Kenya offers to lead UN-backed police mission to restore order in crisis-hit Haiti

After nearly a year of calls from the Haiti’s prime minister for armed intervention from abroad, Kenya is the first country to have now offered to lead a police force to help restore order to the island nation, where gangs that control vast parts of the country’s capital have fomented violence.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres had also been appealing unsuccessfully since then for a lead nation to help restore order to Latin America’s most impoverished country. With Haiti’s prime minister largely viewed as incompetent, and gangs having taken over vast areas of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, and its police having done little to quell the violence, the troubled Caribbean country may soon get such a deployment from an African nation. Kenya has said it would “positively consider” leading a force, offering to send 1,000 police to help train and assist the Haitian National Police to “restore normalcy in the country and protect strategic installations,” according to Kenya’s Foreign Ministry.

The United States said Tuesday August 1 it will put forward a UN Security Council resolution that will authorize Kenya to lead a multinational police force to the crisis-hit Haiti.

While several countries had previously backed the prospect of sending what the UN has dubbed a “specialized support force” to Haiti, Kenya is the first country that had stepped forward to lead the intervention. “Haiti appreciates this expression of African solidarity… and looks forward to welcoming Kenya’s proposed evaluation mission,” Haitian Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus said in a statement. The UN chief welcomed the Kenyan pledge, saying he “values Kenya’s consideration to possibly lead a non-UN multinational force”, according to UN spokesperson Farhan Haq.