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Security & Strategic Review - May 2025

HAITI: From very bad to even worse

A little over a year since the nine-member transitional presidential council (TPC) assumed power on 25 April 2024, the TPC’s failure to improve the lives of Haiti’s 11m citizens has been near total, prompting United Nations (UN) Special Representative for Haiti María Isabel Salvador to tell the UN Security Council on 21 April that Haiti had reached a “potential point of no return” and that the country faced “total collapse”. Either that, or as the Caribbean Community (Caricom) warned on 13 April, a takeover of the state by “a coalition of gangs” which is “threatening to seize power and compel a change in the governance arrangements in Haiti”. Fully aware of the threat from these two equally unpalatable options, and in view of the opposition from Russia and China to authorising a full UN peacekeeping mission, UN Secretary General António Guterres has proposed a hybrid model in which a new UN support office would provide significant back-up support, out of UN peacekeeping funds, to the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS). This may help, but ultimately real progress will depend on re-establishing a stable political system in Haiti, and on this a recent excoriating report from the Haitian NGO Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH) provides little scope for optimism.

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