Haiti Doesn’t Need War. It Needs Peace. |
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Haiti Doesn’t Need War. It Needs Peace.
As Haiti confronts deepening violence and political collapse, calls for military intervention risk repeating a long history of foreign policies that have destabilized the country.
In early January, Haitian police working alongside private military contractors and Kenyan security forces, launched a major offensive to wrest territorial control of downtown Port-au-Prince from the clutches of the country’s armed groups. Explosive drones rained down from the sky and, at ground level, bullets sprayed into the densely packed communities.
A 28-year-old Haitian, who had left the country for the United States and been trying to relocate the family he left behind, told a local news outlet that his brother, sister, and father had all been killed in the police operation. He had been scrambling to get them to a safer place for months. But the search for a new family home had been hampered by landlords’ refusal to rent to anybody from one of Haiti’s impoverished neighborhoods. The stigma was too great. “Sometimes we had to lie about where we came from to avoid being associated with bandits,” he said.
The government told residents to leave, but few had anywhere to go. The day the family intended to move, the police began their attack. The man’s father and brother were killed by gunfire while inside their house; then a drone fell, instantly killing his sister. In total, nearly 120 people were killed in just one neighborhood, a local human rights organization later revealed, almost half of whom were civilians.
After years of steady descent, of seemingly ever-increasing violence and economic hardship, many in Haiti were understandably relieved to finally see the state’s security forces hit back against the bandi, despite the human toll—such is the desperation for an opportunity to breathe again. After weeks of the most aggressive security operations Haiti had seen in years, the police were able to reestablish a presence in an important commercial hub downtown, bringing, if even for a short time, some semblance of normalcy, of stability.
Later this year, a UN-authorized “Gang Suppression Force” is expected to be more fully deployed, bolstering the nearly 1,000 Kenyan forces already in the country. The goal of the force is clear: to kill the bandits and clear the way for the country’s first election in a decade. Speaking at the US Senate earlier this year, US Ambassador to Haiti Henry Wooster described the objective of the latest foreign intervention as ensuring “baseline stability,” defined as preventing state collapse and mass migration to US shores.
As I wrote in Aid State: Disaster Capitalism, Elite Panic, and the Battle to Control Haiti, everyone wants stability. For decades, just about every foreign intervention (not just in Haiti but globally) has been conducted under the auspices of stability. But the question that rarely gets asked is, stability for whom?
After the 2010 earthquake, there was stability. Billions in aid flows stoked the economy and 10,000 UN blue helmets stood guard. But who benefited from that stability? Today, there are as many Haitians displaced as in the aftermath of the earthquake 16 years ago. Per capita income is 25 percent lower than it was prior to that epic disaster. It wasn’t the Haitian people who benefited from the manufactured stability.
There is little reason to believe the US’s notion of stability will ultimately benefit the Haitian people this time either. In fact, it seems more about advancing the Trump administration’s domestic agenda of criminalizing migrants and mass deportations. Last week, amid ongoing efforts to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the US of their legal status—stopped, at least temporarily only after a judge ruled that the decision was motivated by racial bias and animus—the administration threatened to halt the flow of billions of dollars in remittances that provide a lifeline to the country. Given how the Trump campaign weaponized baseless allegations of Haitian migrants eating neighbors’ pets, it’s not hard to understand the judge’s claim of racism. But in court, the United States argued that the deployment of the GSF meant the situation in Haiti was improving and justified the ending of Haitian’s Temporary Protected Status. The judge wasn’t buying that either. “There is no evidence or reason to believe that the GSF will succeed anytime soon given the failed prior interventions,” she wrote.
So how do the particularly violent security operations at the beginning of 2026 fit into this story, and for whom will these foreign troops be providing stability?
On February 7, a date marking the end of the Duvalier dictatorship 40 years ago, the mandate of the presidential council that had governed for the past 22 months came to an end. In the lead-up to the all-important date and amid the ongoing security operations in downtown Port-au-Prince, political negotiations over the future of the transition were taking place. A politician involved described the negotiations to me as a battle between different coalitions vying to convince the United States that they were more able to ensure a smooth deployment of foreign troops. The January offensive proved decisive.
When a majority of presidential council members attempted to remove the prime........