There’s been recent change in violence-torn Haiti – but whether it will bring much-needed progress remains to be seen.

A new acting prime minister, Garry Conille, was sworn in on 3 June. A former United Nations (UN) official who briefly served as prime minister from October 2011 to May 2012, Conille was the compromise choice of the Transitional Presidential Council. The Council was put together in April to temporarily assume the functions of the presidency following the resignation of de facto prime minister Ariel Henry. In a sign of how tense the situation remains, the Council’s swearing in was held in secret to avoid a potential attack.

Upsurge in violence

Haiti has been the scene of intense and widespread gang violence since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. Henry was finally forced out as the conflict escalated still further: in February, two major gang networks joined forces, determined to oust him. The gangs attacked Haiti’s main airport, which was forced to close for almost three months, stopping Henry returning from abroad. Haiti was effectively cut off from the outside world, with travel to the only other international airport impossible because gangs controlled the roads.

In the same wave of attacks, gangs took control of police stations, slaughtering those inside, and opened the gates of the country’s two biggest jails, releasing over 4,000 prisoners. The violence targeted an area of the capital, Port-au-Prince, previously considered safe, where the presidential palace, government headquarters and embassies are located. Some diplomatic staff fled and the US government airlifted personnel out. But once again it was Haitian citizens who paid the highest price: the UN estimates that around 2,500 people were killed or injured in gang violence in the first quarter of this year alone, a staggering 53 per cent increase in casualties on the previous three months.

With Henry’s departure, gang leaders got what they said they wanted. But he won’t be missed by civil society either. Henry was widely seen as lacking any legitimacy to lead. Moïse announced his appointment shortly before his assassination, but it was never formalised, and he then won a power struggle with his predecessor, Claude Joseph, thanks in part to the support of several foreign states. His tenure was a blatant failure, marked by the escalating gang violence that ultimately made his international allies drop their backing. It was when the gangs seemed on the verge of taking full control of Port-au-Prince that Henry finally lost US support.

Now the USA, other states and the regional body, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), have thrown their weight behind the Council and a Kenya-led international police force, which has recently begun to deploy after a long delay.

Contested developments

Gang leaders can be expected to maintain their resistance to these latest developments. The most prominent, ex-police officer Jimmy Chérizier, who goes by the name of Barbecue, demands a seat at the table and a role in any talks. But this looks like self-serving posturing. Chérizier likes to portray himself as a revolutionary, on the side of poor people against elites. But the gangs are predatory. They kill innocent people, and it’s the poorest who suffer the most. The activities the gangs make their money from – including kidnapping for ransom, extortion and arms and drug smuggling – benefit from weak law enforcement and a lack of central authority. Gang leaders don’t want to govern Haiti. They’re best served by maximum chaos for as long as possible, and when that ends will seek an accommodation with favourable politicians, as they’ve done before.

Political squabbling suits the gangs, which makes it a concern that it took extensive and protracted negotiations to establish the Council. The opaque process was evidently characterised by little sense of urgency and self-interested manoeuvring as politicians jockeyed for position and status, with some early members resigning in disagreement.

The resulting body has nine members: seven with voting rights and two observers. Six of the seven come from political coalitions and parties, and the seventh is a private sector representative. One observer represents religious groups and the other civil society: Régine Abraham, a crop scientist by profession, who comes from the Rally for a National Agreement.

The Council’s formation was shortly followed by the arrival of an advance force of Kenyan police officers, with more to follow. This came despite attempts by the Kenyan opposition to block deployment, and still faces the problem of delays in funding pledged by the US government.

It’s been a long time coming. The current plan was adopted by a UN Security Council resolution in October 2023, which approved an international police force mission to strengthen local law enforcement capacity. The government of Kenya took the lead, offering a thousand police officers, with smaller numbers to come from other countries. But Kenya’s opposition won a court order temporarily preventing the move. Henry was in Kenya to sign a mutual security agreement to circumvent the ruling when he was left stranded by the airport closure.

Many Haitians are rightly wary of the prospect of foreign powers getting involved. The country has a dismal history of self-serving international interference, particularly by the US government, while UN forces have been no saviours. A peacekeeping mission from 2004 to 2017 committed sexual abuse and introduced cholera, for which the UN failed to take legal responsibility. This will be the 11^th UN-organised mission since 1993, and all have been accused of human rights violations. International civil society doesn’t have a clean record either: Oxfam staff members were implicated in sexual exploitation of Haitians.

Civil society points to the Kenyan police’s long track record of committing violence and rights abuses, including in response to protests, and is concerned it won’t understand local dynamics. There’s also the question of whether resources spent on the mission wouldn’t be better used to properly equip Haiti’s forces, which have consistently been far less well equipped than the gangs they’re up against. Previous international initiatives have manifestly failed to help strengthen the capacity of Haitian institutions to protect rights and uphold the rule of law.

Time to listen

Haitian civil society has long called for a transitional authority to take control of the situation and pave the way for the restoration of both peace and democracy. It’s right to criticise the current process as falling short of expectations. For a start, it’s an impossible task to expect one person to represent the diversity of Haiti’s civil society, no matter how hard they try. And that person doesn’t even have a vote: the power to make decisions by majority vote is in the hands of the political parties many feel helped create the conditions that enabled the current violence.

The Council is also a male-dominated institution: Abraham is its only female member. Dominique Dupuy, one of the initial political appointees, would have made it two, but she withdrew, citing threats and sexist comments. With gangs routinely using sexual violence as a weapon, the Council hardly seems in good shape to start building a Haiti free of violence against women and girls.

And given the role of the US government, other states and CARICOM in bringing it about, the Council – just like the Kenya-led mission – is open to the accusation of being just another foreign intervention, giving rise to suspicions about the motives of outside powers and concern about propping up failed and corrupt elites.

The latest steps could be the start of something better, but only if they’re built on and move in the right direction. In the full government to be formed as the next step, civil society is pushing for more: for much more women’s leadership and civil society engagement. For the Kenya-led mission, civil society is calling for strong human rights safeguards, including a means for complaints to be heard if the mission, like all its predecessors, commits human rights abuses. This time, civil society wants to see tangible development of the capacity of Haitian institutions to respond to Haitian problems, and genuine democratic oversight of those institutions. That shouldn’t be too much to ask, since nothing else has worked.

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