By: Staff Writer
March 7, 2023
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in a new report warns that Haiti is at risk of “further destabilisation” due to the rise in the powerful criminal armed groups in the country.
The report, Haiti’s criminal markets: mapping trends in firearms and drug trafficking,” said: “Haiti is in the grip of multiple, interlocking, and cascading crises. If unattended, there are serious risks of further destabilisation from a myriad of increasingly powerful criminal armed groups. The risks of regional spill-over and contagion are widely acknowledged: The United Nations Security Council has repeatedly raised concerns about the country’s ‘protracted and deteriorating political, economic, security, human rights, humanitarian and food security crises” and “extremely high levels of gang violence and other criminal activities,’”
The report said that Haiti’s slide into political and economic disintegration began before the 2018 assassination on the late President Jovenel Moïse. “Haiti’s prolonged security crisis took an alarming turn for the worse since 2021. Even before the high-profile assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse by suspected foreign and domesticmercenaries in July 2021, Haiti’s cities and towns registered deteriorating economic conditions,rising social unrest, the targeting of human rights defenders and the growing menace of heavily armed gangs and organised criminal organisations.
“Today, violent gangs have effectively seized control of large swathes of the country, contributing to a deepening humanitarian crisis. A recent assessment estimates that close to 100,000 Haitians have been physically displaced by insecurity in Port-au-Prince alone.5 Chronic instability is contributing to rising food prices, surging hunger, dangerous cholera outbreaks, deepening poverty and the potential for a major migration exodus.”
The report also said: “Confronted with escalating insecurity, Haiti’s Council of Ministers authorised the Prime Minister in late 2022 to take the unusual step of requesting the deployment of a ‘specialised armed force’ by the international community. For its part, the UN Security Council issued a sanctions regime freezing assets, establishing travel bans and embargoing arms flows targeting actors deemed responsible for, complicit in, or having engaged directly or indirectly in actions that threaten the peace, security or stability of Haiti. Some Member States and prominent non-governmental organisations have called for more muscular intervention, including the deployment of a multinational police force.”
The CARICOM countries have shied away from sending in their military forces to provide stability for Haiti despite Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness pledging to send a small force of his Jamaica Defence Force. However, the CARICOM statement coming out of the Heads of Government meeting this past February said that they will only go as far as helping the Haitian government to stand up its own police and military forces ahead of the presidential elections expected for this November.
The report also noted, “Meanwhile, lawlessness is worsening across Haiti. It is also growing increasingly violent. US law enforcement and intelligence authorities detected a sharp uptick in the quantity and calibre of firearms and ammunition destined for Haiti in 2022. Haiti’s National Police(HNP), along with the international and domestic human rights groups, have also documented rising levels of killings, sexual violence, protest and kidnapping between 2020 and 2023. Likewise, the US Coast Guard registered a fourfold increase in intercepted Haitian migrants between 2021 and 2022. And 43,900 Haitians, including as many as 1,800 children, were reportedly deported on the border with the Dominican Republic between July and October 2022 alone.”
Drugs and firearms are flowing freely within and throughout Haiti and the police force has no solution for the situation despite. “A majority of the legal and illegal products entering Haiti are offloaded from the country’s public and private seaports. There are several public and private ports spread out across Haiti, with the largest cluster in Port-au-Prince77 and others in Cap Haïtien, Les Cayes, Miragoâne, Port-de-Paix, Petit Goave and Corai. With some exceptions, these ports are in poor condition, intermittently operational and several are closed down indefinitely,” the report said.