Wild goose chase: Embattled Kenya President, Ruto sends police officers to Haiti as Nairobi burns

The first U.N.backed contingent of foreign Police Officers has arrived in Haiti, nearly two years after the troubled Caribbean country urgently requested help to quell a surge in gang violence.

Interestingly, the police officers are from Kenya where the president Ruto is yet contain the youth led protests that is tearing the country apart.

About 400 members of the Kenya led multinational Police operation stepped off a Kenyan Airways plane at Port-au-Prince’s on Tuesday whose main international airport reopened in late May after gang violence forced it to close for nearly three months.

United States President, Joe Biden, hailed their arrival as the start of “an effort that will bring much needed relief to Haitians”.
“Rampant gang violence has killed or harmed thousands of children, women, and men. Over half a million people have been displaced. The people of Haiti deserve to feel safe in their homes, build better lives for their families and enjoy democratic freedoms,” Biden said in a statement.

Biden said the eventual 2,500-strong force would also count on personnel and financial support from Benin, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Belize, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Algeria, Canada, France, Germany, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Spain.

It wasn’t immediately known what the Kenyans’ first assignment would be but they will face violent gangs that control 80% of Haiti’s capital and have left more than 580,000 people homeless across the country as they pillage neighborhoods in their quest to control more territory. Gangs also have killed several thousand people in recent years.

The Kenyans’ arrival marks the fourth major foreign military intervention in Haiti. While some Haitians welcome them, others view the force with caution, given that the previous intervention; the U.N.’s 2004-2017 peacekeeping mission was marred by allegations of sexual assault and the introduction of cholera, which killed nearly 10,000 people.

Hours after the Kenyans landed, Prime Minister Garry Conille thanked the East African country for its solidarity, noting that gangs have vandalized homes and hospitals and set libraries on fire, making Haiti “unlivable.”

“The country is going through very difficult times,” he said at a news conference. “Enough is enough.. We’re going to start working little by little to retake the country.”

Conille said the Kenyans would be deployed in the next couple of days, but he did not provide details. He was accompanied by Monica Juma, Kenya’s former Minister of Foreign affairs who now serves as national security adviser to President William Ruto. She said the Kenyans will “serve as agents of peace, of stability, of hope.”

“We stand united in our commitment to support Haiti’s National Police to restore public order and security,” she said. “It is our hope that this will not become a permanent mission.”

It is not clear what the officers’ first task will be but their objective is to steer Haiti out of a security crisis that has been intensifying since President Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in 2021.
Kenyan news reports suggest they will be responsible for defending key infrastructure including the airport, the port, the Presidential Palace, and the gang-controlled highways connecting the besieged capital with the rest of Haiti.

The 2024 mission will be the fourth large-scale foreign intervention in Haiti since the United States President Woodrow Wilson sent marines there after the assassination of then President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915.
The next big intervention, Operation Uphold Democracy, was in 1994, when the US President Bill Clinton ordered troops to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Presidency after a military coup.

Clinton claimed that marked “the beginning of a new era of hope for the people of Haiti”. Three decades later, politicians in Nairobi and Washington are using more cautious words.

Kenya’s president, William Ruto, told officers they would “bring hope and relief to communities torn apart by violence and ravaged by disorder”.

Biden said Haitians deserved “what people everywhere deserve: security, opportunity, and freedom”. He acknowledged “these goals may not be accomplished overnight” but said the current US-backed mission provided “the best chance of achieving them”.