Haitian police announced Tuesday that they had killed, with the support of residents of Port-au-Prince, 28 members of armed gangs, after the latter had launched an offensive in the capital of this Caribbean country in the midst of chaos.
A sign of very high insecurity, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) will suspend its work in Port-au-Prince from Wednesday and accuse the police of “violence and threats” against it for more than a week.
During the night from Monday to Tuesday, police intercepted a truck and a minibus transporting members of armed gangs in Pétion-Ville, a wealthy town in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince, and in the center of the capital, explained to AFP the deputy spokesperson for the national police, Lionel Lazarre.
The police then opened fire on these gang members, killing ten of them, according to the same source. Others were pursued and killed by residents organized into self-defense groups and by police.
According to an AFP photographer, corpses of people, described as members of these criminal gangs, were subsequently burned in a street in Pétion-Ville.
The death toll stands at 28, according to police.
Residents told AFPTV, on condition of anonymity, that “gangs arrived in trucks, armed with large calibers, pickaxes, large hammers, in order to cause unrest and spread terror in Pétion-Ville “.
But, assured one of them, “we will kill anyone who tries to attack Pétion-Ville (because) we are determined to preserve the security of our city.”
– Outbreak of violence –
Since last week, Port-au-Prince has been shaken by a new outbreak of violence fueled by “Viv Ansanm” (Living Together), a gang alliance formed in February and managed to overthrow the then Prime Minister, Ariel Henry.
This coalition launched an attack against Pétion-Ville and the Bourdon and Canapé Vert districts, after an appeal on social networks from one of its leaders, Jimmy Chérisier, alias “Barbecue”.
The latter “demanded the resignation of the Presidential Transitional Council” (CPT), the head of the executive.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is concerned about “the escalation of violence in Haiti,” according to his spokesperson, and urges “urgent progress in the political transition.”
This insecurity pushed MSF to “suspend its activities in Port-au-Prince” from Wednesday and “until further notice”. The NGO recalls in a press release that it denounced incidents on November 13, two days earlier, when one of its ambulances “was attacked, leading to the execution of at least two patients and an attack on medical staff.” .
“The following week, police officers repeatedly stopped MSF vehicles and directly threatened staff, including threats of death and rape,” she denounces.
– Political crisis –
This violence occurs in the midst of a political crisis with the dismissal on November 10 by the CPT of the Prime Minister, Garry Conille, who was replaced on the 11th by businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé.
He promised to restore security and organize the first elections since 2016.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has long suffered from the violence of criminal gangs, accused of murder, rape, looting and kidnapping for ransom.
Last week, gunfire at three American airline planes prompted the federal civil aviation regulator to ban commercial flights between the United States and Haiti.
The Port-au-Prince airport has been closed since.
Added to the violence is a catastrophic humanitarian situation which last week forced more than 20,000 people to move, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), unheard of on “such a scale (…) since August 2023.
However, there is a multinational police support mission in Haiti. Supported by the UN and the United States, it is led by Kenya, which deployed a little more than 400 men there this summer.
The local United Nations representation counted 1,233 murders between July and September, 45% of which were attributable to law enforcement and 47% to gangs, in a country of 12 million inhabitants.
