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The Dominican Republic’s president said the embattled leader of neighbouring Haiti is not welcome in his country for security reasons, complicating the chances of Prime Minister Ariel Henry returning home to confront a gang uprising.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for the prime minister to be here . . . let him be in another country,” President Luis Abinader told the Financial Times when asked whether Henry would be allowed to travel home via the Dominican Republic.
Henry’s authority was thrown into question last weekend when the gangs that control swaths of the capital Port-au-Prince launched a joint revolt against the prime minister while he was returning from a trip to Kenya aimed at securing deployment of a long-stalled international security force.
The Dominican Republic has closed its 390km land border with Haiti since the upsurge in violence, with tight restrictions on the flow of goods. Henry, interim prime minister since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, had intended to fly back from the US to Haiti via the Dominican Republic last Tuesday but his plane was diverted to the US territory of Puerto Rico.
Abinader said his top priority was to ensure the Dominican Republic’s security amid the chaos. “Right now there is no government, there is no authority, there’s a total lack of security, especially in the south of Haiti and in the capital and its outskirts,” he said in an interview.
Unless a peacekeeping force was swiftly deployed to restore order and ease Haiti’s deepening humanitarian crisis, the president added, the situation would deteriorate further as the country was “on the road to the abyss”.
The US, Henry’s main backer, and Caribbean nations are putting increasing pressure on the 74-year-old former neurosurgeon to resign and hold early elections. But he has not spoken publicly since giving a lecture at a university in Kenya on March 1.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken spoke to Henry on Thursday and urged him to “expedite a political transition” through the creation of “a broad-based, independent presidential college”, the state department said on Friday, adding that the proposal had been developed with the Caribbean Community (Caricom) trade bloc and Haitian stakeholders.
Monique Clesca, a Haitian democracy activist and member of the Montana Group of opposition and civil society members, said Henry’s silence showed the extent of the country’s power vacuum.
“Even if there was a semblance of leadership before, there is now a vacancy at the head of the country,” she said.
Clesca added that US policy on Haiti had not worked. This included backing Henry over other potential leaders in the wake of Moïse’s murder but resisted committing American forces to a peacekeeping effort.
The US policy on Haiti was “a total failure”, Clesca said, adding: “We warned them, they knew and everybody saw it coming, but they maintained their thing with Henry.”
Daniel Foote, a retired diplomat who served as US special envoy for Haiti for two months following Moïse’s assassination, said Washington had “finally realised the horror of their ways” regarding Henry, who he said would be unable to return to Haiti without “a hell of a lot of help and some big weapons”.
“They’re not going to put boots [on the ground] to support Henry,” Foote added.
The Haitian government on Thursday extended a state of emergency around Port-au-Prince for a month, though the nightly curfews and restrictions on protests are barely enforced in a city largely under gang control. The measure was signed by finance minister Michel Patrick Boisvert, who is acting as interim prime minister in Henry’s absence.
Local media reported that the main port — by which fuel and food enter the country — was raided by gangs on Thursday, with a hunger crisis looming in a country where nearly half the population already misses meals.
The UN’s World Food Programme has suspended maritime transport operations around Haiti, which it said was “the only means of transporting food and medical supplies from Port-au-Prince to other parts of the country”.
“Haiti has descended into total chaos and lawlessness,” said Laurent Uwumuremyi, Haiti country director for US charity Mercy Corps. “Hospitals and trauma centres [are] overwhelmed by patients suffering from bullet wounds, including women and children caught in the crossfire.”
Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, said at an FT Live conference in Punta Cana on Thursday that “more people died in Haiti in January than in Ukraine, but nobody realises this”.
No date has been set for the deployment of the proposed UN-backed security force, with experts questioning whether the Kenyan-led grouping, whose exact size and make-up is still unclear, would be able to restore order in a failed state.
“The first thing to do . . . is to pacify Haiti” with the help of the international community, Abinader said. “Then you can develop a plan for elections so there is a legitimate government. But who’s going to vote with this level of violence?”
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