Haiti is in a state of profound decay.
Gangs roam the streets unimpeded by any sort of rule of law, the elected prime minister cannot return to the country and has been assured of death if he tries by the nation’s de facto leader: a gang chief who has earned the sobriquet “Barbecue,” reportedly for his problematic habit of burning his enemies alive.
Because of this, President Joe Biden’s White House has evacuated bureaucrats from the American Embassy in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince. But don’t expect the administration to do anything about Christian missionaries stuck in the country.
According to the New York Post, Jill Dolan, who runs an orphanage in Haiti with her organization, Love a Neighbor, said that while she’s been in contact with the embassy, she’s not getting help getting out of the country.
US missionary Jill Dolan, who runs an orphanage in Haiti through her organisation, Love A Neighbour, is trapped with her family at a makeshift motel in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
She says they are worried nobody is coming to rescue them as gang violence and lawlessness tear… pic.twitter.com/Y3ZkHYU6Ir
— Zaki Solja (@zakisolja) March 13, 2024
“Really, what they say is like, ‘Be safe.’ I’m just like, ‘OK, well that’s not really helpful,’” Dolan told the Post.
“My fear is that we will be caught in the middle of something really dangerous. We’re already on the front lines of it. We’re in a bad area,” she added.
“It’s kind of depressing. The gunfire never stops.”
Does the Biden administration have contempt for Christians?
Dolan is currently sheltering with her family at makeshift lodgings in the capital, which has borne the brunt of the violence.
Two women who work with Dolan — a woman named Lynn, who did not give her last name, and another identified as Miriam Cinotti — described the horrors of being left behind in a country that has deteriorated into literal mob rule.
“Nobody’s reached out to us or anything,” said Cinotti, who told the Post she’d rescued 80 girls from gangs while she was in Haiti.
“And then of course, when we saw the non-essential [embassy] workers get picked up, we were thinking, ‘well, maybe they’re going to come back and start evacuating Port-au-Prince and then have a plane for everyone else.’”
“We’re worried because we’re in a country where we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s unpredictable what’s going on, we don’t know,” Lynn said. She’s worried because her husband is a diabetic and she doesn’t know if they can get medication.
Flights out have been suspended after gangs tried to take control of Toussaint Louverture International Airport, the main pathway for foreigners seeking to enter or leave Haiti.
In short, the Biden administration’s apparent indifference could be what amounts to a death sentence for American Christian missionaries.
According to the U.K. Guardian, the gang insurrection began on Feb. 29 and became so intense that the U.S. military airlifted non-essential embassy employees out of the country after the political quarter of Port-au-Prince came under attack by the gangsters.
“Downtown Port-au-Prince has fallen; there is no doubt about it any more,” the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported, along with a photo of a police station that had been burned out, according to the Guardian.
“On Sunday, the Miami Herald said US marines had been flown into Port-au-Prince to reinforce embassy security and evacuate non-essential staff. US defence officials told the newspaper that the middle-of-the-night operation had been conducted via helicopter at the request of the state department,” the Guardian reported.
And consider who they’re up against: The man known as “Barbecue,” Jimmy Chérizier, the boss of the Haitian gang G9, which has led an uprising essentially shutting Prime Minister Ariel Henry out of the country he is supposed to rule. Henry announced Tuesday that he would resign once a transition council is created, according to The Associated Press — a major victory for Chérizier.
As The New Yorker noted in a profile of him last year, Chérizier is former Haitian police officer who styles himself after “a series of nation-building revolutionaries. He mentioned Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s iconic first ruler, as well as the Burkinabe revolutionary Thomas Sankara, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X.”
“I like Martin Luther King, too, but he didn’t like fighting with guns, and I fight with guns,” Cherizier said, according to The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson.
Cherizier followed that line with a “a short, explosive laugh,” Anderson wrote.
Wonderful. And under Mr. Barbecue’s de facto rule, the capital is in such a condition where the stench of rotting bodies permeates the city.
“It’s a grisly new marker of the violence and dysfunction in this beleaguered Caribbean nation of 11 million people. In the absence of a functioning state, violent armed gangs have taken control of more than 80 percent of the capital, the United Nations estimates. Gunfire crackles at all hours. Residents who dare leave their homes stumble across bodies that have been left where they fell,” reported The Washington Post last week.
“Port-au-Prince reached a high of 92 degrees on Friday. The smell of decaying corpses, human rights activists say, has driven some people from their homes. Others have taken it upon themselves to move or burn the bodies. Because who else will?”
Unfortunately, “Barbecue” comes to mind — given that’s how the moniker allegedly began.
Haiti’s descent into violence and the Biden administration’s seeming inability to protect American citizens abroad is reminiscent of the chaotic period of withdrawal from Afghanistan — when the White House didn’t seem to know how many U.S. citizens or protected individuals were in the country, didn’t seem to know how to find out, and didn’t seem to have any way to get them out.
Then as now, however, the government knows how to protect bureaucrats.
There is little food or water in the capital. Whatever hospitals remain open are suffering from shortages of medicine. The United States seems hapless to either help install a democratically elected leader in the country or get its own citizens out.
Chérizier and his cronies will likely end up playing a major role in who becomes the next head of the country. No doubt heads will roll (again, literally) when that occurs.
Is this the sign of a world where America is respected, feared and known for taking care of its own? Hardly. The stuck missionaries in Haiti are symptoms of a greater malaise: Bureaucrats’ lives matter, Christians’ lives don’t.
