When an armored convoy of Kenyan and Haitian police forces rolled into a rural hamlet east of Port-au-Prince amid an active gang attack last week, residents along a 14-mile stretch to the Dominican Republic border breathed sighs of relief.
At the arrival of the tan-colored mine-resistant vehicles in Ganthier, heavily armed members of the 400 Mawozo gang fled into the bushes, and fleeing residents began plotting their return from the town next door.
But less than 24 hours after the first significant outing of the largely U.S.-financed, Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission got underway, the Kenyans rolled out without taking back control of Ganthier.
What should have been a mission that inspired confidence in what an armed international force could mean for restoring security in Haiti is instead underscoring its shortcomings as a small, underresourced effort.
Not long after the Kenyans left on Saturday after spending the night, heavily armed members of the 400 Mawozo gang returned to the streets of Ganthier, pillaging homes and businesses and promising bloodshed. Their target isn’t just Ganthier, one of the last holdouts in gang-ridden Port-au-Prince, but neighboring Fonds-Parisien, where local authorities had taken the drastic measure of stopping transport cargo vehicles from crossing into Ganthier and falling into the gang’s clutches.
“Everyone in the area is panicking because of the messages, the threats the head of 400 Mawozo has been sending, especially toward Fonds-Parisien,” said a resident, who asked not to be named. “The people in Ganthier ran to Fonds-Parisien and now they are on the run again. But there is nowhere else left to run.”
Jean Viloner Victor, who serves as mayor for both Ganthier and Fonds-Parisien, said if Friday’s intervention by the Kenyan-led forces had not happened, things could have been worse.
“But even though the police are trying to hold on, nothing has changed,” he said. “The people still cannot return home.”
On Monday, as rumors spread that 400 Mawozo leader Lanmou SanJou had retaliated against Fonds-Parisien by cutting access across the Bonnet bridge, which connects Port-au-Prince to the border region, Victor was trying to meet with Haitian police to see what else they could do.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology in the foreign policy program at Brookings, said at best, the failed intervention in Ganthier by the Haitian and Kenyan forces shows that improvements are needed in mounting an intervention in Haiti, where gangs continue to mount a significant amount of attacks against the population.
At worse, it shows the kinds of mistakes and poor planning that could quickly discredit the Kenyan forces and render them ineffective in the face of Haiti’s powerful and heavily armed criminal groups.
An ‘undercooked’ mission
“What were they thinking? That they were just going to ride there, hang around for a bit and pick up and go?” said Felbab-Brown, a security expert who has been looking into Haitian gangs and the security response. “It seems so undercooked in the very, very initial planning as to what the operation would look like; first of all, it looks like they had no plan on going there and taking the center.”
Felbab-Brown said she thought the MSS mission — which is barely a month old and made up of 400 specialized Kenyan officers — would face struggles as forces confront gangs and try to clear areas now under their control. But she thought trouble would come maybe after a week or two into an operation, as violence leaked back in and gangs responded with perhaps more firepower.
“What is really astounding is how enormously it’s gone awry just in the initial thrust,” she said.
This was underscored on Monday when Prime Minister Garry Conille and members of his government accompanied CNN to the gang-ravaged Hospital of the State University of Haiti, known as the General Hospital, for an interview. As Conille was walking through the facility, where the ground is littered with trash and human bones, shots rang out. Video of the incident showed panicked Kenyan police officers, rushing to get out of the line of fire and reaching for their guns on the ground.
Noting Conille’s recent declaration that Haitian authorities plan to take back the capital “house by house, community by community,” Felbab-Brown said the statement seems “just completely inconsistent with the capacity that’s on the ground.”
Ahead of last month’s arrival of the first Kenyan forces to Haiti, there was hope that the United Nations-backed mission would arrive with a big bang and launch a spectacular operation against Haiti’s criminal groups and quickly take control. That didn’t happen. However, Ganthier was supposed to be an opportunity for the Kenya-led forces to show their ability to help Haiti’s beleaguered police force take back territory, the security expert pointed out. It has instead become a lesson in what it means to have an enormously underresourced mission.
