A U.S. delegation visited Kenya about helping Haiti – and was surprised by the response

The offer by the government of Kenya to consider taking the lead in helping Haiti combat heavily armed gangs was cemented after U.S. officials received word that the East African nation was open to leading a multinational force into the troubled country, and the Biden administration sent a U.S. delegation to Nairobi.

Days later, Kenya said it would “positively consider” sending 1,000 of its police officers to the Caribbean nation, where a deadly surge in armed gang violence and kidnappings has forced the withdrawal of non-emergency personnel from the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince. Last month, the violence led to the deaths of dozens of Haitians who were summarily executed by armed gang members in a rural valley less than two hours north of the capital.

But a lot remains to be done before any foreign cops start patrolling in Haiti, a top Biden administration official told the Miami Herald, pointing out that the Kenya offer to lead a security mission in Haiti is far from a done deal. What happens next will depend on the outcome of a Kenyan government assessment mission to Haiti and a vote by the United Nations Security Council.

“What we needed to do right now was to try and find a country that would lead this thing. Now that we think that we found that, we’ll see after the assessment,” Todd Robinson, the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told the Herald in an interview Thursday. “It will be up to the lead country, to the Haitians and to the U.N, to figure out, ‘What is this going to look like? What’s going to be needed? How many more forces beyond what could potentially be committed by a lead country are going to be necessary? And how do they want this to look?’ We don’t want to preclude any of that.”

Last month, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres was given up to 30 days by the Security Council to report back on various options for helping Haiti with its security situation. With an Aug. 15 deadline approaching, Guterres’ representative in Haiti has been meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who is currently looking at four different options. They range from a mission with a large footprint with both police and military contingents, to one that would only protect strategic installations like ports and major roads, to a robust medium-sized mission authorized to use force and to disarm and dismantle gangs.

READ MORE: Exclusive: Confidential U.N. document spells out thinking on foreign troops for Haiti

Robinson, who headed the U.S. delegation that arrived in Nairobi on July 22, said during the meeting they discussed what the U.S. had in mind but also wanted to see how far the Kenyans were willing to go. Kenya President William Ruto had previously spoken with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Henry, and his government had been a vocal advocate of African countries taking a leadership role on Haiti during Kenya’s tenure as a non-permanent member on the Security Council.

Still, when the U.S. delegation left Nairobi, there were no assurances other than that Kenya would “look seriously at” helping in Haiti. The delegation left Nairobi, Robinson said, thinking that any announcement would come out only after an assessment mission to Haiti took place.

“We were pleasantly surprised to see their announcement come out,” he said about the statement issued Saturday by Kenya Foreign Minister Alfred N. Mutua.

Kenya expects to deploy an assessment mission the week of Aug. 19, Robinson said. Some members will visit the U.S. to hold further talks, while a smaller contingent will visit Port-au-Prince to meet with Haitian authorities and others about what is needed with a security mission, and how Kenya can help.

“Then they will make a decision, a full commitment to either do it or not do it, after that assessment,” said Robinson.

Should the mission go ahead, there will be vetting of officers as well as pre-deployment training on human rights. There are also ongoing discussions about accountability, said Robinson, noting that “the Kenyans are fully aware of the history of international interventions in Haiti and so they understand the sensitivity of what this will entail and they are not going into this with their eyes closed.”

Significant step

Kenya’s offer is a significant step forward in what has been an exhausting and at times seemingly daunting appeal by the United States and Guterres for an international force to help Haiti’s beleaguered police force. The appeal was first made by Henry in October as a powerful gang federation, led by a former police officer, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, blocked the entrance to the country’s main fuel terminal and port in Port-au-Prince.

The blockade, which lasted for nearly six weeks, deepened an already worsening humanitarian crisis as diesel, gasoline, food and drinking water became scarce and a resurgence in water-borne cholera took new victims.

Despite backing from the U.S., countries were skeptical and reluctant to volunteer to lead a mission to Haiti. Some feared the domestic fallout, while others noted Haiti’s fraught and complicated history with outside armed interventions.

Eventually, some countries did volunteer to help, The Bahamas, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, among them. But despite their previous deployment histories to Haiti, they lacked the capacity to lead the mission.

With Kenya considering taking the lead, both the U.S. and Guterres have reiterated their appeals to other nations, particularly from the region, “to join forces with Kenya.”

Robinson, who estimates that the cost of such a mission at between $200 million and $400 million a year, said the U.S. will “be passing the hat around,” because there is no way to directly bill countries since it is not a true U.N. peacekeeping mission.

