Haiti is an object lesson in the costs of global apathy

Washington Post

2 days ago

Haiti's four-year spiral into chaos is not only the chronicle of a disaster foretold. It was also one of the modern world's most preventable tragedies.
Describing Haiti as a 'failed state' is an almost comically antiseptic description of the horrific meltdown underway there. In Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital, murderous gangs now control all but a single besieged redoubt, where an impotent, querulous governing council is holed up, its members fearing for their lives.
Thousands have been killed, many in massacres, and perhaps a million have been displaced in a nation of 11 million, the Western Hemisphere's poorest. Half the population faces catastrophic hunger, according to the United Nations. Rape is rife and unpunished. The Trump administration's gutting of international humanitarian aid has resulted in closed clinics and curtailed care, deepening the misery.
For several years, one could project that Haiti's nightmare would become only more terrifying and lethal. At this point, it's difficult to imagine a dystopia more desperate than the status quo. But, as history suggests, even cataclysmic situations sometimes get worse.
Joe Daniels of the Financial Times, one of the few outside journalists to report recently from Port-au-Prince, described it like this: 'Gangsters stand watch at neighbourhood borders, ruling over landscapes scarred by rubble, bullet holes and the charred remains of homes and vehicles.' Meanwhile, with vigilante resistance fighters battling gang members in the streets, 'the police and private military contractors have begun using kamikaze drones laden with explosives.'
According to the New York Times, those drones are likely deployed by a shadowy task force operated by American contractors who include Blackwater's Erik Prince, a Trump ally, hired by what remains of the Haitian government to combat the gangs in a desperate tactic likely only to add fuel to the fire.
It all has been enabled by the world's complacence, an inexcusable moral failure.
Cynics, who dismissed Haiti as unsalvageable or not worth the bother, are as guilty as starry-eyed idealists who insisted Haitians themselves could make do without outside intervention.
The former prevailed in Washington and the wider world, which paid lip service to Haiti's agony while turning their backs on the only plausible thing to prevent it: an international force with sufficient personnel, muscle and means to restore order. The latter provided cover with a smoke screen of specious talk about the perils of neocolonialism and the virtues of homegrown Haitian solutions.
It's clear that past interventions in Haiti, including the most recent one under U.N. auspices, went wrong even as they promoted order. But it was equally obvious that without the deployment of armed international peacekeepers after the assassination four years ago of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, that the result would be violent anarchy. In the event, the pandemonium that has beset Haiti has exceeded even the grimmest predictions.
Immediately after Moïse was killed, The Post's Editorial Board, of which I was then a member, wrote, 'Swift and muscular intervention is needed.' Without it, his 'death is likely to trigger a power vacuum that would only accelerate the spiral of mayhem in the absence of almost any current elected officeholders with a claim to political legitimacy.'
Instead of urgent action, world leaders responded with foot-dragging, quarter-measures and tergiversations.
Apathy on Haiti is nothing new. It was the upshot of a brutal realpolitik to which Joe Biden, then a U.S. senator, gave voice in 1994. It wouldn't much matter to U.S. interests, said Biden, 'if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean, or rose up 300 feet.'
Not to be outflanked in heartlessness, then-candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance last year slandered Haiti with a contemptible lie: that Haitian migrants were eating domestic pets in Springfield, Ohio.
This is where a columnist is meant to offer some prescriptive relief — a beacon of light that might extract Haiti from its dark tunnel. Alas, the time for that seems past.
In 2022, as the country slid further into mayhem, its government issued a formal appeal to the U.N. for a stabilization force. A Kenyan-led mission of scarcely 1,000 officers finally began arriving a year ago — drastically undermanned, underequipped, outgunned, poorly funded and, unsurprisingly, doomed to fail. That mission has U.N. approval but limited backing. When Washington tried to transform it into a full-fledged U.N. force last fall — an effort that might have unlocked additional funding and personnel — Russia and China blocked it in the Security Council.
Tough-minded decisions could have averted Haiti's collapse. Instead, feckless international hand-wringing left fertile ground for pandemonium. Haiti has become an object lesson in the consequences of apathy.