Over the weekend, Haiti was once again the site of a horrific gang massacre that reports say killed almost 200 people — and most Haitians don’t expect the man responsible to face justice, given the imploding state of the country's public security.
Haitian human rights groups say a powerful Port-au-Prince gang leader, Monel Felix, known as Micanor, ordered the killings in the Wharf Jérémie section of the capital's vast Cité Soleil slum.
He allegedly blamed Vodou followers there for using witchcraft to cause the death of his ill son — and ordered his henchmen to execute them, from house to house, with machetes and knives. Most of the estimated 184 murdered were elderly, say rights groups, including the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.
It was the second large-scale gang massacre in two months in Haiti. In October, a provincial gang stormed the town of Pont-Sondé in the central Artibonite department, killing 115 people.
Many if not most Haitians have lost any hope that their overwhelmed national police — and the U.N.-approved, Kenyan-led multinational security support mission that arrived there in July — can stop the gang homicide spree.
"We can do nothing," Samuel Madistin, a leading Haitian human rights attorney, told WLRN by phone from Port-au-Prince.
"Our security forces cannot arrest Micanor. They can't arrest any of the gang leaders" terrorizing Haiti today, he said. "They are in a state of failure."
Like many Haitians, Madistin says the job of confronting the gangs — who now control much of the country, including 80% of Port-au-Prince — is now beyond the ability of police alone.
“In my opinion," said Madistin, "we need to build, to reinforce our army.”
READ MORE: Haitian gangs attack what many call a 'last bastion" against their expansion.
Even some international human rights groups that have opposed sending a larger, more militarized U.N. peacekeeping force to Haiti — as was suggested by the Biden Administration earlier this year — now support the idea.
One of those nonprofits is Human Rights Watch, which last week released a disturbing report on the escalation of sexual violence committed by Haiti's gangs against women and girls. It said some 4,000 have reported being raped by gang members so far this year alone — and that cases involving minors has increased 1,000%.
The U.N., meanwhile, reports that gang recruitment of children has proliferated so badly that about half the gangs' ranks may now consist of minors.
UNICEF, the U.N.'s child welfare agency, said last week that Haiti is "one of the worst places on the planet to be a child," not only due to the gang violence but the malnutrition it has spawned as well.
The gangs, which earlier this year bolstered their strength by uniting in a new confederation known in Creole as Viv Ansam, or Live Together, are responsible for more than 4,000 murders in Haiti this year, according to the U.N. More than 700,000 Haitians have been left homeless by the violence, which has also included thousands of ransom kidnappings.
Haiti's Transitional Presidential Council, as well as the new interim Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, appear helpless to affect the situation.
That greatly hinders their ability to organize desperately needed new elections to restore governance in Haiti, which was largely disappeared in Haiti after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse — which in turn paved the way for virtual gang government there.
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