PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Schools and hospitals have closed.
Kidnappings are a daily risk and gang wars are waged openly in the streets. But now the chaos that has long consumed many parts of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince has spread: The national police — outgunned, outnumbered, underpaid and demoralized — have relinquished control of most from the city to the gangs.
Hardly anyone is safe, say analysts and residents, not even the wealthy who have long looked down on the gang-ridden city from their mountain homes.
Youri Mevs, a partner in an industrial park who lives in the mountains, said safety “is a matter of avoiding being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, the wrong place is almost everywhere, just as the wrong time is literally all the time.”
Gangs operate with impunity, analysts say, attacking police officers and destroying police stations. The collapse of law and order has even led officials to tell residents that they must take their protection into their own hands, and not count on the government.
The violence has spread beyond the capital: More than 200 people were killed across the country in the first two weeks of March, mostly by snipers who randomly shot people in their homes or on the streets, the United Nations said.
The assassination of Jovenel Moïse, the President of Haiti, in July 2021 plunged the country into terror and disorder: the interim Prime Minister is widely seen as inept. There is no legislature since the terms of the last remaining members of Parliament expired in January, and the judiciary is seen as fundamentally corrupt.
A UN official in Haiti said in December that gangs controlled about 60 percent of Port-au-Prince. Analysts now estimate that figure is over 90 percent.
“The government is deeply concerned” about the violence, Jean-Junior Joseph, spokesman for Ariel Henry, Haiti’s acting prime minister, said in a statement. He acknowledged that the police can no longer deal with the gangs.
The national police force has been reduced to less than 9,000 members, the UN reports, from 15,000 three years ago, after many agents resigned or left the country, among other factors. At least 12 police officers were killed in January, prompting many others to abandon their stations and checkpoints.
Entry-level officers earn less than $200 a month, more than the minimum wage, but not enough for many officers to perform an increasingly lethal role, said Gesnel Morlant, a spokesman for a Haitian police union. “If nothing is done, the police force could collapse in the next few weeks,” he said.
In October, the Henry government called for external military intervention to quell the violence, a remarkable request that underscored the dire situation in a country that deeply resents foreign intervention. Biden Administration officials are pushing to assemble a multinational armed force in Haiti, though the effort has stalled, largely because no country wants to lead it.
Videos posted on social media show residents fleeing their homes as the fires rage. Others show crowds of people fleeing gunfire and groups of men armed with rifles patrolling the streets.
Doctors Without Borders, the global humanitarian organization that helps keep Haiti’s health system running, closed its hospital in Cité Soleil — the country’s largest slum — last month because heavily armed groups were fighting just meters from the compound’s gate. from the hospital, said Vincent Harris, a medical consultant who worked at that hospital.
“Bullets were flying over the hospital,” he said.
By: ANDRE PAULTRE and CHRIS CAMERON
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6635409, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-29 21:10:09
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