Kenya has halted plans to deploy a thousand of its police officers to lead the mission in Haiti to restore law and order in the streets rocked by gang protests for the past few months after the country’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry bowed to pressure to resign.
Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, made the decision despite expressing enthusiasm in October last year for leading a U.N. peacekeeping mission to Haiti. The policing plans attracted criticism from Kenyans, with the majority saying that the country needs to prioritize deploying its police to Haiti.
The plan was also challenged in court. Kenya’s highest court, The Supreme Court, ruled that it was unconstitutional for the president to deploy police to Haiti, in part, because of a lack of reciprocal agreements on such deployments between the two countries; a ruling that Kenyan President Wiliam Ruto insists on going against.
Mr. Ruto said on X on March 13 that he had a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who briefed him on the latest developments in Haiti. He said he assured Mr. Blinken of Kenya’s commitment to deploy its police to Haiti.
“I assured Secretary Blinken that Kenya will take leadership of the U.N. Security Support Mission in Haiti to restore peace and security,” he said.
Earlier on, the Kenyan Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Korir Sing'oei said that Kenya had to withhold the deployment of 1,000 of its policemen until a clear administration was in place in Haiti. The announcement came after Haiti Mr. Henry said he would resign once a presidential council is created.
Haggai Chogo, a security analyst based in Nairobi, says that Kenya can send its police to the Caribbean nation only if they do it right, and only within international police law. Mr. Chogo was referring to an incident in which a Kenyan police officer died in an American hotel while he was allegedly on the way to Haiti.
No Obligation
Susan Mukami, a businesswoman and resident of Nairobi, says she doesn’t feel like Kenya is obligated to solve the street protests and unrest in Haiti when it is suffering the same problems at home as well as other domestic issues.“The last time I checked, this country did not even have enough police officers to serve its citizens, let alone a surplus for us to send to another country. At the very least, the police would be sent to a neighboring country because instability in such a country would be a threat to our country’s security and stability,” she said.
The Caribbean nation, 7,500 miles away, has had a history of street violence since the assassination of its former President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. His successor, Mr. Henry has struggled to cement a recognized leadership for his people, after failing to run a general election in January 2023 citing unprecedented levels of gang violence. This stripped the nation of a democratically-elected leadership.
Gang violence is not new to Haiti, as history has it that previous leaders have formed and utilized them to support their political agenda, in parallel to the country’s police system. According to an October 2022 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime that detailed the historical timeline of Haitian gangs, the gangs have existed since the time of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Haiti’s elected leader-turned-dictator from 1957 through 1971. Successive leaders have formed and utilized armed groups external to the nation’s national security forces for protection or to enforce their agendas and self-interest.
Mr. Ruto said that he and Mr. Henry had witnessed the signing of the reciprocal agreements to salvage the plan for sending Kenya’s police to Haiti on March 1, clearing the rough legal path for deployment.
While Mr. Henry was in Nairobi to sign the pact with Kenya, violence escalated sharply in Haiti since Feb. 29, with gunmen burning police stations, closing the main international airports, and raiding the country’s two biggest prisons and releasing more than 4,000 inmates.
This made it hard for the Caribbean country’s prime minister to fly back into his country. He was stranded for some days in Puerto Rico before he made the announcement that he would cede to the demands of gang leaders that he step down.
But as Kenya plans to put boots on Haitian soil, it may as well be depriving its own citizens of the much-needed services. The United Nations recommends that every country should have at least a 1 to 450 police-to-citizen ratio. Kenya currently stands at 1:1,150.
According to Mr. Chogo, Administration Police officers can only, at the very least, be deployed to Haiti after they have been retrained and given the Kenya Police uniform for them to be under the international police act.
“Let the police deal with that matter in the correct way, but not by mixing up our police in Kenya because it has been diluted and not done the way it is supposed to be. Next time, they are going to call the Kenya Wildlife Police,” Mr. Chogo said.
