Caricom's Haiti Challenge

Last week’s release of an investigative report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the “grip of gang violence” on the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Cité Soleil, provides an instructive backdrop to this week’s Caricom Inter-Sessional meeting in The Bahamas which begins today.

For one, and whatever its limited scope (Haiti is much, much more than this large, impoverished community within a much more expansive city of Port-au-Prince), the report supports the view that gang violence is but the dorsal fin on a monstrous creature on the verge of terminal submersion.

But it has become almost fashionable to focus on this one key symptom and to declare populistic solidarity. This has made it pretty easy to activate expressions of interest in the current invitation to invade.

However problematic such an approach, this situation cannot continue. In Brooklyn alone, between July and December 2022, at least 263 people were killed and 285 injured. People’s homes have been raided, pillaged, and destroyed. Women and girls attacked.

Gangs now control food and water supplies. In cases where it was the norm, children have been unable to attend school, and some of the young boys are being recruited to patrol the streets and participate in acts of violence.

By all means, being party to what the OHCHR has prescribed as “deployment of a time-bound specialised support force under conditions that conform with international human rights laws and norms, with a comprehensive and precise action plan”, is an acceptable stop-gap measure guaranteed to end the violence … for the time being.

At the current rate, with over 200 active gangs in Port-au-Prince and some northern towns alone, it is necessary to simultaneously and promptly apply ameliorative measures to satisfy endemic deprivation. Otherwise, a return to square one is absolutely guaranteed within a very short space of time.

Some of this has happened before – trouble, solidarity, invited occupation, stop-gap measures, gradual withdrawal, and rapid return to a self-destructive status quo. All the while as intense migrant outflows (a declared feature of Caribbean self-interest) remain the norm.

However loathsome their parochial, political and regulatory interventions, the Dominicans next door embody a useful reference point for confronting some stark realities.

When Caricom meets today, they are also going to discuss overdue elections, knowing well that elections of any kind are impossible under current conditions. As if elections by themselves are likely to signal any kind of political normalcy. In Haiti, they have not in the past.

The OHCHR report suggests that at least one main gang has “regularly carried out violent acts to take control of neighbourhoods under the influence of the Brooklyn gang and its allies, both to strengthen the electoral bases of its potential sponsors (among others, potential candidates for presidential, legislative, and communal elections) and to increase its illegal revenues.”

The implication here is that even with the return of elections there is little possibility that criminal insurgency will end. It is a classic case of elections not being a reliable indicator of street-level democratic values.

The region, together with the global community, has been going along with a false narrative of triumphant hope. Under the influence of such denial, as I have argued before, the admission of Haiti as a member of Caricom was based entirely on fanciful ideological factors.

Ever since, it has been rocky going. The country has not been a constant, reliable ally in hemispheric relations. The PetroCaribe splurge – described in one judicial proclamation as “an orgy of corruption” was never openly discussed at regional fora and remains like a neglected boil on the buttocks of the integration movement.

In presenting the report, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, saw a country that “lurches from crisis to crisis.”

“The way out of these multiple human rights crises must be owned and led by the people of Haiti, but the magnitude of the problems is such that they need the international community’s active attention and targeted support,” he added.

True. But the prerogative of the former call to self-determination has always been far more difficult to engage than the latter compulsion to intervene from outside and above. Who knows what’s the magic formula? Most of us don’t. This is Caricom's most intractable challenge.