Haiti has fired a warning to gangs. But is Kenya-led mission enough to stabilize the nation?

“It’s just a question of whether it’s all going to add up and be enough, and if they can avoid a catastrophe, a ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident against the Kenyans that leaves them reeling or the opposite where they go in and shoot up some civilians,” Mines said.

Restoring security

Those involved in the planning of the Multinational Security Support mission have provided few details on how the foreign troops, working with Haitian police, are supposed to achieve their main objective: getting authorities to finally be able to hold long-overdue elections so that a new president and parliament can take office by February 2026.

Even the mission’s rules of engagement, required by the U.N. Security Council, have yet to be made public. But that’s not the only plan Haitians say they have yet to see.

“Kenya has arrived, a new police chief has been installed,” human rights activist Marie Yolène Gilles said referring to the transitional government’s decision to fire the previous police chief and name a new one just days before the deployment. “But we haven’t yet sensed anything has changed.”

Like many Haitians, feeling trapped by gangs’ control of roads and entire neighborhoods in the capital and neighboring rice-growing Artibonite region, Gilles has heard Conille’s recent declarations, including his call for armed groups to lay down their weapons.

“When you ask bandits to lay down their guns, it is too simplistic,” said Gilles, who runs the Fondasyon Je Klere/Eyes Wide Open Foundation. “A bandit always remains a bandit because when the bandits attack the population, they do so with rigor; they burn, they rape, they kidnap, they kill, they torch.”

“The gangs,” she added, citing the Croix-des-Bouquets attack, “are still active. There are still areas that are off limits and to quote the former minister of justice, ‘remain lost territories.’ ”

Foreign interventions

This is Haiti’s fourth major foreign military intervention in a little over a century. The first, in 1915, led to a near two-decade occupation by the United States after Haitian President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was overthrown and hacked to death by an angry mob.

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