The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports on the serious situation in Haiti and a planned international deployment: “On Monday, the UN Security Council approved the deployment of more than a thousand police officers led by Kenya to the Caribbean country for 12 months.”
The United Nations’ most powerful body, so often divided in other cases, voted 13 in favor of the mission; only Russia and China abstained. (…)
For years, Haiti has suffered from fighting between gangs that control a large part of the capital Port-au-Prince and terrorize the population with great brutality and sexual violence. The number of kidnappings has increased dramatically.
Lately there’s been a movement against gangs by people who want to take the law into their own hands.
The violence is also exacerbating the already precarious supply situation. “According to the United Nations, nearly half of Haiti’s 11 million people suffer from hunger.”
“Disaster announced”
“Peace Mission of the Corrupt and Incompetent” is the title of an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on the subject:
“There has been an uproar on social media in Kenya in the last few days. The reason for this is that the government wants to send 1,000 police officers to the crisis country of Haiti, 12,000 kilometers away, from the beginning of next year. They have to achieve something there.” What thousands of UN peacekeepers have not achieved: control over the powerful and heavily armed gangs in Haiti.
Many believe the mission will be a foretold disaster. (…) In fact, the Kenyan police do not have the best reputation. But Kenya – a political and economic heavyweight in Africa – appears to be the only country ready to lead an intervention that the Haitian government called for a year ago. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021, the country has been stumbling towards state collapse. (…)
But the skeptics do not go unnoticed, and not just in Kenya. They are particularly concerned about the poor reputation of the Kenyan police. It regularly kills illegally, is considered corrupt and often acts as an occupying force in poor neighborhoods.
The human rights organization Amnesty International wrote in a letter to the UN Security Council in August: The human rights record of the Kenyan police must be carefully examined before the operation. According to Amnesty International, Kenyan police have killed at least 30 demonstrators during protests this year alone.
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Argentina: Criticism for allusion to the Holocaust
In a corresponding article, the online edition of the German weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” takes up an incident committed by a politician on the side of Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei.
“’Imagine if the Gestapo had been Argentinian. Wouldn’t that have been better?’ asked Martin Krause at an event at the University of Torcuato di Tella. ‘Because instead of killing six million Jews, there would have been fewer. Because there.’ “There would have been bribes, inefficiencies, they would have fallen asleep… but they were German. That was the problem that existed.”
With his words, Krause wanted to clearly point out the alleged inefficiency of the Argentine authorities.
The Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA) expressed sharp criticism: “We condemn the trivialization of the Holocaust,” the organization wrote in a statement. (…) The Jewish community of Buenos Aires is one of the largest outside of Israel.
Conservative presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich also condemned these statements.
(…) Krause later apologized. “He said he wanted to highlight the deficits in the education system and chose an inappropriate comparison.”
(rml)