Haiti has been hit by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake and 10 inches of rain from Tropical Depression Grace, both events complicated by a lack of clarity over who is leading the country. After the July 7 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, many commentators, including the The Washington Post editorial board (and some Haitians), have been calling for outside intervention. The international community is highly likely to intervene in some way, as it has so many times before. Observers agree that Haiti suffers from devastating economic and political problems. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, with low quality of life, high inequality, corruption and a stagnant economy that relies heavily on remittances from abroad.
However, as critics point out, Haiti’s situation is partly the product of policies from outside. These actually include past armed interventions that provided temporary political stability, but left Haiti’s underlying political problems much worse than it found them. The key question facing Haiti — as it confronts widespread gang violence and lack of confidence in elections — is whether any new intervention will help ordinary Haitians or hurt them, as well as whether it can halt political and gang violence.
Haiti has seen many interventions
The United Nations has had three military interventions with troops in Haiti over the past 31 years, as well as a continuing large civilian mission. The first two were ONUVEH (French abbreviation for U.N. Organization to Verify Elections in Haiti), 1990-1991, which monitored Haiti’s first free elections and the subsequent transfer of power; and MICIVIH (French abbreviation for the International Civilian Mission in Haiti) and UNMIH, 1993-2000, which monitored human rights in the country before and after the agency helped reinstate exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. These three interventions would seem justified under the humanitarian criteria emphasized by political theorist Michael Walzer, who said that humanitarian intervention ought to protect the population when it is threatened by the government.
However, these and other U.S. and/or U.N. interventions in Haiti have instead helped bolster the tacitly imperial power that the U.S. exercises over its near neighbors, and protected the local ruling class, while ignoring — or actively harming — the impoverished masses. These include the most recent Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH 2004-2017), a U.S.-led, U.N. armed intervention in Haiti, which installed a transitional government that was intended to ratify the 2004 unconstitutional change of power after Aristide had been overthrown by former military officers led by Guy Philippe (later convicted by a U.S. court of protecting drug smugglers). A few dozen ex-Haitian military figures captured the country’s regional police offices by force and induced Aristide to flee. MINUSTAH supported the new political status quo. Although Aristide’s own democratic credentials had been suspect, an important goal of the intervention was to eliminate the perceived leftist threat of his political mass movement.
MINUSTAH provided short-term stability at a high long-term cost
MINUSTAH’s greatest achievement in relative terms was restoring stability in Haiti. There were no coups or regime changes while U.N. troops were on the ground during those 13 years.
However, extreme instability resumed as soon as the troops left for good in 2017. MINUSTAH did not endow Haiti with political stability. Instead of dialogue and compromise, poverty, corruption, weak governance and political confrontation have worsened.
Haitians’ contempt for MINUSTAH reflected allegations of systematic sexual exploitation and a cholera epidemic, which the United Nations lied about and refused to take legal responsibility for. In addition, between 2005 and 2007, MINUSTAH conducted 15 major armed raids against gang leaders in the Cité Soleil neighborhood; witnesses alleged they were fired on from helicopters. During Operation Iron Fist on July 6, 2005, Brazilian and other U.N. troops used 22,700 firearm cartridges, 78 grenades and five mortar shells in this neighborhood, killing at least 30 civilians, according to a U.S. Institute of Peace report, and riddling a nearby church and school with machine-gun fire. While these attacks deterred gangs from kidnapping rich Haitians as they had been doing, the gangs continued human, arms and drug trafficking, and they took over urban neighborhoods, especially after MINUSTAH’s 2017 departure.
MINUSTAH has arguably left the country more unstable than when it started in 2004. Haiti is vulnerable to another armed insurrection, thanks to corruption and increased urban violence, involving both exchanges of gunfire between the police and soldiers and politically orchestrated massacres of slum dwellers. Haiti now fits the conventional definitions of a “failed state”, since it doesn’t have a government with a monopoly over the legitimate use of force.
The Haitian police force is divided and corrupt, and it confronts a variety of heavily armed factions. Jimmy Cherizier, a notorious gang leader also known as Barbecue, has been accused of orchestrating massacres on behalf of the assassinated president. However, he is able to operate freely and is bidding for political power, claiming that he will liberate his country from the rich ruling elite.
The next intervention might be different
No one is proposing the return of a large MINUSTAH-type mission. But as Robert Fatton has suggested, some kind of U.N. peacekeeping mission is likely. If the peacekeepers’ objective is once again to increase political stability in Haiti, planners may wish to address not only the economic structural problems that MINUSTAH left untouched, but also to demobilize the urban gangs that now dominate Haitian politics, including those that claim to speak for the masses while taking money and orders from members of the rich oligarchy. It would take decades to build Haiti’s state and economy, identify and prosecute corruption and violent human rights violations, and create an effective system of government.
This means that outside military interventions face a dilemma. If they do too little, they will fail to dismantle the gangs or to create credible elections. If they do too much, Haitians will not build their own sustainable solutions. Yet without a U.N. intervention, Haitians are unlikely to become engaged and politicians unlikely to be held accountable, with another rush to fraudulent elections rightly perceived as unfair.
The last election of Moïse as president was the first election since 1987 that was run exclusively by the government of Haiti, without participation or funding from the international community. It was met with credible, widespread allegations of fraud. To minimize such allegations, U.N. technical advice would need to produce a truly independent electoral commission.
The past four years of violence, endless public strikes and demonstrations, and more recently, coronavirus deaths, will continue without U.N. troops. It is possible that outside intervention can help stabilize Haitian politics, but only as long as Haiti’s people have the resources and security that they need to build credible institutions themselves.
Henry (Chip) Carey is an associate professor of political science at Georgia State University and is editor of “Peacebuilding Paradigms: The Impact of Theoretical Diversity on Sustainable Peace” (Cambridge University Press, 2021).