Residents along a 14-mile stretch of the Dominican Republic borders breathed sighs of relief when an armoured fleet of Kenyan and Creole police forces rolled into a remote village south of Port-au-Prince last week in the wake of a violent group harm.
The 400 Mawozo crew, who were strongly armed when the tan-colored mine-resistant cars arrived in Ganthier, eluded capture and began preparing to flee the nearby area.
But less than 24 hours after the first major excursion of the mostly U. S. financed, Kenya-led Multinational Security Support vision got afoot, the Kenyans rolled out without taking back control of Ganthier.
What ought to have been a vision that gave people confidence in what an armed international pressure could do to restore security in Haiti is now underscoring its inadequacies as a little, understaffed effort.
The 400 Mawozo crew, who were heavily armed, retreated to the streets of Ganthier on Saturday after the Kenyans had slept for the night and were suspected of plundering homes and businesses and causing unrest. Their goal is n’t only Ganthier, one of the last holdouts in gang-ridden Port-au-Prince, but neighboring Fonds-Parisien, where local officials had taken the drastic measure of stopping carry goods cars from crossing into Ganthier and falling into the group’s handbags.
” Everyone in the region is panicking because of the emails, the challenges the mind of 400 Mawozo has been sending, especially toward Fonds-Parisien”, said a native, who asked not to be named. ” Ganthier residents fled to Fonds-Parisien, and they are now on their way back.” However, there is no longer anywhere to move.
Jean Viloner Victor, who serves as president for both Ganthier and Fonds-Parisien, said if Friday’s interference by the Kenyan-led troops had never happened, things could have been worse.
” But even though the police are trying to hang on, nothing has changed”, he said. ” People ca n’t ever go back home,” the saying goes.
Victor was attempting to match with Haitian authorities on Monday as rumors spread that 400 Mawozo head Lanmou SanJou had cut access to the Bonnet gate, which connects Port-au-Prince and the border region, in response.
The Haitian and Kenyan forces ‘ failed treatment in Ganthier, according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior colleague in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology’s foreign policy programme at Brookings, is at best evidence that changes are required to start an intervention in Haiti, where criminals continue to launch significant numbers of assaults against the populace.
In worse, it demonstrates the kinds of errors and poor planning that could quickly discredit Kenyan forces and render them ineffective in the presence of Haiti’s powerful and heavily armed criminal organizations.
An’ undercooked’ mission
” What were they thinking? that they were simply going to “ride there, hang around, pick up, and leave”? said Felbab-Brown, a security expert who has been looking into Haitian gangs and the security response. First of all, it appears that they had no intention of going there and taking the center because it seemed so undercooked in the very, very beginning of planning for the operation.
The MSS mission, which is only a month old and consists of 400 specialized Kenyan officers, would face difficulties as forces fight gangs and try to clear areas that are now under their control, according to Felbab-Brown. However, she anticipated trouble to follow after a week or two of an operation because gangs could use more firepower to stop the violence and launch a counterattack.
She said,” What is really astounding is how dramatically it’s gone wrong in the beginning.”
This was underscored on Monday when Prime Minister Garry Conille and members of his government accompanied CNN to the , gang-ravaged Hospital of the State University of Haiti,  , known as the General Hospital, for an interview. Shots rang out as Conille passed through the facility, which has a lot of trash and human remains on the ground. In the incident, Kenyan police officers were seen on video rushing to escape the line of fire and reaching for their weapons on the ground.
Noting Conille’s recent declaration that Haitian authorities plan to take back the capital “house by house, community by community”, Felbab-Brown said the statement seems” just completely inconsistent with the capacity that’s on the ground”.
There was anticipation that the UN-backed mission would launch a spectacular operation against Haiti’s criminal groups and take control of the country as soon as the first Kenyan forces arrived last month. That did n’t happen. The security expert remarked that Ganthier was intended to give the Kenya-led forces an opportunity to demonstrate their willingness to support Haiti’s beleaguered police force in regaining control of the country. Instead, it has evolved into a lesson about what it means to have a mission that is incredibly underfunded.
