UN warns Haiti is collapsing with no state to stop it

Haiti fades: 1,500 dead in three months and a state that has ceased to exist

Just over a month after gangs launched their offensive on Port-au-Prince, William O'Neill, the UN's top human rights expert for Haiti, described the country as "apocalyptic," "like the end of times." This is not idle exaggeration: the American lawyer has traveled to the island for three decades, helped create the Haitian police in the mid-nineties, and worked in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, or South Sudan. The international airport remains closed since early March. Foreigners leave by helicopter. And the national library was looted on an ordinary Wednesday. The country held its last elections in 2016 and has had no president since 2021.

1,500 murders in three months: the collapse in figures

The United Nations counts more than 1,500 murders in the first three months of 2024, compared to 4,451 for the entire previous year. The comparison allows no nuance: people are being killed at an annual rate triple that of the prior period. Up to 90% of the violence is concentrated in the capital and controlled by gangs with political connections, and more than 53,000 people have fled Port-au-Prince in just weeks. Schools, hospitals, banks, businesses, and the administrative heart of the country are among the targets hit almost daily.

What distinguishes Haiti from other conflicts, according to O'Neill, is not the intensity of the pavor but the evaporation of authority: "Here what is different is that the state is practically absent... almost like a Hobbesian world where it is survival of the fittest, and unfortunately the fittest right now are the gangs." Only "a minor miracle" prevents, in his view, an outgunned police force from losing control entirely. His reference point: Somalia in its worst times, just 90 minutes by flight from Miami.

Why doesn't Haiti take off? Dependence, elites, and two centuries of deadlock

This is where disagreement begins. One line of analysis argues that decades of international aid — food, clothing, water — have dismantled any productive structure: nobody farms if the bag of rice arrives for free. The counterargument is immediate: without that aid, the weakest would have died, and the alternative scenario looks too much like rapid natural selection. Another reading looks further back and points to the weight of two centuries of failed starts, from the liquidation of the elite after independence to a plantation system that never became a productive fabric. Some even attribute the divergence with neighboring Dominican Republic to the type of colonization — French in one case, Spanish in the other — and the degree of subsequent mixing.

At the crudest end of the diagnosis circulate racial explanations or supernatural attributions — religious consecrations, IQ scores — that do not withstand the slightest scrutiny and which, moreover, explain far less than an absent state and 4,451 murders in a year.

The Kenyan mission and weapons arriving from Florida

O'Neill trusts in one specific lever: a multinational security support mission led by Kenya, with up to 4,000 police officers and troops, to recover and secure the airport, port, and fuel terminal. With US elections on the horizon, he rules out Washington troops, but does not rule out another cheaper route: inspecting ships departing from Florida. "It surprises me that food or medicine cannot be brought to Haiti, yet weapons and bullets still arrive," he says. "If the gangs don't have their weapons or bullets, they lose all their power." The country does not manufacture a single rifle.

Mud cookies and the risk of crossing the border

There is a detail that measures the depth of the Haitian economy better than any report: the galette or mud cookie, made with earth from the central plateau, transported by trucks, and bought by women in marginal markets. It is consumed during pregnancy because it is believed to provide calcium, although doctors warn of cavities, constipation, "and worse things." When part of the population eats dirt, the rest of the agenda takes a back seat. O'Neill antiestéticars that violence will spill out of the capital and trigger a mass exodus toward the United States and toward the Dominican Republic, which shares the island. His time window: "weeks in the worst case, months in the best."

What still doesn't add up

There is a hypothesis about the motive that changes the entire diagnosis: the rebellion would not seek to take power, but to prevent the deployment of foreign forces and derail the transitional council called upon to organize elections. For the gangs, the absence of the state is not a problem: it is the business. Kidnapping, extortion, arms trafficking, and drug trafficking need exactly that. And there the analysis stalls, with no clean exit: without a state there are no elections, without elections there is no government with legitimacy to request the mission, and without the mission the airport remains closed. "We haven't reached that point yet," admits O'Neill. "But we are dangerously close."