By: Staff Writer
September 12, 2024
It’s been three months since Kenyan troops arrived in Haiti and very little can be said about their impact on the ground in quelling the violence and assisting the appointed cabinet to stabilize the country for holding general elections.
The Haitian authorities have expanded a state of emergency to the whole country as the government battles violent gangs that have taken control of large parts of the capital – and are attempting to move into other regions.
The move comes as the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the Caribbean nation, where he met Prime Minister Garry Conille to discuss “forthcoming steps in Haiti’s democratic transition”.
Despite this, Kenyan troops are facing challenges. Pay issues and shortages of equipment and manpower have sapped morale among Kenyan police officers deployed to Haiti and hampered their ability to confront heavily armed gangs, four officers told Reuters.
After three years of rampant killing, rape and extortion by gangs that control most of the capital Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s transitional government and its international allies are counting on the Kenyan-led mission to restore enough security to hold elections by February 2026.
The U.S. is also mulling a U.N. peacekeeping operation in Haiti as one way to secure funding and staffing for a Kenya-led mission deployed to quell gang violence in the Caribbean country, a top U.S. diplomat said earlier this month.
Some 400 Kenyan police are currently in Haiti, but the mission also calls for the deployment of police and soldiers from the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Chad and Jamaica for a total of 2,500 personnel. They would be deployed in phases that would cost roughly $600 million a year. Currently, the U.N. has $85 million in pledges for the mission, out of which $68 million has been received.
The inability to secure funding immediately is allowing the criminal gangs to regain portions of the country that they were beat back from by the surge of the Kenyan troops.
These challenges are exacerbated by the failure to fully fund and operationalize the Multinational Security Support, which has allowed the gangs to entrench themselves and further destabilize the capital. The funding shortfall for the UN trust fund, which relies on voluntary contributions from member states rather than the mandatory assessments used for traditional peacekeeping missions, has significantly delayed the deployment of Kenyan police to Haiti and has hindered their operational effectiveness due to insufficient equipment and delayed pay, impacting morale.