By Jacqueline Charles, Chatham House, Dec. 15, 2025
In September, Tom Fletcher, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, arrived in a gang-ravaged Port-au-Prince to see Haiti’s deepening crisis first-hand and draw it to the world’s attention. Wherever he went – whether a dehumanizing tent city home to the displaced or a women-led charity centre caring for rape survivors – he heard the same message: Haitians are tired of the unrelenting violence that has haunted their country for years and simply want peace.
A fortnight later diplomats at the UN approved a beefed-up force to tackle Haiti’s armed gangs (China, Pakistan and Russia abstained in the Security Council vote). But with the country’s ruling Transitional Presidential Council coming to the end of its mandate in February, will the new Gang Suppression Force (GSF) deliver what Haitians want?
As UN members welcomed the GSF initiative and debated renewal of sanctions on the perpetrators of violence in Haiti, Mike Waltz, America’s ambassador to the UN, declared ‘the era of impunity over’. The new force, he said, will ‘concentrate on Haiti’s immediate, critical security challenges’ but ‘long-term recovery will depend on the Haitian people.’
Political vacuum
The international community has long grappled with how to address the crisis in Haiti, which deepened dramatically after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. The formation of a nine-member Transitional Presidential Council in April 2024 to temporarily rule the country and pave the way for a new prime minister was intended to restore order. However, the council will miss its 7 February deadline for passing power to an elected government.
As a political vacuum looms, pressure is building from Washington for elections to be held. But it will be months, at best, before a UN-authorized Haiti support office, charged with financing the GSF’s logistics, will be up and running. Little indicates that the GSF, consisting of 5,500 police and soldiers with the power to detain suspected gang members and 50 civilians, will be fully functional before February when violence may flare up again.
2.7 million
people are estimated to live in a gang-controlled neighbourhood.
Despite the support for the UN resolution to establish the force, proposed by the US and Panama, countries have been slow to write cheques or deploy troops. And while the mechanics remain unclear, the rhetoric surrounding the force is worrying observers. The next phase of the response to the crisis, some argue, cannot just be focused on the killing or arrest of gang leaders. Those alone won’t bring peace. Instead, a comprehensive approach is needed to tie security to social justice and create a path for reconciliation through the building of trust, rather than the criminalization of poverty.
Much of the capital Port-au-Prince is in the grip of the gangs and in 2024 more than 5,500 people were killed in gang-related violence. According to the UN, one in four Haitians – or 2.7 million people – now lives in a gang-controlled neighbourhood, while youths make up 30 to 50 per cent of the gang membership. Inside the country, however, these statistics carry little weight.
Armed children
Increasingly, the armed children, some as young as eight years old, and the people living in these disenfranchised neighbourhoods are no longer seen as victims and are often regarded as villains by the Haitian police. When one gang leader recently invited displaced residents back to their ravaged neighbourhood, a Haitian police spokesman warned the people risked being viewed as accomplices of the gang.
‘How do we get in a conversation with the people that are most affected by violence?’ asked Jessica Hsu, an anthropologist who wants to see community-led, sustainable solutions. ‘What are the conversations people need to have among themselves, across sectors, to create different forms of peace?’ These conversations, which were already taking place before Moïse’s assassination, need to be expanded as part of a path to rebuilding, Hsu said.
Haiti’s relentless gang violence isn’t just about lawlessness, it’s also the result of failed governance and social exclusion.
Haiti’s relentless gang violence isn’t just about lawlessness. It is the result of failed governance, social exclusion and fractures that the current policy framework around the GSF fails to address. Amid the crisis that has seen more than 1.4 million people displaced, Haitians are wrestling with widespread gender-based violence, children at risk of recruitment by gangs and immense psychological distress.
‘When a kid is born, sometimes they say it’s a mistake,’ a teenage rape survivor told Fletcher as he visited Kay Fanm, the women-led centre in an area of Port-au-Prince under gang control. ‘Maybe I was one.’ At 12, she was orphaned, she said. At 15, she was shot multiple times, the scars still visible on her leg. Now, at 19, she is a survivor of one of the most horrific acts of violence being carried out by armed groups. She lives in constant fear, she said, of being killed, either by armed gangs or by drones armed with bombs the government is using to target the gangs.
The people she was renting a room from can no longer afford their home, and are moving to Carrefour, a community which fell under gang control last year. ‘Now I must go back to a neighbourhood where the armed groups are still in control. What should I do?’ she asked. ‘I cannot find any other place.’
Isabelle Clérié, a transitional justice expert, says a commonly voiced sentiment to dealing with the gangs is ‘kill them all’. To which her response is, ‘how can you operationalize killing 10,000 people, of which 5,000 are probably children?’ She went on: ‘Everybody is talking about security. They’re not actually talking about peace. We have no concept of what that means.’
Decades of dictatorship
For Clérié, the power of local communities needs to be exploited to confront not just the fallout of the crisis but its root causes, which include decades of dictatorial rule and military coups. ‘What we are living through, right now, is the fallout of these successive crises that nobody thought to address,’ she said.
The size of the new GSF is five times greater than the force it is replacing. This and the fact it can deploy lethal force may mean it is more successful than the previous Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission. But it risks repeating the failures of past UN peacekeeping missions, which focused on tactical gains rather than achieving stability for the people.
We kill them all, and then what? We party for one day, and after that, we’re going to kill each other.
Isabelle Clérié, transitional justice expert.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on non-state armed actors at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, welcomes the increased capacity of the GSF. But she warns that with gangs still making inroads outside the capital and with no confirmed date for its arrival, the GSF faces several challenges. ‘Will the mission simply be defined as “kill enough gang leaders”, in the hope that will bring about the desired outcome?’ she asked.
Observers of Haiti’s crisis say that this is the time for the US and its partners to work with Haitian authorities and local actors, be they civil society or ordinary citizens, to find a peace that fulfils the country’s needs. Merely targeting the gangs will serve only to lock Haitians in a cycle of violence. As Isabelle Clérié said: ‘We kill them all, and then what? We party for one day, and the day after that, we’re going to kill each other.’
Posted Dec. 25, 2025