Can Haiti avoid history repeating as burning streets meet vying elites?

Scenes of unrest in Haiti, as Ariel Henry announced his resignation as prime minister amid a violent gang uprising, have brought a strong sense of deja vu.

An international proposal for a transitional council to rule the country appeared to be crumbling on Wednesday. But those jostling for influence are familiar figures associated with political parties, coalitions, and the tiny oligarchic business elite that have been key players in the country’s long-running crisis of political legitimacy.

Haiti has been here before, repeatedly, in the turbulent decades since the 1986 fall of the François Duvalier dictatorship. There have been coups, transitional governments (sometimes military), ineffectual leaders and politicians who have cynically employed criminal gangs to pursue power.

The leftwing president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former parish priest and anti-poverty champion, employed armed gangs known as “chimères” – ghosts – and established a template for political violence when conflict flared up.

Henry’s predecessor, Jovenel Moïse, who was assassinated by Colombian mercenaries in 2021, reportedly was allied with the G9 gang alliance, which in turn played a key role in Henry’s removal. Figures seen as potentially influential in the country’s next chapter are said to have their own gang links.

All of which makes it likely that, whether or not the gangs that pushed out Henry are explicitly given a seat at the table – as they have demanded – the threat of violence will remain unless there is a radical rethinking of political accountability in Haiti.

Among the factions jockeying for influence is the Platfòm Pitit Desalin party, run by the former senator and presidential candidate Moïse Jean-Charles, an ally of Guy Philippe, a former police officer and coup leader with ties to politicians and the business elite. Philippe was instrumental in the 2004 rebellion against Aristide and was recently released from a US prison having served time after pleading guilty to money laundering.

In a video posted on social media, Philippe rejected a proposed transitional council which had been backed by the Caribbean regional bloc and the US.

“The decision of Caricom is not our decision,” he said. “Haitians will decide who will govern Haiti.”

Underpinning the succession of crises of governance is a more urgent issue: the fact that since US marines landed in Haiti in 1915 to start a 19-year occupation, Washington has played a key role in either anointing or sustaining the country’s leaders, who have mostly emerged from the same small elite.

Among those who have criticised the latest negotiations for a transitional council has been Jake Johnston, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. In a blogpost this week, he wrote: “Though negotiations have been taking place for the better part of a week, none of the participants or discussions has been made public, leaving the vast majority of Haitians in the dark.”

Johnston added: “It was US and foreign support for Henry that pushed the situation to its dire state. But rather than letting a truly Haitian-led process play out, those same foreign powers have opted for a stability pact that, it would seem, is likely to lock in an unsustainable status quo at least in the short term.”

Washington and the wider international community have bet heavily on a Kenyan-led intervention force to stabilise Haiti. That has been put on hold since Henry’s resignation, although Kenya’s president, William Ruto, insisted on Wednesday that his country remained committed to the plan. But previous interventions have had troubled histories: a 2004-17 UN mission was tarnished by widespread sexual misconduct allegations, and sewage from a UN camp was implicated in a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 people.

Dr Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the Chatham House thinktank, is among those who sees history being repeated. “We are seeing all the usual suspects,” he said, adding that “in moments of crisis the void is filled by the old guard of the ancient elite”.

Sabatini is sceptical too of the “diplomatic laziness” that in Haiti has tended to gravitate towards familiar political faces from a discredited political system – and the international community’s insistence that elections would magically produce a solution to Haiti’s chronic lack of political representation and accountability.

Negotiations in Jamaica that led to Henry’s resignation were aimed in large part at ending the current gang uprising, but he suggested that holding elections quickly could actually empower the gangs.

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“The rather ad hoc effort to cobble together an exit strategy for the current president and move to elections quickly risks opening up space for gangs. They have the organisation and the rhetoric,” said Sabatini, who described Jimmy Chérizier – the leader of the G9 Family and Allies gang and apparent architect of the current unrest – as an effective “political entrepreneur” in a country lacking any social mechanisms to generate significant political renewal or reform.

In large part, that is intimately bound up with the long-term failure of Haitian state institutions, and with the international donor community that has long bypassed them. With so many services provided either by NGOs or by the private sector, ordinary and impoverished Haitians have long been excluded as stakeholders in their own political system – a vacuum into which the gangs have interposed themselves.

On Monday, Chérizier made it clear in an impromptu press conference that he regarded himself as a key player. “The Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” he warned.