Haitian, Kenyan police took control of a rural town – then the victory led to carnage

It was supposed to be a rare victory after a wave of setbacks in Haiti’s war against gangs.

The armored police vehicles, manned by Haitian and Kenyan police, rolled into the small farming town north of the Haitian capital to the sounds of residents cheering, dancing and waving tree branches in elation.

After threats, kidnappings and a massacre in neighboring Pont-Sondé in October that left at least 70 dead, specialized Haiti National Police and Kenyan police with the Multinational Security Support mission had finally arrived in Petite-Rivière. For two years armed gangs had forcibly taken farmers’ lands and livestock and subjected residents to unimaginable cruelty after making the town their stronghold.

But what should have been a moment of relief after police entered downtown Petite-Rivière on Saturday and reclaimed control of the area quickly ended in bloody violence: On one side, armed members of the Savien Gran Grief and Palmis gangs began attacking residents in reprisal. On the other, a so-called citizens’ defense group carried out its own attacks with machetes and knives on suspected gang members and sympathizers.

The killing spree, which unfolded over three days, has left at least 150 dead, said Bertide Horace, a local community leader who shared graphic images and videos of the carnage: torched houses, streets and a river strewn with discarded bodies, many of them missing arms and legs.

“I am in Ti-Rivière … I couldn’t walk before. Now I am walking in the bush. I am not scared. They are all thieves,” a voice says on one of the videos that shows several corpses, arms hacked off, floating in a river.

The slaughter in Petite-Rivière, a small farming community in central Haiti, overlapped with the killing of more than 100 elderly residents in the Wharf Jérémie neighborhood of the capital by a powerful gang leader who accused them of using witchcraft to kill his ailing 6-year-old son.

The back-to-back massacres highlight the anarchy engulfing Haiti and the morbid fallout of a country’s descent into chaos: Haitians now fear being gunned down by warlords or being hacked to death by their own neighbors.

“We’re in a nondeclared civil war,” said Horace, the spokesperson with the Commission for Dialogue Reconciliation and Awareness to Save the Artibonite. “The people are the collateral damage. They are the victims.”

Horace said most of the killings were carried out by members of the citizens’ defense group, which took advantage of the police presence to take justice into its own hands. Between Sunday and Tuesday, she said, residents were dragged from their homes and off the streets and hacked to death with machetes and knives.

The victims, Horace said, were accused of being accomplices of the Gran Grif and Palmis gangs, which joined forces to try to stop the arrival of police. No consideration was given by the vigilante group to people’s innocence or whether the victims had been coerced by the gangs, she said.

Among those killed: a longtime spaghetti vendor who sold meals in the community and a popular soccer player who, while being questioned by police, was somehow set on fire by members of the vigilante group to the horror of his family, which watched the scene on video.

“His family has said he had nothing to do with the gangs,” Horace said. “There are people who had criminal ties to gangs but there are also people who were victims of personal vendettas.”

The Haitian National Police, which initially declared victory after regaining control of the town’s police station, has not said how many people were killed in Petite-Rivière. Human rights groups in the capital say it’s difficult to put a number on the death toll because of gangs’ control of the rural region.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé said that the government is working on reinforcing security and providing the police and the army everything they need. He acknowledged that as Christmas approaches, gang members continue “to sow terror” and putting “tears in the eyes of mothers and fathers.”

“There is no one on Earth and in the Haitian population who deserves to live in these conditions,” Fils-Aimé said during a rare news briefing where questions were not permitted. “The fight of the government is to guarantee the security of everyone.”

He asked the public to “be vigilant” and help the security forces.

“No one group can resolve this country’s problems. But I believe in my heart and all my soul that if we put our heads together, we will find the Haiti we want, the Haiti we know where people could walk when they want, take care of their business without fear.”

Clarens Renois, a former journalist and head of the Union Nationale pour l’Intégrité et la Réconciliation party, said the country, which remains isolated with its main international airport closed because of gangs shooting at jetliners, is in “total anarchy.”

“It is total disorder,” he said. “The government doesn’t control what is happening. All they can do is make declarations. they cannot take any action.”

Romain Le Cour, a senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a civil-society organization based in Switzerland, said the massacre in the Artibonite region and the killing of the elderly in Port-au-Prince “raise questions about the blurring lines between police and vigilante groups.”

“It is alarming that, in recent months, the government and police have extolled the merits of what they describe as a mariage police-population – a marriage between the police and the people – and have called on the citizenry to support law enforcement,” LeCour said. “It is a chillingly dangerous dynamic, considering that many of today’s gangs started out as vigilante groups, and one that sends the message that the state and its police are not able to provide public security.”

