Top UN expert warns of worsening situation in Haiti: ‘It’s an apocalypse’

Just a month after the gang uprising began, William O’Neill, an American human rights lawyer who has traveled to Haiti for more than 30 years, expressed alarm at the rapidly deteriorating situation in Port-au-Prince.

According to The Guardian, Haiti’s international airport has been closed since early March due to an outbreak of violence, foreigners are being evacuated by helicopter, and heavily armed gang militants continue to wreak havoc with almost daily attacks on schools, universities, hospitals, banks, businesses and the political heartland. Haitian capital. The national library was looted on Wednesday.

“I know a woman who lost half of her family due to punitive detachments [бывшего диктатора] Francois Duvalier, and she says she’s never seen it so bad. Uncles, cousins, brothers were killed – and she said it had never been so bad,” O’Neill said from Geneva.

“Honestly, I’m running out of words at the moment… It’s apocalyptic, it’s like the end of the world,” added the independent UN expert who helped create the resource-strapped Haitian police force now struggling to stem the tide in the mid-1990s. years. – The level of intensity and cruelty of violence is simply unprecedented in my experience in Haiti…

Last week, the UN reported that more than 1,500 people had died in the first three months of 2024, compared with 4,451 for all of last year, The Guardian writes.

As The Guardian notes, William O’Neill is no stranger to difficult security situations, having worked in hotspots such as Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Bosnia, Nepal and South Sudan. But he expressed shock at Haitian authorities’ near-total inaction in the face of the bandit insurgency that began Feb. 29 and forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce his resignation from abroad. Haiti’s last elections were held in 2016, and the country has not had a president since 2021, when Jovenel Moise was killed at his home in Port-au-Prince. There are currently no elected officials in Haiti.

“Here, I think the difference is that there is practically no state… There is no state here, and it’s almost like in a Hobbesian world, where it’s really the survival of the fittest… And, unfortunately, now the gangs are the strongest,” he said O’Neill, who believed that only a small miracle would help the Haitian police prevent a total takeover of power.

Much of the violence so far has occurred in Port-au-Prince, where up to 90% of the territory is estimated to be controlled by powerful gangs with political ties to Haiti. According to the UN, more than 53 thousand people have fled the capital in recent weeks.

But O’Neill feared that unrest could soon spread to other parts of the country, causing a mass exodus of refugees to the United States and the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Republic of Haiti. “If this all just goes down the drain and spreads outside of Port-au-Prince into the countryside, there will be a lot of people getting on boats. You will see them take any risk to get out of there.”

O’Neill believed that the nightmare scenario would be “weeks at worst, months at best.” “The situation right now is really reminiscent of Somalia at its worst, a 90-minute flight from Miami. We haven’t gotten to that point yet. But we are dangerously close to that.”

Despite his grim prognosis, O’Neill believed the situation could be changed. He expressed hope that a multinational “security support mission” led by Kenya, numbering up to 4,000 police and military personnel, will eventually be deployed and will be able to regain control of key infrastructure such as the airport, port and fuel terminal.

The upcoming US election means the Biden administration is unlikely to send US troops to the island. But the UN expert believed that Washington could seriously undermine the position of the gangs by stopping the smuggling of American-made weapons from Florida to the ports of Haiti.

“I’m amazed that you can’t get food or medicine into Haiti, but the guns and bullets keep coming… I can’t believe my government can’t inspect the boats leaving the Miami River and seize all the rifles and bullets because Haiti does not produce guns or ammunition,” O’Neill said, adding: “If the gangs don’t have guns or ammunition, they will lose all their power.”

The gangs’ propaganda videos posted on social media in recent weeks give a glimpse of their firepower and draw comparisons to Mexico’s violent drug cartels.

Observers continue to debate the exact motives behind the mob uprising, which one attention-seeking mob figure has portrayed as a popular revolution against Haiti’s corrupt elite.

William O’Neill suspected that the purpose of the uprising was not to seize power, but rather to curb the deployment of foreign security forces and to intimidate politicians involved in creating a transition council to elect new leaders and restore order. He said the near absence of a government in Haiti is essential to the gangs’ lucrative illegal activities, including kidnapping, arms trafficking, drug trafficking and extortion.

“I can’t read their minds, but they seem to be targeting people or institutions that might be involved in change—moving from this disaster to something else. They’re not interested in changing Haitian society or good governance or anything like that,” O’Neill said of the gangs. “I don’t think they want to seize power.” it doesn’t look like the Maoists in Nepal or the FARC [«Революционные вооруженные силы Колумбии»]. There is no ideology here that could seize power in the state and manage affairs. I think they want to maintain a very weak, ineffective and largely absent state to fill the void and maintain control.”