Haiti, suffering grows, in ‘race against time’: UN expert

Vendors carrying their goods travel along a rocky, cliff-lined road to avoid gangs in the Port-au-Prince area. The perilous journey takes nearly seven hours – Copyright AFP/File Clarens SIFFROY

The Haitian people are suffering greatly at the hands of powerful criminal gangs, while international security forces and local police are severely under-resourced to protect them, a top UN expert said on Friday.

William O’Neill, briefing reporters in Port-au-Prince at the end of a 12-day visit to the impoverished Caribbean island, described the dire conditions that have left the population in a state of extreme insecurity and increasing famine.

He visited areas in southern Haiti that were unaffected by gang violence a year ago but are now struggling with “skyrocketing inflation, a lack of basic goods and flows of displaced people,” particularly affecting women and children.

Only 28 percent of health services are functioning normally, O’Neill said, “and nearly five million people are suffering from acute food insecurity.”

In a refugee camp he met an “anemic girl” who had not eaten for two days and had not been to school for over a year.

More than half of the island’s 700,000 displaced people are children.

According to O’Neill, the gangs are increasingly using sexual violence as a weapon to control the population.

They have “trafficked children, forcibly recruited them into gangs and often used them to carry out attacks” on police and public facilities.

The criminal gangs control more than 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, as well as major roads in the country.

Meanwhile, police lack the logistical and technical capacity to combat the gangs, O’Neill said.

He said the Multinational Security Support Mission, authorized by the U.N. Security Council nearly a year ago, has so far deployed less than a quarter of its planned contingent of 2,500. The core consists of 400 Kenyan officers deployed this summer.

“The equipment it has received is inadequate and the resources are inadequate,” the UN expert said.

Police are overwhelmed. “We have to learn to walk on water,” a Jeremie police officer told O’Neill.

Prison conditions were appalling, the UN expert said.

A prison in Jeremie, designed for 50 inmates, holds 470. “They sleep on floors flooded with rainwater and strewn with dirt,” and sometimes go for days without food.

“This ongoing torment must stop,” O’Neill said.

He called on Haitian authorities, appointed this year after the resignation of the unpopular government of Ariel Henry, to significantly step up efforts to combat widespread corruption, saying “efforts must be redoubled immediately.”

At the same time, he said it was “crucial to suppress the gangs” by giving the international force the means to effectively support the national police.

And because criminals are still importing weapons, the international arms embargo must be tightened.

“It’s a race against time,” O’Neill said.

The population “lacks everything.”