A Kenyan police officer, part of a UN-backed multinational force, kneels for cover from an exchange of gunfire between gangs and police at a base in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on December 5, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Volker Turk, United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said on Monday (December 9, 2024) that 184 people had been killed over the weekend in the Haitian capital, rocked by a spike in gang violence.

“Just this past weekend, at least 184 people were killed in violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, in the Cite Soleil area,” Volker Turk told reporters in Geneva. “These latest killings bring the death toll just this year in Haiti to a staggering 5,000 people.”

Cite Soleil, a densely populated slum by the port of the capital Port-au-Prince, is among the poorest and most violent areas of Haiti. Tight gang control, including the restriction of mobile phone use, has limited residents’ ability to share information about the massacre.

In October, at least 115 people were massacred in Pont-Sonde, a town in Haiti’s breadbasket Artibonite region, in what the Gran Grif gang said was retaliation for residents working with a self-defence group hindering their road toll operations.

The government, wracked by political infighting, has struggled to contain armed gangs’ growing power in and around the capital.

Haiti violence: At least 3,661 killed this year; six lakh people displaced, says UN

Haitian authorities had in 2022 requested international security support for local police, but the mission — based on voluntary contributions — that the United Nations approved in 2023 has only partially deployed and is severely under-resourced.

Haitian leaders have since called for the mission to be converted into a U.N. peacekeeping force to ensure it is better supplied, but the plan stalled amid opposition from China and Russia in the Security Council.

People displaced by gang violence gather at a refugee camp in the Bourdon neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on November 15, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

“More than 20,000 people have been displaced across Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in four days,” a United Nations agency said Saturday (November 16, 2024), as residents flee gang violence that has crippled the troubled Caribbean nation.

“The isolation of Port-au-Prince is amplifying an already dire humanitarian situation,” said Gregoire Goodstein, Haiti chief for the International Organization for Migration.

“Our ability to deliver aid is stretched to its limits. Without immediate international support, the suffering will worsen exponentially,” Mr. Goodstein added in a statement.

The IOM said that around 17,000 of the roughly 20,000 people recently forced to relocate were already in temporary housing, with many having been displaced multiple times.

“Such a scale of displacement has not been observed since August 2023,” the migration agency said in a news release.

Haiti saw Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime sworn in on Monday (November 18, 2024), replacing outgoing premier Garry Conille, who was appointed in May but became embroiled in a power struggle with the country’s unelected transitional council.

Violent crime in Port-au-Prince remains high, with well-armed gangs that control some 80 percent of the city routinely targeting civilians, even though a Kenyan-led international force has been deployed to help the outgunned Haitian police restore order.

Gang-related violence has caused nearly 4,000 deaths this year, according to the U.N. human rights office.

Haiti lost major links to the rest of the world this past week when the United States banned all civilian flights to the country for a month, after three jetliners approaching or departing Port-au-Prince were hit by gunfire.