PORT-AU-PRINCE — Private security guards watch the premises and a 12-foot wall protects the sprawling solar-powered Miracle Village in Fond-Parisien, where a self-defense citizens’ brigade patrols the town’s blocked and booby-trapped streets, day and night.
Still, Bobby Burnette and his wife Sherry, who run an orphanage, birthing center and medical clinic on their 100-acre property at the foot of a mountain range leading to Haiti’s highest point just a few miles southwest of the Dominican Republic have never felt so helpless.
“We have 498 employees and they’re scared to death,” said Burnette, who runs Love A Child, Inc., a Fort Myers-based Christian charity they founded in 1985 to help Haitian families. “For these gangs to come here and then try to hurt our children, rape our children or run them out, and hurt these poor people and take over this beautiful place that has helped so many people, I can’t conceive how evil people are.”
A brutal gang attack less than 15 minutes away in neighboring Ganthier has already left more than a dozen dead, forced thousands to flee and now has the residents of Fond-Parisien bracing for more violence.
A self-defense citizens’ brigade in Fond-Parisien, Haiti has booby-trapped streets in hopes of slowing down any gang attack after bandits in July 2024 threatened bloodshed.
Over the weekend, fresh attacks in nearby Ganthier by members of the gang 400 Mawozo left an armored police vehicle and a customs office in flames. The attack happened a week after gang members burned and demolished the local police station. A joint operation by the Haiti National Police and the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission failed to regain control of the city.
In response, the citizens’ brigade in Fond-Parisien, which has become a refuge for Haitians from at least four other communities east of Port-au-Prince, blocked commercial traffic from passing through to the gang’s roadblocks. The gang in turn has welded metal pipe beams across a key crossing, the Bonnet Bridge, to block traffic from Port-au-Prince into Ganthier, Fond-Parisien and other parts of the southeast
Now with both the gang and the brigade engaged in an escalating war, fear and panic are setting in.
“When we lie down at night and we close our eyes, we wonder if a man will be standing by our bed with an AK-47 to kidnap us,” Bobby Burnette said. “I feel like a sitting duck in a pond about ready to be shot and nobody wants to do anything about it.”
Haitian police have insisted that they have control of Ganthier even in the wake of the Kenyans’ retreat and Sunday’s attack, which left one policeman injured.
But a viral video of 400 Mawozo gang leader Lanmou Sanjou celebrating Sunday’s siege, while wearing a police officer’s cap, conveys another reality: Despite the presence of an armed international force, Haiti’s powerful gangs are continuing to make inroads.
“These guys are not for you really; they did not come to your defense,” SanJou said, taunting the Kenyans before panning the camera to show the burning customs office and vehicle, and cheering armed gang members brandishing assault rifles.
An aerial view of Haiti’s Fond-Parisien lakeside village east of Port-au-Prince. Following fresh attacks on neighboring Ganthier, residents of Fond-Parisien are panicking over a possible assault that could turn the border town to ashes.
‘Break the back of gangs’
Kenya, the United States and Haitian authorities have all claimed there have been improvements in Haiti’s security landscape since the first Kenyan police officers arrived to lead the support mission.
The progress, they said, include the retaking of the Hospital of the State University of Haiti; the main government seaport, where there’s contradictory information about whether there was a gunfight with gangs, the freeing of Ganthier and the killing of 104 bandits over a two-week period by security forces.
But while touting the “significant strides,” the mission’s backers have made no mention of its limitations, which are coming into focus with the unfolding gang crisis in Fond-Parisien, a lakeside border town. Security forces lack air support and even basic means to confront armed gangs, leaving the population to fend for themselves.
The ongoing gang attacks and the response so far are raising questions about whether the Kenya-led force can truly “break the backs of gangs and criminals” as Kenyan President William Ruto declared ahead of the deployment of the first 200 officers.
“The failure of the effort to retake Ganthier and establish a secure, permanent presence in the town, at least in the form of a forward operating base, does not bode well for the existing strategy”0 of the Haitian government, the Haitian police or the support mission, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution in Washington. D.C..
“The fact that a very important town like Fond-Parisien, a crucial strategic location on the road to the Dominican Republic …is either about to fall to gangs or is finding significant pressure from 400 Mawozo, is an indication that significant adjustments need to be made to the existing strategy,” she said.
Days after the first attack on July 21, eight armored vehicles rolled into Ganthier from Port-au-Prince with both Haitian police and Kenyan officers. The Kenyans, after spending the night and making an appearance in Fond-Parisien, then left abruptly. According to residents in the area, “they did not fire one shot.”
Fond-Parisien, a rural Haiti town near the border with the Dominican Republic is bracing itself for a potential attack by the ruthless 400 Mawozo gang. On July 21, 2024, the gang launched fresh attacks against the neighboring community of Ganthier.
