The Decibel - Where Haiti could go from here

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

After months of escalating violence, Haiti has descended into chaos. Criminal gangs have largely taken control of the country’s capital as they attack civilians and police. Haitian prime minister Ariel Henry has agreed to step down to allow for a transitional government to take over, while a UN-backed security force from Kenya is being called on to restore order.Chalmers Larose, a Haitian political scientist and lecturer at several Canadian post-secondary institutions, joins the show to unpack the security problems facing Haiti, what can be done about them, and whether international effort could help.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Haiti has collapsed into widespread violence. 80% of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, is physically controlled by gangs. And a lot of those gangs have banded together behind a leader called Jimmy Cherizier, who goes by the name Barbecue. Gangs have been fighting the overwhelmed Haitian national police in an effort to depose Prime Minister Ariel Henry. They've been burning police and government buildings, shutting down ports and the international airport, as well as committing terrible violence against Haitian civilians. This Haitian woman tells a journalist that she has nothing to eat and has been forced out into the street. When a reporter asks her why she's on the street, she says,

I'm running away from bullets. The criminals forced me out of my home. According to the UN, some 36,000 people have fled their homes inside Haiti, while close to 1,200 have been killed and nearly 700 injured since the start of this year. Finally, on Sunday, a group of international diplomats gathered in Jamaica to discuss what could be done to help Haiti. And then on Monday, Haitian Prime Minister Henri announced that he would resign after a transition council was set up. Haiti needs peace. stability, sustainable development, and to rebuild its democratic institutions. Meanwhile, Kenya has been asked to send in some of its police as part of a UN-sanctioned support mission that Canada is also a part of. But there's no clear sign when that might happen. So today, our guest is Haitian political scientist Chalmers Larose. He's a lecturer at the University of Quebec at Montreal and Royal Military College of Canada. He's going

to unpack the security problems facing Haiti, what can be done about them, and whether international effort could help. I'm Mena Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Dr. Laroche, thank you so much for being here. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. So we're talking on Wednesday morning, and this situation is in flux in Haiti at this time. But to start, I want to broadly look at what's been happening. How do you understand what's been going on in Haiti? It's not easy to describe it, but I would describe it as an uprising.

An uprising coming from the population as a whole against the government, against the economic hardship, and also against insecurity. But at the same time, we've had the multiplication of gangs, violence. They have decided to take control of the whole city and to push the government out of power. So now the situation is not under control. The regular forces are trying to retaliate. It seems that the situation is still in flux and we don't know exactly what will be the outcome. And so why have police struggled to maintain order in this situation? You have to understand that security in Haiti is connected to the economic situation. If you cannot alleviate the economic sufferings of the population,

you cannot have security. There's a connection between the sufferings of the population in terms of economic hardships and the capacity of the police to maintain order in this environment. So to do it, it has to be an authoritarian police, not a kind of cooperative police. So in order to keep order, it has to be an authoritarian force then? Given the economic situation in Haiti, you cannot police people in that manner when they are hungry and when they cannot see their life with hope. So it's very difficult. But the problem is that the police doesn't have the capacity, they don't have the resources, and they don't have the know-how to do it in a way that can appease the situation of the population.

So it's a very confrontational relationship that the police maintain with the population. So in this confrontation, the police will lose. I want to talk about Haiti's army here, because in these moments of national crises, armies tend to play a role. Now, of course, it has a long history. It was initially the Haitian army that led the country's revolution against French colonizers. And that was later replaced by an American imperialist force, which was disbanded in 1994. And there is an army now, but it's only really been around since 2017. And most of the security work now in Haiti is done by police.

So is it important for Haiti to have a strong army? Why would it be important? Well, to keep the nation together, not necessarily to keep the political forces together. The mission of an army is to protect, first, the physical environment of the territorial space. That's important. And to guarantee the sovereignty of the nation.

That is not the role of a police force. The police force is a force whose mission is to maintain public order. Meaning to police the citizenry, not necessarily to protect the nation. So in Haiti, we need to have that because first, we are a nation which is prone to natural catastrophes, meaning that to counter all the vulnerabilities we have, environmental vulnerabilities, security vulnerabilities, we need a force that can rise above and take control in moments of despair. For now, we don't have that.

Who intervenes in such a moment? International forces through international interventions. It justifies, in my view, the pertinence and the necessity to have a stabilizing force, which is internal, not a stabilizing force, which is internal, not a stabilizing force, which is external. Okay. So you're saying the Haitian army, that would be an internal stabilizing force. But I guess I have to ask you, though, don't you run the risk that the military could take

permanent control of the state and become a military dictatorship? I mean, isn't that a danger there? Well, I don't know if it is a danger. It is a hypothesis. It is a probability. So let's work for that probability to never happen. That doesn't justify not to have an army. Canada has an army.

They never had a coup d'etat. Why? Because they have institutions. And also they have a kind of political establishment that rejects the idea of having a coup d'etat. But wouldn't the risk be greater in Haiti than without those kind of established political institutions? But we need to fabricate it. We need to have a political culture that is aligned with the idea of keeping the power out of the reach of the army. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't have an army. Let's dig into this idea a little bit.

