Here is the job of the police in Haiti today that the Kenya police are being sent there to do.
You have to be chasing armed gangsters who will not hesitate to shoot back at you with very powerful guns. Then you have the endless demos by ordinary Haitians about everything everywhere in Port-au-Prince.
Then comes IG Japheth Koome and his commander, Foreign Affairs CS Alfred Mutua barking behind him about the police now learning French language. Those Haiti gangsters and demonstrators must be trembling in fear of the superpower coming to take them out after they have knocked out the Americans so many times since 1991.
Now the USA wants to throw Kenya into the fire while they sit back and throw some money (Sh. 14 billion) there like they are doing in Ukraine. Put money and sit back and never get involved directly.
The US Army has been stuck in Haiti for decades and sometimes it got very big like in the Operation Uphold Democracy launched by President Bill Clinton in 1994. They had more firepower than the entire Haitian Army and Police combined.
The US Operation lasted some years and succeeded in bringing back Jean Bertrand Aristide to power for a temporary break from the violence in Haiti. That lasted a few years up to 2004 when Jean Aristide was forced to flee to exile from Haiti. In fact, the news reports then were that the same American government that put Jean Aristide to power overthrew him in 2004.
Colin Powell, commanding operation there for Clinton before he became the Secretary of State under Bush, denied Aristide’s claim: ‘We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly.’ But several members of Congress threw their weight behind Aristide’s story.
The Americans who thought the new regime in Haiti would be okay soon found themselves facing a complete war in the streets from Haitians.
Later on, Collin Powell as US Secretary of State who led military operations in Haiti summarized operations in Haiti very vividly.
“We had intervened in Haiti in 1915 for reasons that sounded identical to what I was hearing now — to end terror, restore stability, promote democracy, and protect U.S. interests — and that occupation lasted 19 years,” Powell wrote. “These conditions did not yet justify an American invasion.”
Lessons of the past should drive military decisions about Haiti
Collin Powell said: “We can take over the place in an afternoon with a company or two of Marines, but the problem is getting out.” That is what Kenya will have to deal with.
The present crisis in Haiti which Kenyan leaders in their delusions think they are going to put down and resolve the permanent war once and for all started when the then Haiti president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021.
After the assassination, all hell broke loose in Haiti and it has not stopped until now and the Americans don’t want to go there. Canada with hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the country does not want to go there and even the UN is just offering lip service until now when they want to drag Kenya into the middle of a total mess ready to explode.
It is almost as if the US and the UN calculated the egotistic characteristic of the present Kenya government and knew that Kenya would jump at this head on seeing it as some kind of glory for the regime. Kenya has no idea what they are getting themselves into.
Haiti has been up in smoke since 2021 and it seems it is unstoppable.
Here is young Mr. Barbecue who leads a very nasty gang (G9) in Port-au-Prince. These guys don’t fool around with anybody and they are heavily armed even with machine guns.
The reason there are so many guns in Haiti including heavy-duty military weapons is because over the decades there have been so many military operations by the US and others in Haiti and a lot of their weapons end up in the hands of gangs after they leave.
Kenya police will discover one thing very quickly in Haiti. Unlike Kenya where they shoot unarmed demonstrators who at best will throw stones at the cops, in Haiti they return live fire with their own fire and they are going to shoot at Kenyan cops with machines that even our police officers will not have. What do you think Mr. Barbecue is going to be doing with that machine in his hands?
Before Kenyans get entangled in the present messy war situation in Haiti, the Kenyan government must ask the USA who is sending them there to back them up with a couple of battalions and army units including airborne defense units.
Alfred Mutua who is talking like he is going to be the commander of the Kenya police in Haiti should take a break and listen to the advice Collin Powell gave to the guy the US sent in Haiti to bring life back to normal in 2004 after another coup there.
“Let me make sure you understand what you’re facing,” Powell told Cedras during a tense meeting at his military headquarters in Port-au-Prince. “I began ticking off on my fingers: two aircraft carriers, two and a half infantry divisions, 20,000 troops, helicopter gunships, tanks, artillery.”
The USA has never sent their police to Haiti in all the years they have intervened there. They always send the US Army there because they know what the situation there looks like. It is a war zone. In fact, no country has ever sent its police force to Haiti to put down chaos and armed confrontations. I cannot think of any one time that any country in the world has sent their police officers to bring peace to another country. It is always the army because those are armed conflicts.
But the one thing the Kenya government has to understand before they get deep into the Haiti troubles is that this is not like fighting Al Shabaab in Somalia where you can sneak back your soldiers through the border when things are not working. This one in Haiti means when you are getting beat up you need to be evacuated with helicopters and war planes. Will Kenya have those? From where?
The saddest thing about the tragedy in Haiti which has unfolded before our eyes for decades is that Haiti has a very distinguished and honorable history as the first free black country in the Western world when the slaves there at that time under French rule rebelled and overthrew the French slavery rule in 1801.
That Black slave rebellion was led by a former black slave who became a guerrilla leader, Toussaint Louverture who conquered Haiti, abolished slavery, and proclaimed himself the Governor-General of an autonomous government in Haiti.
The French force led by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc tried to overthrow Governor-General Toussaint Louverture and was beaten in 1802.
In 1804 Haiti became independent led by a former slave, Jean Jacques Dessalines and that is the first free African state in the Western world and the first time slaves beat the hell out of their former masters to establish their own country.
That is the amazing history of how slaves in Haiti liberated themselves to establish their own country, the first one ever by African slaves in the Western world.
Fifty years from that time, Haiti had to do with the father and son complete thugs Pap Doc and Baby Doc ruining the country to its knees until the Lavalas revolution led by Jean Bertrand Aristide brought democracy to Haiti in 1991, which was 190 years since Haiti slaves defeated French Colonialists in 1801.
In between, Haiti had to deal with the Duvalier thugs in government. Papa Doc was so hideous that he actually made up the Lord’s prayer for himself that kids had to sing in school before classes and Haitians had to recite that every day.
“Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life, Hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done at Port‐au‐Prince and in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the trespasses of the anti-patriots who spit every day on our country; let them succumb to temptation, and under the weight of their venom, deliver them not from any evil . . .”
The Duvalier dictatorships went on until Aristide took them out with a mass revolution in 1991.
The point we have to make is that Haiti is one of the countries in the world with an incredible history as a people who have gone through a lot of turmoil and changes and still going on. So Kenyans are better off not looking at Haiti as just some country controlled by gangsters at the moment and that is all. The country is a whole lot more than that.
My final word to commander Alfred Mutua taking the police to Haiti is that the French language training for Kenya police may be okay to buy hamburgers in the streets but the real French language you need is to help you gather intelligence information from the streets so you know where the gangs are and what plans they have.
That is why it would have been important for Kenya to talk with the US and Canada to bring troops there. Canada has battalions of French-speaking soldiers and even French-speaking police and intelligence officers. You need those people. This is not going to be a cakewalk as some government officials think. This is going to be the kind of war that no Kenyan police has ever seen in their lives.
The bigger picture is that any country with forces in Haiti trying to restore peace and order in the country must never forget the bigger picture of what the country is and who Haitians are all about.
Here is a special speech by President Jean Bertrand Aristide to the UN on September 25, 1991.
The speech was entitled The Ten Commandments of Freedom in Haiti and it is breathtaking, to say the least.
President Jean Bertrand Aristide to the UN on September 25, 1991