“The mission is so, so underresourced,” Felbab-Brown said. “Even if you had more plausible plans, the resources of the mission, whether it’s the lack of support (or) the actual numbers of the people on the ground, are woefully inadequate for what it would take to control Port-au-Prince and maybe go to the Artibonite.”
No holding force
One problem, Felbab-Brown sees and the Kenyans themselves acknowledge with the Ganthier operation, is that there is no holding force, which has been a key selling point on why Haiti needed an international mission, in the first place, to help its police maintain territory after taking it back from gangs.
“There are not enough of them for holding,” she said of the Kenyans, “and there is not enough of the rest of the eventual MSS or of the Haitian national police.”
A spokesperson for the Kenyan Force Commander Godfrey Otunge said Friday’s deployment of what ended up being eight armored vehicles was “to support the Haitian police in driving away the bandits” after they attacked and later demolished the police station and set fire to a customs building in Ganthier.
But he acknowledged that after the troops returned to Port-au-Prince, the gangs returned.
The spokesperson said usually when Kenya carries out a mission, it does so by going in and capturing a gang- infested area and setting up a base.
“We don’t move. We set ourselves there, we put our troops on the ground and pacify the area up when to when those gangs will run away,” he said.
But this did not happen in Haiti over the weekend because of “technicalities,” the spokesperson said, adding that the mission came under heavy gang gunfire on the outskirts of Ganthier as it headed back to Port-au-Prince.
“The contractor cannot supply food on this foreign operating basis; the contractor cannot supply mattresses for officers to sleep, which forced us to go back to our area,” he said. “If we were fully resourced with what we needed than last time when we went to Ganthier, we would have set up a base there because that is what.”
While Haitians have been clamoring for helicopters to assist with hard-to-reach regions of the country like Ganthier, there is another more basic problem: the armored vehicles the U.S. has supplied to the Kenyan troops. They do not have towers.
“It means we cannot fight the gangs effectively,” he said. “This is what we’ve been calling on the Americans, to make sure that they give us (mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles] with towers. Those MRAPs are just like ambulances — you cannot fight when you are in there. The gangs are becoming bolder with attacks, even at close range. Without towers we cannot even mount a response.The Haitian police cannot sustain those gangs; that is why they need our support.”
Like the Haitian police, the spokesman could not confirm if indeed the Bonnet bridge was cut off, which would make it problematic for reinforcements to come from the capital. “What I can confirm,” he said, “is that it was under attack.”
Who controls key bridge?
Residents in Ganthier and Fonds-Parisien said the attack on the bridge took place after local officials in Fonds-Parisien decided to keep transport vehicles in the town and not let them cross. The trucks, which carry produce and other supplies from the Haitian-Dominican border in the city of Malpasse to the capital, usually pay hundreds of dollars in fees to pass through the gang’s checkpoints.
In a video directed at the people of Fonds-Parisien, 400 Mawozo gang leader SanJou accused the people of the town of betraying him by blocking the trucks’ passage and threatened to block the area from commercial traffic for the next four months. In a separate video, he also announced that he was in possession of a cache of AK47s and ammunition.
Jean-Bernard Son, a local leader in Fonds-Parisien, said they are not taking SanJou’s threats lightly.
“Once he makes a threat, he plans them; if he doesn’t have enough guys in his base to launch an attack, he buys them from elsewhere,” Son, 53, said, noting the gang is not just well armed but well financed. “We all know what they can do.”
Son said since the gang launched its attacks against Ganthier three years ago, the people have been suffering. The latest attack, a week ago, was the fourth.
“Up to now there are people who have died in their homes, and no one can recover the corpses to bury them,” he said. “There are people who were killed in the bushes, in the streets, and dogs that are eating their corpses.”
Over the weekend, the Haiti National Police sent a new police chief to the community, who came with a team of police officers. However, they remain on the outskirts of Ganthier, and despite a meeting over the weekend to try and instill confidence in the community, panic and fear remain, residents said.
While the population is waiting on the Haitian state to help them, Son also says that he doesn’t have much hope in the mission given what he has already witnessed.
“They didn’t shoot one bullet,” he said, “and that gives us a lot of worry.”
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