The U.N. has finally taken action, but a police mission alone won't be enough.
 | By Krista Mahr Senior International Editor, Opinion |
It's too easy for many of us not to think about Haiti. |
The pure scale and depth of the nation's overlapping crises are difficult to grasp — that is, for anyone who hasn't lived through them. |
In 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of people in a country a little bigger than Maryland. Thirteen years later, Haitians are in the grip of another unfathomable catastrophe: their government devoid of elected officials, their lives threatened by powerful gangs that control large swaths of the capital and nation. Nearly half the nation is hungry, and at least 2,500 Haitians have died in gang violence this year alone — roughly 10 people every day. |
This week, a small but important corner of the world managed to focus its attention on Haiti and take action. The United Nations Security Council overcame internal squabbling and agreed to back a yearlong international security force to help stabilize the country by working with police and by guarding schools, ports and hospitals. Kenya has volunteered to lead the force, and other Caribbean countries have said they will also send personnel. |
He has seen it happen before. As the head of Haiti's National Human Rights Defense Network, Espérance was part of an earlier U.N. mission tasked with reforming Haiti's police force to fight the growing gang problem. Though the effort to weed out corrupt officers and stop police collusion with gangs had support within the police leadership, it fell apart when a president came to power who was widely believed to have close ties to gang leaders, Espérance writes. |
More recently, his organization has been documenting how gang leaders routinely flaunt their use of state resources in the streets. |
Without cleaning up the government, adding more armed security personnel to this mix — wherever they are from, no matter how good their intentions — won't stop Haiti's gangs, he argues. What Haiti needs now is help setting up a transitional government made up of honest actors who are unbeholden to the gangs and committed to re-establishing democracy. |
Under that system, "gangs would not disappear," Espérance acknowledges. "But they would eventually exert less power and lose some of the vast territory they now control." |
On the other hand, "if such a transitional government is not realized and the current government carries on and eventually calls for elections, gangs will control the polls," he writes. "Terrorized people will vote for gang-affiliated politicians and even gang leaders themselves, some of whom are entertaining the idea of running for office." |
The world needs to keep thinking about Haiti. And Haiti needs a government that does more for its people — not just people with more guns. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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