” The mission is so, so underresourced”, Felbab-Brown said. ” Even if you had more plausible plans, the resources of the mission, whether it’s the lack of support (or ) the actual numbers of the people on the ground, are woefully inadequate for what it would take to control Port-au-Prince and maybe go to the Artibonite”.
No holding force
There is no holding force, which Felbab-Brown sees and the Kenyans themselves acknowledge because of the Ganthier operation, which was a key selling point for Haiti’s international mission to help its police maintain territory after recovering it from gangs.
She cited the Kenyans as having” not enough of them for holding,” and the Haitian national police as having” not enough of the rest of the eventual MSS.”
Eight armored vehicles were deployed on Friday, according to a spokesman for Kenyan Force Commander Godfrey Otunge,” to assist the Haitian police in driving away the bandits” after they attacked and later destroyed the police station and set fire to a customs building in Ganthier.”
But he acknowledged that after the troops returned to Port-au-Prince, the gangs returned.
The spokesperson claimed that when Kenya embarks on a mission, it typically does so by entering and establishing a base in a gang-infested area.
” We do n’t move. He said,” We set ourselves up there, we put our troops on the ground, and we set up a pacification zone where those gangs will flee.”
The spokesperson claimed that due to “technicalities,” this did not occur in Haiti over the weekend, not to mention the fact that the mission was encountered by rogue gangs on the way back to Port-au-Prince on the outskirts of Ganthier.
According to him,” The contractor cannot supply food on this foreign operating basis, and the contractor cannot supply beds for officers to sleep, which forced us to return to our area.” ” We would have established a base there because that is what we needed if we had been fully resourced with what we needed than we were last when we went to Ganthier.”
There is another more fundamental issue: the armored vehicles the U.S. has provided to the Kenyan troops, despite Haitians ‘ clamor for helicopters to help with difficult-to-reach areas of the nation like Ganthier. They do not have towers.
” It means we cannot fight the gangs effectively”, he said. ” This is what we’ve been calling on the Americans, to make sure that they give us ( mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles ] with towers. You ca n’t fight in those MRAPs because they are like ambulances. The gangs are becoming bolder with attacks, even at close range. Without towers, we are unable to build a response. Haitian police need our assistance because they ca n’t keep those gangs alive.
The spokesman, like the Haitian police, did not confirm whether the Bonnet bridge was actually closed, which would make it difficult for reinforcements to leave from the capital. ” What I can confirm”, he said, “is that it was under attack”.
Who controls key bridge?
Local officials in Ganthier and Fonds-Parisien said the bridge attack occurred because they had chosen to keep the vehicles moving and not to cross it. The trucks, which carry produce and other supplies from the Haitian-Dominican border in the city of Malpasse to the capital, usually pay hundreds of dollars in fees to pass through the gang’s checkpoints.
SanJou, the 400 Mawozo gang leader, accused the town’s residents of betraying him by blocking the trucks ‘ passage in a video that was directed at them and threatened to halt the area’s commercial traffic for the next four months. In a separate video, he also announced that he was in possession of a cache of AK47s and ammunition.
Jean-Bernard Son, a local leader in Fonds-Parisien, said they are not taking SanJou’s threats lightly.
” Once he makes a threat, he plans them, if he does n’t have enough guys in his base to launch an attack, he buys them from elsewhere”, Son, 53, said, noting the gang is not just well armed but well financed. We are all aware of their potential, he said.
Son claimed that the people have been suffering since Ganthier’s gang launched its attacks three years ago. The latest attack, a week ago, was the fourth.
No one can find the corpses to bury them, he said, adding that there are currently people who have passed away in their homes. ” There are people who were killed in the bushes, in the streets, and dogs that are eating their corpses”.
Over the weekend, the Haiti National Police sent a new police chief to the community, who came with a team of police officers. However, they remain on the outskirts of Ganthier, and despite a meeting over the weekend to try and instill confidence in the community, panic and fear remain, residents said.
Son claims that despite what he has already witnessed, there is little hope for the mission despite the fact that the Haitian population is waiting for them.
” They did n’t shoot one bullet”, he said,” and that gives us a lot of worry”.
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