There's an unanswered question hanging over the complex political negotiations on the future of this failed state — if the gangs are to be excluded from power, who is going to take power from them?A child watches from an opening in a security gate as residents flee their homes due to gang violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on March 9.
"There simply isn't enough strength in the state of Haiti to respond to the level of violence that's being perpetrated by these gangs," Rae told CBC News.While Haiti's security problems are complicated and multi-dimensional, they can also be summed up in a single phrase: too many criminals, not enough cops.
"Everybody's being hiding in their place, in their home. All the schools are out for now. We're waiting to see what's going to happen," he said. "But today it was calm. We're all waiting to see what's going to be the reaction of those criminal groups." "There are a lot of threats against the multinational force that's supposed to come," Haiti-based freelance journalist Anne-Marie Schoen told CBC News.
Former cop "Barbecue" Cherizier is merely one of Port-au-Prince's gang leaders, although he's perhaps the most talkative and certainly the best-known. Five of the seven voting seats will go to Haitian political parties and coalitions: Pitit Desalin, led by Sen. Moïse Jean Charles; Fanmi Lavalas, the left-wing party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide; EDE/RED, a party led by former prime minister Claude Joseph; the Jan. 30 Collective, an alliance of parties centred on the PHTK of former president Michel Martelly; and the Dec. 21 Agreement, an alliance that supported outgoing Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
Most of the groups appeared to meet a deadline on Wednesday to provide the names of their representatives. There was public infighting within some of the groups over who should speak for them. The U.S. government, which had intervened a decade earlier to save Aristide from a military coup, took a very different view in 2004 and looked on Philippe's coup with, at a minimum, benign indifference .
"There's been a lot of pain, rapes, killings, murders, burning down of houses. You cannot, you cannot just give a blanket amnesty and an impunity ... to those who have done wrong, including to their sponsors and to those who have been supplying them with guns and ammunition. So there must be a justice component to the way out," he told CBC News.