At least 150 people have been killed in Port-au-Prince over the past week, the United Nations says, as the Haitian capital reels from a surge in gang violence.
In a statement on Wednesday, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said more than half of the deaths – at least 55 percent – came “from exchanges of fire between gang members and police”.
Another 92 people were injured in the violence, and about 20,000 others have been forcibly displaced from their homes.
“Port-au-Prince’s estimated four million people are practically being held hostage as gangs now control all the main roads in and out of the capital,” Volker Turk, the high commissioner, said in the statement.
“The latest upsurge in violence in Haiti’s capital is a harbinger of worse to come. The gang violence must be promptly halted. Haiti must not be allowed to descend further into chaos.”
Haiti has reeled from years of violence as powerful armed groups – often with ties to the country’s political and business leaders – have vied for influence and control of territory.
But the situation worsened dramatically after the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise, which created a power vacuum.
Earlier this year, the gangs launched attacks on prisons and other state institutions across Port-au-Prince, fuelling a renewed political crisis.
The campaign of violence led to the resignation of Haiti’s unelected prime minister, the creation of a transitional presidential council, and the deployment of a UN-backed, multinational police mission.
That Kenya-led police force – formally known as the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) – has failed to take control back from the gangs, however.
Only a fraction of the planned contingent has arrived in Haiti so far, while the United States, the MSS’s key backer, has been pushing to get more funding and personnel to bolster the force.
The US also has been pushing to transform the mission into a UN peacekeeping force, a proposal that has the backing of Haitian leaders but is opposed by veto-holding UN Security Council members China and Russia.
Monica Juma, a national security adviser to the Kenyan presidency, said during a special UNSC session on Haiti on Wednesday afternoon that Nairobi “strongly supports” that push.
Juma said the MSS currently counts 416 “boots on the ground” from Belize, Bahamas, Jamaica and Kenya, but that is “too few for the task ahead”.
“The urgency for a surge in the MSS personnel deployment is evident,” she told the council in New York.
Many Haitians remain wary of UN interventions, however, saying past deployments have brought more harm than good.
A deadly 2010 cholera outbreak was linked to a UN peacekeeping base, for example, and UN forces in Haiti were also accused of rape and sexual abuse.
Still, civil society leaders in Haiti have cautiously welcomed the Kenya-led multinational mission as a needed boost in the fight against the gangs while also stressing that the problems facing the Caribbean country will not be solved by force alone.
They have called for more support and training for Haiti’s national police force, as well as an end to corruption and a Haitian-led political process.
In the meantime, Haitian armed groups are now believed to control at least 80 percent of Port-au-Prince.
Planes were hit by gunfire earlier this month at the airport in the capital, prompting international airlines to suspend flights into the city and isolating the country further.
The incidents came amid an internal power struggle that saw the transitional presidential council tasked with rebuilding Haitian state institutions vote to dismiss another interim prime minister, Gary Conille, and appoint his replacement, Alix Didier Fils-Aime.
Speaking at the UNSC session on Wednesday, Miroslav Jenca, the UN’s assistant secretary-general for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, said Haiti is facing more than “just another wave of insecurity”.
“It is a dramatic escalation that shows no signs of abating,” Jenca told the council.
“The human consequences are severe. We are deeply concerned about the safety, basic needs and human rights of people residing in gang-controlled areas, in particular, those of women and children.”