The Kenya-led mission would be a hybrid arrangement. It would operate under a Security Council mandate but U.N. staff won’t have the same kind of monitoring and oversight capabilities that they would have with a peacekeeping operation. Still, the U.N. will be blamed for any shortcomings, observers say.

Linda Greenfield-Thomas, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., described the proposed mission as “very much a police action to stabilize the country so that [Haiti] can get back on the path of democracy... that will lead to a stable government that will be able to deal with the situation in the future.”

Asked about the unusual arrangement, she said on Tuesday that Kenya will answer to the Security Council, and the U.S. will work with council members on a resolution that it hopes will give Kenya “the guidance they need to go in to establish their presence on the ground.”

“Yes, it is unusual. But what is happening in Haiti is unusual,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “This is not a traditional peacekeeping force, this is not a traditional security situation. We have gangs that have taken over the country, taken over communities that are terrorizing civilians every single day.”

Though Kenya’s interest in Haiti has been brewing for months, the offer started to develop over the summer. In June, after meeting with U.S. officials in The Bahamas, Henry traveled to Paris to meet with African leaders, including Kenya’s president, to request help.

Days before Kenya’s public announcement, Brian A. Nichols, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that finding a nation willing to lead the intervention into Haiti “has been a challenge,” and Kenya was among several countries the U.S. was speaking to.

He noted the Caribbean countries that have publicly said they would be willing to participate, have Haitian Creole speakers who could be an important resource for interpretation and translation. A democracy in East Africa that has suffered its share of terrorists attacks along its border with Somalia, Kenya is English-speaking but has participated in peacekeeping operations in its region.

“People need to remember that the Kenyan police and the Kenyan military... have been dealing with their own terrorist problem for quite a while along their northern border. So this is a force that is fully capable of doing the type of civilian security that’s necessary,” said Robinson.

He added that “we know that there are already rumors out there that ‘They’re trying to prop up on Henry.’ We do not equate this with propping up Prime Minister Henry and the political solution is still the primary solution to bringing safety and security and order in Haiti. This is to to support the Haiti political solution that might come out of this.”

More atrocities, embassy departure

On the same day as the Senate hearing, the State Department ordered the evacuation of embassy staff in Port-au-Prince and the departure of U.S. citizens from Haiti. A surge in gang violence in nearby neighborhoods had led to dozens of families seeking refuge in front of the embassy.

In the Lower Artibonite Valley, the situation was even more precarious. A human rights report issued by the Eyes Wide Open Foundation/Fondasyon Je Klere in Port-au-Prince said at least 29 people were summarily executed in less than 30 days last month, while a dozen people were kidnapped and several women were raped and homes were looted and burned.

In one instance on July 14, eight innocent women in the rural town of Liancourt, where a police substation suffered three deadly gang attacks in January, were forcibly removed from their homes and executed in the middle of the street in broad daylight by heavily armed men belonging to the “Gran Grif” gang. On July 23, gang members invaded Liancourt again and burned several houses. Four people burned to death inside their homes.

“More than 70% of the population of Liancourt had to abandon their residence to take refuge in other neighboring municipalities, increasing the already considerable number of internally displaced people across the country who receive no government support,” the foundation said in the report published Thursday.

The human rights group criticized the Henry government’s lack of response, saying that “faced with the terror of gangs” the government had responded with “radio silence, inaction” and has not offered “any protection plan for the displaced persons, no relocation plan, nor any security measures to hold gangs to respect and facilitate the return of displaced people.”

In fact, a petition by the residents for police to station an armored tank in the municipality has gone unanswered, the report said, while “at the same time, local residents reported that traders who want to cross the town of Liancourt with their goods must pay between 500 to 1,000 U.S. dollars to the police so that an armored tank of the National Police of Haiti can facilitate the crossing.”

Primary law-enforcement authority

Those are just some of the challenges any international force going into Haiti will face, along with the Haitian police’s inability to hold security gains in gang-controlled neighborhoods because they lack the equipment and staffing.

Well aware of the challenges, Robinson said the U.S. is seeking help from an outside force with holding the ground that the Haiti National Police has secured, “so that the [Haiti National Police] continues to be the face of the fight against the gangs.”

The Haitian national police is still going to be the primary law enforcement authority, he said.

“The multinational force is basically going to give the [Haitian National Police] an opportunity to move away from protecting ground that they’ve already won, and continue to go after the gangs, to continue to do some training, to give some people some relief, some off time to do more recruiting,” he said. “All of those are things that they can’t really do now because they’re both holding positions that they won and conducting operations.”