Haitian police and residents of Port-au-Prince killed 28 gang members on Tuesday, November 19, after they launched an offensive in several neighborhoods of the capital, a police spokesperson told the Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Around 2 a.m. (local time, 8 a.m. in Paris), police intercepted a truck and a minibus carrying gang members in Pétionville, an affluent area in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince, and in the center of the capital , declared to AFP the deputy spokesperson for the Haitian National Police (PNH), Lionel Lazarre.
During these two encounters, the police opened fire on the gang members, killing ten of them, according to the same source. Forced to flee, the others were chased and then killed by residents organized into self-defense groups and police. Bodies of people described as gang members were later burned in a street in Pétion-Ville, an AFP photographer noted on Tuesday.
Since last week, Port-au-Prince has been facing a new outbreak of violence caused by Viv Ansanm (“living together”), the gang alliance formed in February which managed to overthrow Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
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Political crisis
This coalition has launched in recent hours an attack against Pétionville and other neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince such as Bourdon and Canapé vert, after an appeal launched on social networks by one of its leaders, Jimmy Chérizier, nicknamed “Barbecue “. “We demand the resignation of the Presidential Transitional Council (CPT). The Viv Ansanm coalition will use all its means to achieve the departure of the CPT”he declared Monday evening.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “is alarmed by the escalation of violence in Haiti”his spokesperson declared on Tuesday, and calls for “urgent progress in the political transition”.
This violence takes place in a context of political crisis, marked by the dismissal on November 10, by the CPT, of the Prime Minister, Garry Conille, who was replaced by the businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé.
Haiti, already the poorest country in the region, has long suffered from the violence of criminal gangs, accused of numerous murders, rapes, looting and kidnappings. In the capital, the streets were almost deserted on Tuesday, after the police and the population erected barricades in several neighborhoods to stop the gang offensive.
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Port-au-Prince is also virtually cut off from the rest of the world after the decision of the American aviation regulator (FAA) to ban commercial flights by American companies to Haiti. More than 20,000 people were displaced in four days in the Haitian capital, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on Saturday.
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In total, the wave of violence and a catastrophic humanitarian situation have forced more than 700,000 people, half of them children, to flee their homes to find refuge elsewhere in the country, according to the latest figures from the IOM.
Around three-quarters of these internally displaced people are now housed in the country's provinces, with the Great South region alone hosting 45%, according to the UN agency.
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