis Group experts Renata Segura and Daniel Forti examine the main questions about mounting such an operation.
What happened?
On 21 October, Leslie Voltaire, the current head of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, formally requested that the international security mission presently in the country be converted to a full-fledged UN peacekeeping operation. This idea has been floated at the UN Security Council before, during negotiations over renewing the mission’s mandate in September. The Council did not vote to shift to a blue-helmet force then, but the U.S. is tabling the proposal again in the hope that a peacekeeping mission can be approved by the end of the year. The push for returning UN peacekeepers to Haiti just five years after they left comes after a new wave of depredations by criminal gangs, including what appears to be one of the country’s worst massacres in decades and the launch of coordinated attacks in parts of the capital Port-au-Prince and other cities.
Deployment of the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) to Haiti began only four months ago, but disappointment in its achievements is rising fast. Led by Kenya, the mission was originally approved by the UN Security Council in October 2023 to support the Haitian national police in fighting the gangs, which count some 12,000 members. In the past three years, the gangs have been responsible for killing over 10,000 people and forcibly displacing 700,000. The mission was also intended to create suitable conditions for elections to be held by the end of 2025. Haitian officials and their international partners had hoped that by now, a year after the mission got the go-ahead, some 2,500 foreign officers would be working alongside their Haitian counterparts to push back and eventually dismantle the gangs. But the mission is still severely understaffed, with just over 380 Kenyan police officers serving alongside 30 soldiers from the Bahamas, Belize and Jamaica. At the same time, the gangs, which have long existed but have grown increasingly powerful and violent since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, appear to have gone back on the offensive after a five-month lull, to catastrophic effect.