“We are obliged to accept it,” Charles Adison said in one of the many schools converted into makeshift refugee camps in Haiti’s capital PortauPrince, speaking about a United Nations (UN) resolution calling for this week the entry of foreign forces into the country to help the police restore order.
The United Nations estimates that about 200,000 Haitians have been displaced due to the escalation of violence. Armed gangs carry out indiscriminate killings, kidnappings, gang rapes and burning down houses.
A year ago, Haiti’s unelected government asked for urgent help from foreign forces, but it was only in July that Kenya became the first country to propose leading such a force, and on Monday it was approved by the UN Security Council.
“If they do the work the way they say it could be very good for us, we can go home,” said Neptune Dieudonne, who is in a makeshift camp at the Rex Theater downtown.
Jean Remy Renald, who is taking refuge in a camp at the Colbert Lochard School, said he supports the force if it has a good roadmap, but is concerned about the lack of transparency from Haiti’s leadership and about the failures at previous U.N. Missions committed abuses.
“When the military is in the country, they rape women, they play with our precarity,” he said. “When the military leaves, they leave a lot of children behind and spread cholera to us.”
A UN mission to Haiti between 2004 and 2017 left in its wake a sexual abuse scandal and a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 people.
For Adison, independence is incompatible with foreign forces. “But given the current situation, we are forced to accept it. Due to insecurity we are forced to sleep on the streets, we cannot live.”
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