Haiti | In Port-au-Prince, police and residents kill 28 gang members

(Port-au-Prince) 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 country of the Caribbean in 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 forces of “violence and threats” 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 the deputy spokesperson for the Haitian National Police, Lionel Lazarre.

The police then opened fire on these gang members, killing 10 of them, according to the same source. While fleeing, others were then pursued and killed by residents organized into self-defense groups and by police officers.

According to an AFP photographer, corpses of people, described as members of these criminal gangs, were subsequently burned in a street in Pétion-Ville.

Outbreak of violence

Since last week, Port-au-Prince has been shaken by a new outbreak of violence fueled by “Viv Ansanm” (Living Together), an alliance of gangs formed in February and which 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”.

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 for ransom.

The latter “demanded the resignation of the Presidential Transitional Council” (CPT), the head of the executive, and promised that “Viv Ansanm use[ait] all its means to achieve the departure of the CPT”.

UN Secretary General António Guterres is concerned about “the escalation of violence in Haiti”, according to his spokesperson and urges “urgent progress in the political transition”.

But the security situation pushed MSF to “suspend its activities in Port-au-Prince” from Wednesday and “until further notice”, following “serious threats made against its staff by members of the forces Haitian police.

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 against medical staff” .

“The following week, police officers stopped MSF vehicles on several occasions 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 numerous murders, rapes, looting and kidnappings for ransom.

Last week, gunfire at three American airline planes prompted the federal civil aviation regulator (FAA) to ban commercial flights between the United States and Haiti.

Port-au-Prince airport is closed.

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 just over 400 men there this summer.

The UN representation in Haiti 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.