Opinion | The West fiddles as Haiti unravels

Haiti’s ineffectual government has begged for international intervention. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has issued repeated urgent appeals for a specialized armed force to stem the violence, restore some semblance of rule of law and establish conditions for holding elections, which are impossible amid the current anarchy. The international community’s response has been a shrug.

Haiti is a failed state whose collapse, accelerated by its president’s still-unsolved assassination almost two years ago, has generated tens of thousands of migrants desperate to reach the United States. In the absence of a functioning government, and in the face of a crumbling national police force whose members are gunned down in the streets, gangs have run riot over the capital city of Port-au-Prince and elsewhere.

The incidence of killings, rape and kidnapping has soared. Street violence is ubiquitous, and children are frequently among the victims. Sophisticated, high-caliber arms and ammunition, much of it smuggled from the United States, have fed the spiraling mayhem. The illegal drug trade has exploded. Recently, the vacuum in government authority has given rise to vigilante violence against suspected gang members, some of whom have been gunned down and burned to death in the street.

In a country that has long struggled to feed itself, the pandemonium’s humanitarian fallout is cataclysmic. In a recent report, the U.N. characterized life in Haiti as a “daily, terrifying struggle for survival.” Within the population of roughly 12 million, nearly 5 million people have difficulty feeding themselves and almost a third of Haitians live on less than $2.15 a day.

The Biden administration, seeking to impede Haitians who make their way to Mexico from crossing the U.S. border illegally, has established a so-called humanitarian parole program. Under its provisions, U.S. residents who meet certain criteria can apply to sponsor a Haitian immigrant to enter the country legally for a limited period. But the program has been plagued by misinformation and technical glitches. Many Haitians who have managed to use it are health professionals, whose exodus has contributed to the country’s deterioration in public health.

Haiti’s long and checkered history of international interventions has justifiably led skeptics inside the nation and elsewhere to be wary of a new effort by outsiders to bring order. U.S. Marines built infrastructure in Haiti during a roughly two-decade intervention early in the 20th century but also were guilty of appalling racism. In this century, U.N. peacekeepers tamped down political violence but also reportedly exploited and assaulted Haitian women and girls sexually. Other U.N. troops introduced cholera into the Haitian water system through poor sanitation at one of their bases; the result was an outbreak that killed some 10,000 people and sickened hundreds of thousands.

Notwithstanding those shameful experiences, there is no plausible escape from Haiti’s meltdown in the absence of international intervention. A broad coalition of civil groups and political parties in Haiti has called for a new national unity government that would prepare the way for elections. But internal divisions among those groups, and the plain reality that there is no domestic force that can grapple with the street gangs, have produced political paralysis.

The likelihood of such political dysfunction was all too apparent in the aftermath of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination in July 2021. But the extent of Haiti’s misery since then has exceeded even the grimmest predictions.

Both the Biden administration and the Canadian government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have refused calls to organize an armed intervention. France has similarly demurred, despite its own role in impoverishing Haiti, first through exploiting Haitian natural resources as a colonial master in the 18th century, then by imposing forced reparations that lasted over half a century. Nor has the Organization of American States shown the interest or capacity to arrange such an intervention.

The byproduct of the world’s callous apathy is painful to behold — a country, unable to fend for itself, in an accelerating descent into agony.