The spokesman for the Kenya force commander later told the Miami Herald that while in most missions they would have set up an operating base after retaking control, in the case of Ganthier police had to leave because they had no mattresses to sleep on and no means to be fed. He also said that the armored vehicles, provided by the United States, are akin to “ambulances” and do not lend themselves for combat.
The spokesman said the force did come under gang fire. It is unclear, however, if they returned fire. One problem is that no one has seen the force’s rules of engagement, which the Kenyans have not shared. publicly.
‘These guys are tourists’
The fact that not one member of 400 Mawozo was killed or even injured during the joint operation has led some Haitians, including members of the police, to call the Kenyans “tourists.”
“People in the population are saying, ‘These guys are tourists, people who have come to enjoy the Haitian sun and who are not here to help resolve the security crisis,” said Jean Renel Sénatus, a former government prosecutor and senator whose family lived in Ganthier until the escalation in violence forced them to flee.
After the gang attack on Sunday, Sénatus issued a warning to Haitian authorities about a potential massacre in Fond-Parisien. In a widely shared social media post, he asked Conille, the police chief, justice minister and the president of the Transitional Presidential Council if they were “really going to let this blood flow.”
“When the Kenyans arrived in June, there was a wind of hope,” the former lawmaker said. But that hope, he added, is quickly fading as Ganthier and Fond-Parisien and the southern towns of Gressier and Léogâne come under threat of gang takeovers.
Felbab-Brown, who is monitoring the Kenya police presence, said she would not interpret what is happening in Ganthier and Fond-Parisien “as the writing on the wall for the entire mission.” The security mission is still not yet at full strength, which is supposed to include 1,000 Kenyan police officers and 250 members of the Jamaican Defense Force.
Still, Felbab-Brown said that what is unfolding in the rural region of roughly 150,000 residents “is enormously concerning.”
“What clearly needs to happen is a very quick, very honest learning from the massive tactical failures of the operations,” she said. “There also needs to be some very hard reckoning about the overall strategy.”
Last month, Haiti Prime Minister Garry Conille authorized the police, with the support of the Haitian military and the Kenyan mission to launch operations in 14 municipalities that are under the control of gangs in the West and Artibonite regions, just north of the capital.
Felbab-Brown said without significant changes to the security mission, there is little hope that Conille — who has promised to take back gang territory “house by house” — to achieve control “beyond very narrow, very small, limited physical spaces.” There also is little prospect for the international community and Haiti to secure elections “that are to take place next year without substantial negotiations between Haitian politicians and the gangs.”
Jean-Bernard Son, a local leader in Fond-Parisien, said what is happening in the border region is “tragic.”
Prior to Sunday’s assault, Son said he had been trying to find a mechanic to fix the police armored vehicle, which the gangs ended up burning.
Police, Son said, were attacked in the middle of the night while they slept in the customs building because gangs had demolished their police station, and survived only because of their “vigilance and courage.”
“Up until now the Haitian government has yet to do another intervention,” he said. “It’s like they are surrendering territory.”
Helping the police
The Burnettes first arrived in Haiti in 1971, before permanently moving there years later. They plan to remain putt, they say, as long as they can with their 85 children, including a 16-year-old on dialysis treatment 12 hours a night. After ensuring that the town’s handful of police officers have fuel, they’re now focusing on feeding the thousands of refugees sleeping on Fond-Parisien’s streets.
Missionaries, the couple also opened their compound this week to 60 additional children from a neighboring orphanage. A false alarm last week about the gang invading, coupled with volleys of gunfire, sent the children running out in the middle of the night. While trying to make it to the Burnette’s Love A Child facility, however, the children’s vehicle broke down, forcing Bobby Burnette to go out in the dark to rescue them.
Unable to take the pain and the prospect of their life’s work going up in flames, the couple recently took their frustrations to their social media page where they lashed out at authorities —and asked for prayers.
“These people who I see around here, I see fear. They are running through the mountains, they are running for their lives, they think they are going to die any day,” Bobby Burnette said. “They’ve lost their economy, they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost everything. Help them. If they save us it would be nice, but save their people first.”
In the three years since the attacks began escalating, Bobby Burnett said he has not “gone down the road to Ganthier or to Croix-des-Bouquets.”
“I would not come back,” he said, “it’s that dangerous.”
Earlier this week, members of the town brigade killed a local resident whom they claimed was in contact with 400 Mawozo gang members.
“The Haitian people here are ready to fight,” Burnette said. “But they have no backup. I don’t understand how the government does not help its own people.”
By JACQUELINE CHARLES/Miami Herald