This year the number of vigilante units, which have replaced police security in dozens of neighborhoods of the capital, has skyrocketed.

“With the development of vigilante brigades, in addition to the gangs’ increasing territorial fragmentation, Haiti is witnessing a situation where armed militia-type actors are multiplying and increasingly taking control of government functions,” Le Cour said.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security in Washington, warned that “unrestrained brutality by the vigilante groups paradoxically strengthens the actors they are working against.”

Gang violence has left at least 5,000 people dead this year, the United Nations said. Meanwhile, the massacre in Petite-Rivière has forced 10,000 people to flee, the U.N.’s. International Organization of Migration said Tuesday. More than 700,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.

The escalating violence is yet another blow to the international effort to help Haiti get the gang crisis under control. Currently there are 416 foreign security personnel on the ground who are part of the Kenya-led multinational force. That mission is expected to be reinforced in the coming days, according to sources and reporting by Kenyan media.

The new team of officers are among 617 Kenyan police who have been vetted and trained by the United States. A State Department spokesperson declined to discuss deployment plans, citing security concerns. The spokesperson also declined to go into details about funding for the mission, which even with U.S. support has run short of money and equipment.

“If there is indeed a deployment of another contingent of Kenyan forces that would be excellent,” said Felbab-Brown, who follows Haiti and the mission’s involvement. “But beyond the deployment it is also crucial to think about how operations are designed and what the Kenya-led (mission) can actually do on the ground.”

The situation that must be avoided is short-term deployment that leads to the gangs temporarily retreating but then returning in force after the security forces leave, she said. Such maneuvers, Felbab-Brown added, provoke gangs to counterattack in response and encourage citizens’ defense groups to move against the gangs, sparking cycles of retaliation with the public caught in the crossfire.

“In the worst circumstances the so-called self defense groups, the vigilante groups, will start attacking anyone they believe, on the basis of whatever flimsy evidence, is associated with the gangs and they become as indiscriminate in the brutality as the gangs are,” she said.

The Gran Grief gang is led by Luckson Élan, one of seven Haitians currently under U.N. sanctions. The joint police operation in Petite Rivière came after police last month took back a police station in Liancourt, where gangs had killed six police officers in January 2023. The Kenyan-led force said the decision to try to dismantle the Gran Grief gang by going into Petite-Rivière was inspired by the inroads it had made in recapturing the Liancourt station.

Police launched their operation Saturday from neighboring Pont-Sondé, but lost the element of surprise when their imminent arrival played out on social media, with videos showing the armored motorcade.

After the gangs failed to block the security forces’ arrival with containers and trenches, gang members armed with automatic weapons positioned themselves inside Petite-Rivière. But even before police arrived inside the city, violence started to break out. “The people started to feel confident and started attacking gang members with rocks,” Horace said.

Two gang members were struck in the head. In retaliation, the gangs opened fire on residents, killing a local judicial official who was standing on the porch of his home. Another, the local justice of the peace, was kidnapped.

When police finally made it in, the first of several gun battles between the cops and gang members began. After the gang retreated, the community celebrated.

The joy, however, quickly turned to sorrow and fear. Over the following days, members of the local self-defense group, which had formed to protect the area from the gangs, began targeting unarmed civilians – women, merchants and anyone accused of having ties to gang members. Arms were chopped off, and people were fatally beaten. By the end of the day at least 25 people were executed, Horace said, “under the pretense that they had ties to gangs.”

By Monday, another 50 residents were killed. The carnage continued on Tuesday, Horace said, as residents begging for a safe route out of the community locked themselves inside their homes.

“Even though they closed themselves in, they were still killed,” said Horace, who in October 2022 was forced to flee after gangs killed 11 of her family members.

Le Cour said there is no doubt Haiti needs a larger number of security forces. But the problems run deeper.

“In recent months, public debate has focused on the need to beef up the capacity of the police and Multinational Security Support Mission with better equipment, such as drones and helicopters,” Le Cour said. “But the most sophisticated armory will not compensate for the lack of boots on the ground and serious deficits in police intelligence.”

The arrival of Kenyan personnel is essential, he added, but the Artibonite incident underscored how lack of information and police presence left the public vulnerable to attacks both from gangs and vigilante groups.

“Dialogue, coordination and trust must be reestablished between the Haitian authorities and foreign counterparts,” Le Cour added. “Without a strategy, boots on the ground will not be enough to reverse the balance of power.”