Sao Paulo
Six years after the end of MINUSTAH, the UN mission led by Brazilian military personnel, Haiti will once again face the presence of external forces on its territory to stop what is now considered the worst humanitarian crisis in the Americas.
The United Nations Security Council agreed this Monday (2), after weeks of polarized negotiations, to send a multinational mission to help the Caribbean country’s police fight armed gangs and protect urban infrastructure.
Brazil, a rotating member and responsible for the presidency of the Council this October, voted in favor of the resolution drafted by the United States and Ecuador and twelve other member countries. China and Russia, points of conflict in the group, abstained.
Brasília is considering specifically helping to train the Haitian police, but interlocutors say there are still doubts about how to make the partnership viable, which could include sending personnel to PortauPrince or welcoming Haitian officials in Brazil could happen train them.
Unlike Minustah, the new mission will not have blue helmets and the leadership of the United Nations, in the person of the Portuguese António Guterres, is seeking greater distance from the intricacies of the mission, which will be led by Kenya at the suggestion of President William Ruto.
This does not mean and precisely because of this that there is no reason to be concerned about possible human rights violations that threaten to occur in operations of this kind worldwide. Years after MINUSTAH, episodes of sexual abuse of Haitian women by soldiers are documented, in addition to the occurrence of cholera by soldiers.
Still, sending the mission was a demand that Haiti’s prime minister, the unpopular Ariel Henry, loudly reiterated as he was under pressure to enact an agenda that would pave the way for elections the country currently has no elected official .
The current mission will have a different character than the stabilization mission that the country carried out between 2004 and 2017 during one of the most striking episodes in Haiti’s history the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people in 2010 and tens of thousands of people from the The dead included 18 Brazilian soldiers and missionary Zilda Arns.
This time the Security Council resolution authorizes the deployment of a police mission not a military one. The agreement is not interventionist in nature, as the prevailing idea is that the Haitian National Police will only be supported and trained by foreign forces.
It will be months before the first police officers disembark in PortauPrince. Optimistically, the Kenyan government says it is working with a deadline of the end of this year to the beginning of 2024. However, the statements ignore the latent concern about how many more countries will join the mission.
The East African country provided a thousand police officers in addition to the technical management of the operation. Caribbean countries also provided agents, but the total number of forces still does not reach 2,000, a number considered the minimum for the operation to have a chance of success.
The expectation was that, with UN approval, more countries would join.
Despite the differences, the current multinational mission like MINUSTAH was authorized under the umbrella of Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. The mechanism is a point of conflict between the group’s members and, with the approval of the Council, allows the use of force if necessary to “restore international peace and security.”
Beijing and Moscow highlighted the differences in their speeches during Monday’s meeting, criticizing the chapter’s adoption and calling for greater accountability for possible abuses.
The background for the differences of opinion between Russia and China are also factors that have nothing to do with the humanitarian crisis in Haiti. On the Moscow side, there are tensions with the West due to the Ukraine war, which make it difficult to reach a consensus. On Beijing’s side is the fact that Haiti is one of the few countries that recognizes Taiwan as autonomous.
The deal between the two countries, which ultimately abstained, managed in recent days to amend the text of the resolution to expand sanctions against those involved in arms trafficking into the country. The measure puts a particularly heavy burden on the USA, the country of origin of most of the weapons that end up in the Caribbean state from Florida.
Once a protagonist, Brazil no longer wants to stand out
Accordingly Sheet Brazil reportedly expressed from the beginning of the negotiations that it did not intend to take a leading role in sending security forces, even if it could send certain cadres of experts who could help with technical knowledge.
Brasília also wants to revive technical cooperation projects, particularly in the health sector, which is currently paralyzed by violence in the cities. The government also intends to establish a dialogue channel with Kenya to share knowledge acquired during the MINUSTAH years.
The calculation, Celso Amorim, special adviser to President Lula (PT), said in June, was that Brazil was frustrated when it deployed troops in Minustah and received a timid response from other Western nations that had promised help. “Brazil was devastated due to the lack of commitment from the international community,” he said at the time.
Brazil’s UN Ambassador Sérgio Danese said this Monday in New York, shortly before the resolution was passed, that the country was “considering how it can help.” “We must learn lessons from the past; we have experiences that we can share with those who will deploy police forces on the ground. But we want to see how this is implemented.”
Danese said the idea is to help the country mitigate the root causes of violence and restore institutions, such as by restoring the democratic process. “Otherwise we’ll just postpone it or have a temporary solution and the problems will come back later.”
According to the latest figures shared with the report by the UN office in Haiti, Binuh, at least 5,162 people have been direct victims of gang violence this year of which 2,907 were murdered, 383 of whom were lynched.
Fernanda Perrin from New York collaborated