As the popular movements predicted, the much-touted Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti is proving to be completely irrelevant: despite the deployment of Kenyan security forces at the end of June, which have since been joined by military contingents from other countries, criminal gangs still control 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, sowing more terror among the population than ever before.
Since mid-November, the gangs that banded together into the Viv Ansanm (“Living Together”) coalition, led by former policeman Jimmy Cherizier, known as “Barbecue,” have unleashed a new wave of violence in the capital, against which the meager and limited operations conducted by the multinational force and the Haitian police have proved totally ineffective.
The civilian population has borne the brunt as usual, forced to leave their homes and abandoned by everyone, including the United Nations, which is evacuating a large part of its staff from Port-au-Prince since not even the minimum safety conditions are........