Every International Force Has Failed Haiti; Now the Latest UN Effort Is Behind Schedule

A Mongolian general touched down at Port-au-Prince in May to take command of the United Nations-backed Gang Suppression Force, the latest in a decades-long parade of foreign military commanders who have arrived in Haiti with a mandate to fix what no one else could.Major General Erdenebat Batsuuri, a Mongolian officer with over 30 years of peacekeeping experience, arrived on May 14 to lead the GSF mission. The Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission that it replaces formally ended on April 27 after nearly two years, still short of its promised troop strength. The symbolism is hard to miss: As much as 90 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, has fallen under gang control, with approximately 26 criminal groups operating in the densely populated area. The country has not held a presidential election since 2016.Promised presidential and legislative elections that the mission was meant to help secure have already slipped. Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council had set August 30 for the first round of voting. Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé said in May that the date was “almost certainly” off, given the security situation, and the council has since pushed the first round to December 13, with a runoff to follow and no new president expected to be seated before February 2027. The numbers are staggering: Haiti recorded more than 8,000 cases of gender-based violence in 2025, a 25 percent rise over the previous year, alongside a 1,000 percent increase in sexual violence against children since 2023. UNICEF assesses around half of all gang members are children, with forced recruitment surging 200 percent last year. A new secretary-general report documents 620 children killed or maimed, mostly in armed confrontations and drone strikes, while adding three more gangs, Gran Grif, Kraze Barye and 400 Mawozo, to the UN’s list of parties committing grave violations against children. An alliance of gangs, Viv Ansanm, had been named to the list earlier. The report also flags a rise in child casualties caused by Haitian police and the government’s own Special Security Task Force, which works in coordination with an American security firm, Vectus Global. “Every international security mission in Haiti has failed for the same reason. Foreign forces with enough capability and willingness to suffer losses can suppress violence temporarily. Still, they cannot manufacture the political legitimacy, functional institutions, and economic conditions that make stability self-sustaining,” the president of the defense and intelligence firm The Ulysses Group, Andrew Lewis, tells The New York Sun. “No outside force has ever been able to hand those things to a country that doesn’t have them, and Haiti has never had them.”A Force on PaperThe UN Security Council voted on September 30, 2025 — 12 in favor, with China, Pakistan, and Russia abstaining — to transition the Kenya-led mission into the new Gang Suppression Force, authorized for an initial 12-month period and eventually slated to number 5,500 police and military officers.As of this spring, just under 1,000 troops and officers had deployed, including contingents from Chad, Guatemala, El Salvador and Jamaica. Chad is currently the largest contributor, with two battalions totaling roughly 1,500 personnel expected to deploy over the year. Mongolia, Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire and Sri Lanka have since joined the roster of contributors, with the full 5,500-strong force still projected to be on the ground by October. Operations between December and February this year resulted in the deaths of 1,343 suspected gang members, though the humanitarian cost was severe. More than 2,400 persons were killed across Haiti in that same period, with anti-gang operations killing at least 158 civilians and injuring more than 100 others.Filling the vacuum in the interim has been the gang coalition known as Viv Ansanm, which has extended its territorial reach and pushed the country to a fresh peak of violence, increasingly framing itself as a defender of the poor against predatory elites. Since early 2025, gang violence has expanded into previously untouched areas beyond Port-au-Prince. Human rights monitors documented at least 10 gang-related massacres in the first six months of 2026 alone, particularly at Artibonite, Kenscoff, and the Central Plateau, killing more than 2,000 persons. More than 1.4 million people nationwide remain displaced. In the meantime, the government of Haiti’s prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, contracted Erik Prince’s firm Vectus Global to conduct drone operations against the gangs. According to a Human Rights Watch report, at least 1,243 persons were killed in 141 drone strikes between March 2025 and January 2026, including 17 children and at least 43 adults with no apparent ties to criminal groups — operations the rights group characterized as deliberate extrajudicial killings.The United States charge d’affaires in Haiti confirmed in Senate testimony that the State Department had issued a license to Vectus to export its services to Haiti. The UN independent expert on human rights in Haiti, William O’Neill, told the news site PassBlue that Vectus’s role was “very obscure, there’s no transparency,” noting the contract has never been made public and that questions persist about who oversees operations and how civilian harm is investigated.The pattern persists in part because of how the mission is financed. Like its predecessor, the GSF relies heavily on voluntary contributions from member states; this model left the Kenya-led mission chronically underfunded.Meanwhile, the United States, which drove both missions and, by its own account, spent $1 billion supporting security in Haiti, has made clear it will not continue to bear most of the costs. With Washington stepping back from the bill and no binding funding mechanism in place, the same financial fragility that doomed the last force is already shadowing this one.That fragility lands on a population with little faith left to give. For many Haitians, the arrival of yet another foreign force carries the weight of everything that came before it.No perpetrators were ever meaningfully prosecuted for the failures and crimes committed by members of an earlier UN peacekeeping force. Graffiti reading “A bas MINUSTAH,” meaning down with the peacekeepers, once covered walls across Port-au-Prince. A Catalog of FailuresUnited Nations involvement in Haiti dates to 1990, when the UN first dispatched election observers at the provisional government’s request. What followed was a three-decade-long rotation of missions that consistently struggled to outlast the crises they were sent to solve.MINUSTAH, the stabilization mission that ran from 2004 to 2017, was troubled from the outset. Nepalese peacekeepers introduced cholera that ultimately killed over 9,000 Haitians, and persistent allegations of sexual exploitation and human rights abuses dogged the mission throughout. It closed in 2017 with the same dysfunction it had arrived to address firmly intact, critics emphasize. The Kenya-led mission fared no better, hampered by chronic underfunding and insufficient personnel.