If you say that Haiti needs a military, but Haiti doesn't really have currently a functioning military, and right now there is a lot of insecurity on the ground. Does this mean that an international army or force of some kind has a role now to play here? Well, it depends on how you view it. Well, there is a case for an international intervention, but this case is very soft. What they propose doesn't address the situation and the reality on the ground. They propose an international police force. And they propose also an international security support mission. Meaning that a mission is going to there to support the police, meaning to help them resolve the problem.

That's the diplomatic language here. And the legal language here is support. Meaning that we are not going to be proactive, we are going to be passive and give the Haitian police the necessary means and assistance to do it. So this formula doesn't correspond to what's happening now in Haiti, because you have not only a reinforcement of the capacities of the criminal parallel forces in Haiti, but we have also the consolidation of the ambitions of those forces on the ground. They don't see themselves now as criminal or as gangs or as bandits. They see themselves as

Robin Hood. The gangs, you're saying, see themselves as Robin Hood. The gangs, you're saying, see themselves as Robin Hood. They see themselves and many Haitians see them as the ones who liberated them from Marielle Henry in power, who is the prime minister. The security situation in Haiti cannot be addressed through security means. It has to be addressed through political means. It has to be addressed through political means. So we need to have a political settlement that can project fear and confidence to the population so that they can have a new institutional arrangement and also new type of relationships among themselves. So what we need is to delegitimate the gangs, not to kill them. You have to

delegitimate them through political settlement. Now they want to take power because they're a vacuum of power. So you need to put in place a power which can inspire cooperation, collaboration among Haitians.

We'll be back after this message. So Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry has said that he will resign once a transitional council and temporary replacement have been appointed. I guess, what are your thoughts generally on that, Dr. Lerhose? Well, it's not clear. For example, there is a council of government that they propose, this council of government who is supposed to take over the political leadership in Haiti. But at the same time, there are seven people, which makes it very hard for decision

making, which is a recipe also for discord and disagreement. So do you think this is not being set up for success then? It is not. I don't know if it is intentional or it is accidental. So what would be a better solution then? Well, what would be a better solution is to have a clarity as far as the leadership is concerned. People need to know exactly who is governing Haiti, who is a prime minister and back him up with resources and political power. Are you referring to them like elections in Haiti? There haven't been elections in Haiti since 2017. No, as a transition, as a transitional stage, because we are in a transitional stage. We are not talking about elections. It's not on the horizon. But of course, I mean, the wish to have election is there. But it's not a question of wanting to do something. It's a question of whether there is a political environment that consolidates this idea. For now, the political environment doesn't do that. From your perspective, Dr. Louros, what is the next step here? Like, what is the next thing that needs to happen in order to increase stability in Haiti?

You need to empower the security forces in Haiti. You have to resort to a kind of mobilization program for the army and for the police, meaning that you need a mobilization of more or less two or three thousand members of the armed forces in order to represent a counter force. You need to have numbers on the ground. So five thousand people, that can be done in one year. So you need to have it. Within Haiti, because what we were talking about before is international forces coming in and supporting these forces. But you seem to say that wasn't the solution. But wouldn't that give them kind of the immediate numbers that they would need? No, they are talking about 1000 policemen coming from the international police force.

But the problem with when international forces arrive, they need to get used to the physical environment of the country. That takes time. The forces that I'm talking about, it's not only to fight the criminal gangs now. They also have to fight them in the future. It is for the future of the country. It's not for only now. That's one. You need a government which is in security mode. You need a security cabinet, a kind of national security state for now, meaning that all the political and security apparatus should gear toward re-establishing security in the country. We have not had that. All the strategies that we have had in Haiti have been to rely on the international community

to take a resolution at the United Nations. And a foreign country will be very generous to give us maybe 1,000 policemen to come and resolve the problem for us. The thought process of the Haitian authorities right now should be through how we manage the situation and what are the resources of the state that we are going to put in it to do it, to buy ammunitions, to buy arms, to train soldiers, to train policemen in order to do that. This is a security policy, the survival of the state. And we need to take actions and initiatives that all states in the world will take when they are facing this kind of situation.

Very lastly here, Dr. Larroze, I mean, it sounds like you're saying that whatever comes next, it has to come from the Haitian people. And we hear a lot of international leaders, including those in Canada and the U.S., say that only the Haitian people can determine their futures. Now, all of us know that only the Haitian people can, only the Haitian people should determine their own future, not anyone else. What would you say to those leaders? Are they approaching this in the right way? I can observe and identify a disconnect between what the international leaders are saying that Haiti needs and what Haitians are saying that they need. I think we need international cooperation

because we are a country and we are facing very, very difficult moment in our life. We need international cooperation, but we don't need international servitude. We don't need international indignity. We need the cooperation of the United Nations, and we need the cooperation of countries that can help us through their technical advancement. But we don't need an international occupation. We don't need international diktat.

If we need international expertise in whatever field that we don't control, we'll have to do that in a cooperative manner, with respect and also with gratitude. Because we still have to not forget that Haiti is a country. Not only a country, but a very important one, which has contributed to the betterment of mankind in terms of spreading ideas of freedom and liberty and equality in the world. It's a very important heritage for humanity, Haiti. The Haitians know that.

For now, they are, I would say, they are off track in their history. But the challenge for them is to be on track with that and to propel themselves to different horizons. Dr. Lerhose, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Thank you very much for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Manjot Singh. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.