Kenya Offers to Lead an Intervention in Haiti

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at Kenya’s offer to lead an international intervention in Haiti, mass protests and evacuations in Niger, and a rare stabbing in South Korea.

Haiti may finally be getting the international intervention its prime minister has been pleading for. Kenya has offered to send 1,000 police officers to the island to lead an international force in support of Haitian police efforts to curb gang violence there. Although Kenyan officials haven’t dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s just yet, Nairobi said it would send an assessment team to Port-au-Prince in the coming weeks to determine operational requirements for establishing a multinational force and a potential timetable for action.

The international community has been quick to support Nairobi’s proposal. On Tuesday, the United States said it would put forward a United Nations Security Council resolution this month to support a Kenyan-led police mission to Haiti, and the government of the Bahamas said it would commit 150 people to the mission if the U.N. authorizes the force. This comes days after an American nurse and her daughter living in Haiti were kidnapped; their whereabouts are still unknown. Washington has also ordered the evacuation of all non-emergency personnel.

Of Haiti’s almost 12 million residents, there are only 9,000 active-duty police officers on the island, with barely 3,500 individuals on the streets on any given day. That is far too little to make a dent in Haiti’s growing gang violence epidemic, which escalated in July 2021 with the assassination of then-President Jovenel Moïse. Now, gangs control 80 percent of the nation’s capital, and killings and kidnappings have become rampant. “In Haiti, gang members are not independent warlords operating apart from the state,” wrote Pierre Espérance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, in Foreign Policy. “They are part of the way the state functions—and how political leaders assert power.”

However, Kenya’s offer is not without controversy. Rights activists have accused the Kenyan police of committing human rights abuses, such as shooting civilians who violated the nation’s COVID-19 curfew and killing demonstrators protesting the rising costs of living. In addition, although Kenyan security forces have participated in security assistance operations and international peacekeeping missions in places such as Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone, Kenya’s police forces have little overseas experience in deployments of this size and do not speak French or Haitian Creole, Haiti’s official languages. Given Haiti’s troubled history of foreign intervention, the new proposal has some people concerned.

“We should care about what happened in peacekeeping missions in the past,” Espérance told the New York Times. “We need to be careful. I don’t know why they chose Kenya.”

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Anti-French backlash. Protests swept Niger’s capital, Niamey, on Thursday as hundreds of demonstrators came out to support the country’s coup leaders. Among their many demands, the protesters called for the Economic Community of West African States to end its sanctions campaign and stop former colonizer France from intervening in the country’s politics. Thursday marked the 63rd anniversary of Niger’s independence from Paris.

Anti-French sentiment has grown across West Africa as other former French colonies, such as Mali and Burkina Faso, have kicked out French forces following military coups in their countries. Paris began evacuating hundreds of its citizens from Niger on Tuesday, though there has so far been no announcement of a withdrawal of the roughly 1,500 French troops in the nation. The United States also ordered some non-emergency U.S. Embassy personnel to leave the coup-stricken state on Wednesday.

Tragedy in South Korea. At least one person was killed and 13 people injured in Seongnam, South Korea, on Thursday after a man drove his car onto a sidewalk and began stabbing shoppers at a local mall. Neither the suspect’s identity nor his motive has been confirmed; however, the country’s police have called it “virtually an act of terrorism,” and some reports indicate that the perpetrator may have suffered from mental illness.

This is the second mass stabbing to rock South Korea in less than a month. On July 21, a South Korean man killed one person and injured three others near a subway station in Seoul. His motive was never released, but locals reported that he’d expressed suicidal ideation while being apprehended by police.

Sunak’s set change. If you were to take a wee sightseeing tour in the United Kingdom, then you might have noticed a decoration change to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s private mansion. On Thursday, Greenpeace activists draped black cloth over Sunak’s home to protest his new policy that would “max out” oil and gas developments in the North Sea by expanding fossil fuel drilling licenses there. Five Greenpeace protesters were arrested after they managed to climb onto the roof of Sunak’s house, where they remained for five hours. No one was home at the time.

Sunak’s energy policy is part of a larger campaign to transition Britain into using more domestically sourced energy as the island works to achieve its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. However, many climate change activists have condemned Sunak’s latest tactic, saying it will hurt the environment far more than it will help it.

Even the late animal expert extraordinaire Steve Irwin would be stunned by this week’s breakthroughs in wildlife research. On Tuesday, scientists announced the discovery of a 505-million-year-old fossilized jellyfish in Canada. With its 90 tentacles, the new species is the oldest swimming jellyfish ever recorded. And if that wasn’t enough, say hello to Perucetus colossus, the largest animal ever found on Earth. Period. Researchers say the fossils, excavated in Peru, indicate an early species of whale measuring around 66 feet long and weighing up to 340 metric tons.