Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry has announced his resignation upon the selection of an interim replacement from a new presidential council that will determine the country’s leadership amid the deteriorating security situation in the country.
In recent weeks, gangs have shut down Haiti’s two international airports, freed more than 4,000 inmates from two of the country’s biggest prisons, and carried out violent attacks in the capital. The gangs had demanded Henry’s resignation, but it’s unclear if they will support the plan for the transnational council to appoint an interim prime minister and a council of ministers.
“The government that I’m running cannot remain insensitive in front of this situation. There is no sacrifice that is too big for our country,” Henry said Tuesday. “The government I’m running will remove itself immediately after the installation of the council.”
Michel Boisvert, who’s normally the finance minister, is serving as the acting interim prime minister.
Henry was not elected to his position. Rather, he was appointed after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021. He said he would step down in early February but then changed his mind and said security had to be reestablished in order to hold elections.
Kenya is leading a multinational security support mission, or MSS, in Haiti, and officials are hoping to expedite its arrival. Henry traveled to Kenya recently, pushing for the force’s deployment, and he remains in Puerto Rico because he cannot fly to Haiti given the airport closures.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Jamaica earlier this week to meet with regional leaders regarding the situation in Haiti.
“What we’ve seen in recent days, again, should remind us that the already challenging and difficult security situation has now deteriorated even further and makes the multinational support mission even more important than ever,” he said. “The United Nations Security Council has reaffirmed that and reaffirmed a collective commitment to deploy it as quickly as possible.”
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Tuesday that the U.S. expects the council to appoint an interim prime minister “in the near future,” but he could not provide a more specific time frame. He also said Henry will “remain the prime minister until such point as there is an interim prime minister who takes the position.”
The U.S. also decided to double its financial contribution for the security mission from $100 million to $200 million, which brings the United States’s total support to $300 million and an additional $33 million for humanitarian support, Blinken explained.
The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, told lawmakers on Tuesday that more than 300 gangs with a combined 7,200 members have “consolidated and conducted simultaneous” attacks against Haitian government buildings.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its annual unclassified threat assessment this week, and it warned that Haiti will remain “unpredictable as weak government institutions lose their grip on power to gang territorial control, particularly in the capital.”
It also warned that gangs “will be more likely to violently” resist a foreign military deployment to the nation.
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Haiti’s most powerful gang leader, the former national police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, warned last week that Henry’s failure to resign would “lead us directly into a civil war that will end in genocide.” He also warned that they would not support international intervention.
The U.S. military evacuated nonessential embassy personnel out of Haiti, while on Wednesday, U.S. Southern Command deployed a U.S. Marine Fleet-Anti-terrorism Security Team to maintain security capabilities at the U.S. Embassy, which remains open on a limited basis.
