COMMENTARY To observe Haitian Flag Day on May 18, the members of Haiti's political and business elite who've sponsored violent gangs could reflect on the possibly irreparable damage they've done.
It was a spasm of heavily armed violence in the nation’s capital that killed more than 30 people, led by a gang with strong links to the Caribbean country’s political and business elite.
It could have been Haiti in 2026.
But it was Jamaica in 2010.
The Shower Posse, one of Jamaica’s most powerful gangs, was lashing out over the extradition of its leader, Christopher “Dudus” Coke, to the U.S. The Posse considered it an intolerable betrayal of its decades-long partnership with Jamaica’s then ruling Labour Party — whose leader, then Prime Minister Bruce Golding, had originally balked at handing Coke over.
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The deadly mayhem that rocked Kingston in 2010 turned out to be a watershed, though. In the years after, the toxic ties between Jamaica’s political parties and their criminal street enforcers have loosened significantly.
“Advancing Jamaica’s global standing became a more overwhelming national interest,” Jamaican-American Miami attorney Marlon Hill, a keen student of Jamaican history, told me.
Remnants of that party-and-posse relationship, so-called garrison communities, still exist in Jamaica. But, Hill said, “the crossing of the line between politics and criminality is no longer so sustainable.”
Some Jamaicans have suggested to me over the years that the 50th anniversary of Jamaica’s independence from British rule — celebrated two years later in 2012 — helped awaken the national conscience.
If so, let’s play that patriotic card and remind Haiti’s own political and business bosses — many of whom stand accused by the U.S. and the international community of sponsoring the powerful and homicidal gangs that all but rule Haiti today — that Monday, May 18, is Haitian Flag Day, one of the most important dates on the national calendar.
If Haiti never holds another election, much of the blame will fall on the gang habit too many Haitian politicos and moguls seem incapable of quitting.
Maybe — OK, most likely not, but maybe — they’ll take a moment to reflect on the illicit line they themselves have continued to cross; and how it’s been crossed for so long and so often that Haiti may never be able to uncross it.
That painful possibility arose again last weekend when Haiti’s acting prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, told the country’s leading newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, that a desperately needed presidential election — something Haiti hasn’t had since 2015 — will not be held in August as scheduled because of the intractable gang violence. It will instead happen, he suggested, at year’s end.
New gang offensives
In fact, even as Fils-Aimé’s interview was going online, Haiti’s gangs launched deadly new offensives in the capital, Port-au-Prince and the Lower Artibonite region to the north. One human rights group is reporting more than 80 killed in Port-au-Prince's Cité Soleil district.
Meanwhile, it’s taking longer than hoped for a new, U.S.-backed international police support mission in Haiti, the Gang Suppression Force, to deploy. That's prompted leading Haitian voices like human rights defender Pierre Espérance to dismiss Fils-Aimé’s hopes of a year-end election as fantasy.
“There’s not even a 1% chance of it,” Espérance told Le Nouvelliste this week.
But here’s the Catch 22 for Haiti:
Jamaica has made strides in the effort to remove its politics-and-gangs tumor, Hill reasons, because “there has developed a synergy between political leadership and civil society so that it will not be tolerated anymore.”
“I don’t think Haiti has found that synergy yet,” he adds.
Unfortunately, it likely can’t be found unless elections can be held and the country’s leaders are made accountable again.
And there may not be even, well, a 1% chance of that happening any time soon.
Perhaps never, if the Gang Suppression Force or any other half-measure the international community comes up with ultimately fails to rein in Haiti’s gangs.
In such a case, much of the blame will fall on the gang habit too many Haitian politicos and moguls seem incapable of quitting.
We certainly can’t and shouldn’t hold all of Haiti’s brass responsible for the problem. But the U.S., Canada and the E.U. have identified and sanctioned too many of that cohort in recent years — from former President Michel Martelly to Haiti’s first billionaire, Gilbert Bigio, who deny the accusations — to dismiss it as exaggerated.
One former Haitian lawmaker, Prophane Victor, was fingered by the U.S. two years ago for helping form a gang, Gran Grif, to be his political muscle.
Victor denies it. But if it’s true, I hope Haitian Flag Day pricks his conscience.
