After more gang attacks, Kenya will send more cops to Haiti

President William Ruto said on Friday that Kenya will send 600 more police officers to Haiti next month to help with an international mission to fight gangs. He said this while the prime minister of Haiti was in Kenya to speed up deployments to the force.

There are about 2,900 troops from 10 different countries that have agreed to join the Multinational Security Support (MSS) led by Kenya.
But since the U.N.-approved mission began in June, only about 430 have been sent out, with almost 400 coming from Kenya.

Gangs with lots of weapons have continued to gain ground. They now control most of the capital, Port-au-Prince. A local mayor said that last week, members of the Gran Grif gang killed at least 115 people in a farming area in one of the deadliest attacks in the country in recent years.

“The battle that we can win” against gangs, Ruto told reporters, referring to the mission’s goal of making Haiti safer. He said that Kenya had sent an extra 600 cops and that they were now training so that they would be ready to go next month.

As he stood next to Ruto, Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille praised how the cops handled last week’s massacre.

“The police and the (Kenyan) contingent were able to deploy by road within – really, virtually – hours to make sure that the city in question was quickly protected,” he said.

The United Nations says that more than 700,000 people have left their homes in Haiti and that more than 5 million people are going hungry. That’s almost half of the population.

The U.N. Security Council unanimously agreed last month to give the MSS another year of power. In order to keep the peace, Russia and China spoke out against the U.S. plan to turn it into a U.N. peacekeeping operation.