Excerpt from caribbeannationalweekly.com
Haiti has never been far from widescale human suffering, grave political instability, and grim economic underdevelopment. But its circumstances today are worse than they have been before.
The country has become a battleground for rival criminal gangs whose weapons are superior to those of the police, both in quantity and firepower. These gangs have established fiefdoms in which they rule supreme, terrorizing communities, kidnapping people, demanding huge ransoms, committing vile murders and even burning their victims alive or dead. Even more disturbing, some gangs appear to have established links with politicians.
Beyond the loss of control of law and order, the country is being governed, in name, by unelected officials with no independent judiciary or a functioning national assembly. An accord among civil society groups and political players, fashioned in September 2021, has collapsed. This makes the fulfillment of the desire for a Haitian-led solution to the country’s problems most unlikely, and not credible.
What makes this situation worse is that Haiti has no strong institutions to support governance and to address the deep-seated problems of the country.
Some nations – among them countries whose governments have contributed to the underdevelopment and weakness of Haiti – now conveniently hide behind the Haitian call for a “Haitian-led” solution, to do little or nothing. The United Nations (UN) withdrew its Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in October 2017, after 13 years.
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