“Successive international missions have failed because they have approached the crisis too often as a peacekeeping, policing, or deployment problem, when in reality Haiti is facing a deeper form of criminalized state collapse,” the president and founder of the Global Organization for Security and Intelligence, Johan Obdola, tells the Sun.“Armed criminal gangs have become territorial authorities, economic actors, social controllers, and in some cases instruments of political power.”The deeper failure, some observers say, predates the gangs themselves. For decades, foreign governments — including the United States, France, and Canada — stood accused of repeatedly directing aid money away from the Haitian government and toward NGOs and private contractors, effectively constructing a parallel state that bypassed rather than built Haitian institutions.“Haiti became heavily dependent on outside organizations to do things that a functioning state normally performs itself,” an associate professor of social work at Miami’s Barry University, Athena Kolbe, tells the Sun.“In the short term, that sometimes kept things running. But it also weakened the government’s long-term ability to build public trust, develop institutional capacity, collect revenue, and provide services independently.”Defenders of continued international engagement argue that the alternative is worse.Human Rights Watch and other major rights organizations urged the Security Council to approve the Gang Suppression Force, arguing that a robust security intervention is necessary to break Haiti’s cycle of violence, distrust, and political fragility.The GSF comes with a broader mandate than any previous mission, authorized not just to support the Haitian National Police but to conduct independent counter-gang operations, secure hospitals, schools and ports, create conditions for elections, and help dismantle arms trafficking networks.Whether it succeeds, or becomes the latest entry in a long catalog of interventions that promised more than they delivered, may depend less on the force itself than on what, if anything, follows it.Can This One Be Different?The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, visited the GSF’s base at Camp Vertières in Port-au-Prince on June 16, calling the mission “a real opportunity to curb violence and restore the authority of the state” while warning that “the biggest disgrace is indifference.”Still, the question haunting the Gang Suppression Force is not whether it can suppress gang activity — it may well do that, at least briefly — but whether suppression alone changes anything that matters.Not everyone agrees that the stakes justify the effort.“The strategic reality is that Haiti doesn’t currently threaten regional stability at a level that justifies the cost and casualties of a serious intervention,” Mr. Lewis asserts. “The more pressing strategic concern for the United States isn’t the gangs themselves. It’s that a lawless, ungoverned Haiti is the kind of environment our adversaries exploit to establish footholds for malign activities at our doorstep.”Mr. Obdola, however, contends that the only credible path forward is simultaneous pressure across multiple fronts: armed pressure against criminal networks, political pressure against corrupt enablers, financial pressure against the networks that fund violence, and immediate social intervention behind every security advance.“A military or police presence can reduce violence temporarily,” he highlights. “But stability requires something much deeper: territorial recovery, governance, justice, local legitimacy, economic survival, social reconstruction, and the isolation of the criminal-political networks that sustain the gangs.”Professor Kolbe’s research on post-peacekeeping countries reinforces that concern. Countries are far more vulnerable to backsliding, she says, when international actors become central to maintaining security. Still, local institutions are too weak to take over once those external actors scale back, creating a cycle in which external intervention substitutes for state capacity rather than building it.A GSF special representative, Jack Christofides, told the Security Council that the force’s objective is “to degrade the operational capacity of gangs to a level that Haitian institutions can sustainably manage, thereby creating the time and space necessary for the state to reassert its authority.”A Security Council report issued in July found the country still facing “persistent insecurity, acute humanitarian needs and institutional challenges, with devastating consequences for its population” — language nearly identical to assessments of the missions that came before it. The Gang Suppression Force now has a new commander, new vehicles courtesy of the United States, and a 12-month clock ticking.Foot patrols began across Port-au-Prince in June, and forward operating bases are being established beyond the capital. By early August, GSF armored vehicles had moved into Cité Soleil and La Saline, two of the capital’s most gang-controlled districts — among the first concrete signs of operational activity the mission can point to. Still, Haiti has seen it all before.“Haiti will not be stabilized by another mission that only changes the name of the deployment. The crisis is not simply a gang problem; it is a criminalized state-collapse problem,” Mr. Obdola says. “Unless the international response dismantles that entire ecosystem, security, corruption, arms flows, child recruitment, poverty, and the political vacuum, every intervention will only reset the crisis, not resolve it.”

Every International Force Has Failed Haiti; Now the Latest UN Effort Is Behind Schedule

Every International Force Has Failed Haiti; Now the Latest UN Effort Is Behind Schedule

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