PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Greater than 5,600 folks had been reported killed in Haiti final yr as a U.N.-backed mission led by Kenya struggles to include rampant gang violence, officers mentioned Tuesday.
The variety of killings elevated by greater than 20% in contrast with all of 2023, based on the U.N. Human Rights Workplace. As well as, greater than 2,200 folks had been reported injured and almost 1,500 kidnapped, it mentioned.
“These figures alone can not seize absolutely the horrors being perpetrated in Haiti, however they present the unremitting violence to which persons are being subjected,” Volker Türk, U.N. excessive commissioner for human rights, mentioned in a press release.
Among the many victims are two journalists and a police officer killed when gunmen opened hearth on a crowd that gathered on Christmas Eve for the much-anticipated reopening of Haiti’s greatest public hospital, which gangs pressured closed earlier this yr.
Different victims embody greater than 200 folks killed in early December in a gang-controlled slum, a lot of them older Haitians, after a gang chief sought to avenge his son’s loss of life following Vodou rituals, based on the U.N. It was one of many greatest massacres reported in Port-au-Prince in current historical past.
Victims additionally embody 315 suspected gang members or folks related to them who had been lynched and greater than 280 folks killed by police in alleged abstract executions, the U.N. mentioned.
“It has lengthy been clear that impunity for human rights violations and abuses, in addition to corruption, stay prevalent in Haiti,” Türk mentioned.
He referred to as for extra logistical and monetary help for the U.N.-backed mission that started in early June because the U.S. and different international locations name for a U.N. peacekeeping mission.
About 400 cops from Kenya are main the mission and had been joined days in the past by some 150 navy cops from Central America, the bulk from Guatemala. Jamaica, Bahamas and Belize have despatched a handful of personnel, whereas different nations together with Barbados, Bangladesh and Chad have pledged to do the identical, however it isn’t clear once they could be deployed.
The quantity stays far under the two,500 officers anticipated for the mission.
In one other blow to Haiti’s stability, Dawn Airways introduced Monday that it will briefly droop flights to and from the capital of Port-au-Prince, 85% of which is managed by gangs.
That leaves the nation’s major worldwide airport with none industrial flights for the third time this yr.
Dawn Airways didn’t present a motive, saying solely that the choice was based mostly on circumstances out of its management, including that the protection of passengers and crew members had been a precedence.
In November, the airport in Port-au-Prince closed after gangs opened hearth and struck three planes, together with a Spirit Airways aircraft that was mid-flight, injuring a flight attendant.
Whereas the airport has since reopened, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in December prolonged a ban on U.S. flights to Haiti’s capital till March 12 out of security.
General, gang violence in recent times has left greater than 700,000 homeless, with many crowding into makeshift and unsanitary shelters.
