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

‘When you tally up their destruction, it is heavy’

So far, Conille, who has been touring the capital including some of the areas destroyed by the gangs, has not offered up any concrete plan on Haiti’s strategy to reclaim the country. Nor have the members of the nine-member transitional presidential council, put in place after Henry’s forced resignation. They were not at the airport to welcome the mission and have been silent, not even publicizing their meeting last Tuesday with the Kenyans and diplomatic corps. Other than writing to Kenya President William Ruto asking for the deployment, the presidential council has not been clear on what its expectations for the security mission are.

Their lack of clarity aside, some like Gilles are clear about what needs to happen.

“If we think it’s foreigners who are going to come and dig us from under what we are under, clean the streets, unblock the roads, we are lying to ourselves,” she said. “We have to take our destiny in hand so that what happened here in 2024 doesn’t happen again.”

Gilles has been compiling a list of government infrastructures that have been ravaged by gangs in the past year. They include over a dozen police stations that have been ransacked and bulldozed since Feb. 29 when armed groups united. Also on her list, dozens of hospitals, schools and the capital’s three largest prisons, now unusable. Two were raided on March 2 and March 3, leading to the escape of more than 4,000 inmates, many of them murderers and rapists. A third, a woman’s prison built on the northern edge by the U.S., was also taken over by gangs who have since plowed a tractor through it.

Even with the lack of prisons to jailed arrested gang members, Gilles said there needs to be a judicial process.

“Arresting bandits is one thing,” she said. “But the bandits need to go before the justice system and give testimony, because the population deserves to know. We need to know why did they destroy all of these police stations, raped all of these women, shut down all of these schools.”

“When you tally up their destruction, it is heavy,” she said.