The Deeper Night of Haiti – by Rashmee Roshan Lall

On July 16, a 200-member Kenyan police force arrived in Haiti, doubling the number of officers already in the Caribbean nation. Two days later, armored vehicles carrying Kenyan and Haitian police officers drove through downtown Port-au-Prince, an area considered particularly dangerous in a capital that had been overrun by armed gangs for months. Shots were heard, but reporters on the scene could not tell who had fired, or if anyone had been injured or killed. Meanwhile, Haiti’s transitional prime minister went on television to tell his 11 million people something they already knew to be painfully true: “Life in Port-au-Prince has turned into a daily struggle for survival.”

As bleak as it sounds, this is what good news looks like today in Haiti, once the “pearl of the Antilles” and now the poorest country in the Americas. There is a foreign police force to bolster the under-armed, under-staffed, utterly demoralized Haitian National Police (HNP), with more international troops promised. There is an unelected acting head of government—trained gynecologist and former UN official Garry Conille—to end the shameful absence of a national leader and a government worthy of the name. And there are the first tentative attempts by the security services to enter the no-go areas of the capital and show that they are doing their job and mean it.

In his classic 1966 novel The ComediansGraham Greene concluded of Haiti’s abject need and chronic dysfunction: “Impossible to deepen that night.” That was then. Even for a country with a history of uprisings, dictatorships, coups and gang violence, the past three years have made Haiti’s night terrifyingly deep.

In the current period of extreme lawlessness, the criminal gangs that hold power 80% of Port-au-Prince have set fire to police stations and UN food depots, released thousands of prisoners, blockaded major gas stations, temporarily closed the country’s main international airport, forced the resignation of the de facto head of state and even demanded a role in the next government.

In March, at the height of the chaos caused by the gangs, their leader, former police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, presented himself as a Caribbean Robin Hood, pumped up for all-out war on Haiti’s fragile administrative state on behalf of ordinary people. He issued a chilling ultimatum, declaring: “Haiti will be a paradise or a hell for all of us.” The devastation of Chérizier’s fluid coalition of criminal groups, accused of murder, kidnapping and sexual violence, has led to tens of thousands of people being forced from their homes, while nearly half of the population is suffering from acute hunger.

There is a clear timeline how it could have come to this.

On July 7, 2021, Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jovenel Moïse, was shot dead in his well-guarded home in an upscale neighborhood high in the hills of Port-au-Prince. Moïse, a banana farmer known by the Haitian kreyòl nickname Neg Bannann, was not a particularly well-liked or unifying politician. In fact, he consistently fought off calls to resign and often hinted at the “dark forces” that were targeting him. Yet his assassination threw the country into disarray, leaving Haiti without a head of state, no functioning legislature, an unelected caretaker prime minister, and a constitutional vacuum after the death of the head of the Supreme Court due to the coronavirus.

Three days after the killing, the Haitian government under acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry called on the United States to send troops to protect the country’s key infrastructure. They never came. In October 2022, Henry’s government asked the international community for a “specialized force” to address the crisis caused by the gangs’ blockade of Haiti’s main fuel port. It was a call Henry would repeat several times during his 32 months in office, while continuing to promise new elections. When he finally set an August 2025 deadline for elections, civil protests broke out, adding to the growing instability caused by already rising gang violence.

In late February, Henry visited Kenya to broker a deal for a police deployment to crack down on the gangs… who promptly blocked the airport to prevent his return to Haiti, forcing him to resign. Last May, Garry Conille was named prime minister by a nine-member transitional council charged with overseeing Haiti’s political transition.

Every timeline, is of course only the core of a story, an orderly sequence of events without much explanation of cause and effect.

Why did the night suddenly turned dark in Haiti? And why did this happen after the death of President Moïse? At first glance, history seems to offer some parallels. In 1915, Haiti violently removed a head of state and plunged into weeks of chaos. Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam had been president for only four months when he was beaten to death and his body paraded through the streets of Port-au-Prince. The resulting instability led to a U.S. military intervention to protect US assetsand ended in an unpopular occupation that lasted nearly 20 years.

But 2021 has been very different from 1915, and not just in terms of Haiti’s importance to the United States. Haitians and observers of Haiti acknowledge that hope for positive change was stronger in the country’s first century as an independent nation than in its second.

Chérizier himself recently provided an instructive explanation for why criminal gangs suddenly broke their years-long deal to serve as a cunning trickster squad for Haitian politicians and instead declared war on their patrons. In a interview Speaking to NPR’s Eyder Peralta, the gang leader explained, “It’s the corrupt political system based on lies that has made me the person I am today.” He went on to say that after serving 14 years in the Haitian National Police, he had an epiphany and realized it was better to be the boss than the cat’s cat.

“It is traditional politicians who want you (the police) to do the dirty work of destabilizing the current government,” he said. “Today, the armed groups have woken up. I have made it clear to them that listening to the oligarchs and politicians will not get them anywhere. So it is better if we turn our guns on the oligarchs and politicians. It is better to use these guns to make the country independent once again.” The joke about “oligarchs” is a reference to the straitjacket of extreme poverty that has long held more than 50 percent of the population captive, while a wealthy elite of a few thousand families make mutually beneficial deals with politicians who care little about governing for the common good.

Naturally, numerous Other factors have compounded Haiti’s woes during the 220 years it has been a sovereign nation. After slaves won independence from France in 1804, the slave-owning United States isolated Haiti for almost 50 years. Meanwhile France a high price demandedwith the outrageous demand that his former colony compensate him for the lost value of slaves and the profitable harvests of Haiti. That debt—estimated at $21 billion in current terms – equal to 80% of Haiti’s income for more than 120 years.

Add to that periodic natural disasters—earthquakes and tropical storms—and Haiti’s unpreparedness for them. In January 2010, a 7.0-magnitude quake killed more than 200,000 people and left Port-au-Prince in ruins. In 2021, another, even larger quake struck, destroying key infrastructure in Haiti’s largely rural south.

Yet Haiti’s fight against gangs is now at the center of the story of recurring misery. Prime Minister Conille has described It sounds like “12,000 thugs holding 12 million people hostage,” but it’s not a simple equation. As one longtime Port-au-Prince resident told me after the second squad of Kenyan police arrived, any measure of progress has to be realistic. “No new areas being taken (by the gangs) … there’s a sense of normalcy if you keep your expectations low and stay in the ‘free’ areas.”

There is an overwhelming sense of a country at war. As chair of the Caribbean Community group of countries noticed: “Earlier this year, more people died in Haiti than in Ukraine.”

At present, Kenyan troops have only just arrived on the ground and Prime Minister Conille has only just begun administering much-needed miracle cures, which is only right, given that he is a doctor.

But there is no sign yet that the long night in Haiti is coming to an end.

Rashmee Roshan Lall reported from Haiti for The Economist, The Guardian and Christian Science Monitor. Her Substack is This week, those books.

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