PORT-AU-PRINCE — Haiti’s children are hungry, many of them malnourished and on the verge of starving. Fleeing burnt out homes, they account for 365,000 of the more than 700,000 Haitians who are now internally displaced, forced into overcrowded makeshift camps with no access to drinking water or latrines.
And that’s not the worst of the suffering for Haiti’s children, 1.5 million of whom have lost their access to education because of rampant poverty and gang violence.
In response, many are joining the gangs spreading violence and famine, their recruitment has jumped 70% over the past year while they now make up for 30 to 54% of gang membership, the U.N.’s leading child welfare agency, UNICEF, has reported. Meanwhile, their cases of reported incidents of sexual violence has seen a staggering 1,000% increase — just this year.
“Haiti is one of the worst places on the planet to be a child,” said Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF. “Children and families continue to experience unprecedented levels of lawlessness and brutality at the hands of the armed groups.”
The precarious situation of children in Haiti, where political stability, gang violence, recurrent natural disasters, poverty and mass emigration are undermining development, was the focal point of a special meeting Monday by the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council, ECOSOC. The meeting was convened by Robert Rae, the council’s president and Canada’s special representative to the U.N., who wants to ring the alarm on plight of Haiti’s most vulnerable citizens.
Increasingly concerned about their plight following his various visits to the country, Rae on Monday called for a prioritization to protect children as Haiti’s partners and the U.N. tries to address its complex, multi-faceted, multidimensional crisis.
“If not now, when,” he said. “Time is not our friend. We must move and we must do more. We have to make progress. We have to drive things forward. Essentially we have to hold the children not just in our hearts but in everything we do; in all of our efforts.
Haiti’s youth make up nearly half of the country’s population. Yet, they are bearing the brunt of its unprecedented gang crisis as armed groups now control large swaths of the capital and move into previously isolated areas despite the presence of 416 foreign security personnel from Kenya, Jamaica, Belize and The Bahamas in the country.
“The intertwined protracted crises gripping the country are not only challenges to governance—they are existential threats to society itself, with children paying the heaviest price,” said Maria Isabel Salvador, the head of the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti and the special representative of Secretary General António Guterres.
Schools are being turned into battlegrounds, hospitals are shuttered and children are increasingly being robbed of their innocence as they are turned “into tools of violence,” she said.
This year alone, 238 children were killed or injured due to violence by armed gangs, whose latest brazen attacks have forced the closure of the main international and domestic airports in Port-au-Prince, and a current ban on U.S. commercial flights to Haiti by the Federal Aviation Administration. Another 38 kids have been reported kidnapped.
Haiti, she said, needs more than expressions of solidarity. A $674 million humanitarian needs and response plan for the country remains just 43% funded, U.N. agency heads said Monday, leaving areas such as child protection, education and nutrition critically underfunded as nearly half of the population, 5.4 million Haitians across the country struggle to find enough to eat.
Still, despite the shortfall, the World Food Program on Monday announced that it is scaling up operations to meet the escalating food demands amid the staggering increase in people —more than 50,000 people in the past two weeks — who have been forced from their homes.
“We have been delivering record amounts of food assistance to Haitians in Port-au-Prince and across the country these past few months and will do even more in the coming weeks,” WFP Country Director Wanja Kaaria said.
The most recent food security data shows one-in-two Haitians do not have enough to eat while 2 million are facing emergency levels of hunger. Also, as many as 6,000 internally displaced people are experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger, famine.
“It’s a crisis within a crisis,” Ulrika Richardson, the U.N.’s resident humanitarian coordinator in Port-au-Prince said during the meeting, stressing that funds are not just needed to address the current violence, which is untenable, but the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe and development needs.
“We need to continue humanitarian operations, otherwise the situation would be even worse for the most vulnerable people, and this includes children,” she said. “We know that we can do more, we can do better, but for that, we need more funding.”
Richardson, Salvador and Kaaria were among several speakers who addressed the room, which included humanitarian experts, representatives of foreign countries and members of Haitian civil society groups working to stop gang recruitment. There was even a musical interlude by Haitian artist Jean Jean Roosevelt, who was designated a UNICEF national ambassador as part of a recently launched initiative to raise awareness about the dangers of armed recruitment and to prevent children from being enrolled in armed groups through art and music.
As the meeting unfolding, another meeting was also taking place. Next door, the U.N.’s Peacebuilding Commission, which supports peace efforts in conflict-affected countries, was also meeting.
The United States has been pushing for a formal U.N. peacekeeping mission to Haiti to guarantee funding and sustainability of the ongoing security effort, which is struggling to make headway against armed gangs. China and Russia, however, have balked at the idea, saying there is no peace to keep in Haiti.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S.’s ambassador to the U.N. who assumed the presidency of the Security Council for December, told journalists on Monday that negotiations for a peacekeeping mission are continuing, but acknowledged that they “are not easy.”
“This is what the Haitian people have asked for. It is what the former prime minister asked for, it’s what the new prime minister has asked for,” Thomas-Greenfield said referring to recently ousted Prime Minister Garry Conille and his successor Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. “So we’re working with other members of the council, with the secretary general as well as with others to work, to get to a place where we can bring a peacekeeping mission forward. I can’t tell you when or how we will succeed. I can tell you that we’re continuing to work on it and I know that we will eventually get there.”
For the Biden administration, time is of the essence. On Jan. 20th, president-election Donald Trump will take office and it remains unclear if his administration will support the deployment of a peacekeeping force to Haiti. During Trump’s first presidency, the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, was on its way out of the country and despite warnings that Haiti wasn’t ready to address its security crisis on its own, the Trump administration did not reverse course.
Asked about the plan ahead of January 20, Rae, the Canadian ambassador, focused on the efforts of the Multinational Security Support mission, the MSS, currently being led by Kenya. He dismissed criticism about its ineffectiveness, and concerns about Kenyan President William Ruto’s failure to keep a promise to deploy his remaining 617 police officers to Port-au-Prince by November.
“I think the MSS is frankly, a work in progress, and we have to keep on supporting it, and keep on extending and making sure it’s better equipped, making sure the Haitian national police are better equipped, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” said Rae. “I think it’s difficult, but I don’t think any of us are prepared to give up or lose our focus on the importance of strengthening the MSS.”
More troops are on the way, he said, without providing a date. And more assistance, he said, is coming to the Haiti National Police, which last week went after high profile gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier but failed to either arrest him or kill him although they reported destroying parts of his fiefdom. The intensified police operations marked the second time in recent months that police have targeted a high profile gang leader— but failed. In October, police went after Vitel’homme of the Kraze Kraze Baryé gang. They injured a top lieutenant they said but Innocent in retaliation set fire to a police armored vehicle.
Rae said for him, addressing the security crisis was the top take away from Monday’s meeting. The others were the need for more humanitarian assistance and development aid.
“You can’t get assistance to the people who need it, until we have security. You can’t address the urgent needs that people have for food and for education and for some kind of housing, unless you deal with the security problem,” Rae said. “So that puts the security issue at the front of the line in terms of what is the key enabler to getting things done. But then we also have to look and deal with the urgent humanitarian issue.” “And we also need to look beyond just the humanitarian. We have to look at the question of, what do we do with respect to long-term development?” he said.
By JACQUELINE CHARLES/Miami Herald
Jacqueline Charles has reported on Haiti and the English-speaking Caribbean for the Miami Herald for over a decade. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, she was awarded a 2018 Maria Moors Cabot Prize — the most prestigious award for coverage of the Americas.
