Kenyan President William Ruto pledged Friday an additional 600 officers for the UN-backed mission to Haiti, following a meeting with Haiti’s visiting prime minister, as both urged the international community to do more.
The East African country is leading a multinational mission aimed at combatting spiralling insecurity in the crime-ravaged Caribbean nation and has so far sent 400 Kenyan police.
“I am pleased to announce that an additional 600 Kenyan police officers are completing their pre-deployment training and will be ready for duty next month,” Ruto told reporters alongside Haiti’s interim Prime Minister Garry Conille.
He did not specify when exactly these officers would be sent. Kenya’s deployment is expected to reach 2,500.
Ruto also called on the international community to “urgently” rally behind the mission, which has been hobbled by a chronic lack of funding.
“This is the moment to provide that critical support for us to be able to undertake the exercise at hand,” he said.
Conille echoed his calls, saying that while there had been “constructive meetings” with international partners, more was needed.
“We would like to see a quicker response, we would like to see more commitment and we are going to continue to push for it.”
Conille’s visit to Kenya comes a week after gang members opened fire in the Haitian town of Ponte Sonde, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the capital Port-au-Prince, butchering 109 people and wounding around 40 more. They also torched houses and vehicles.
Condemning the “senseless crime”, Conille said a security mission had swiftly deployed to the area of the attack and remained there.
“The work is being done, house by house, neighbourhood by neighbourhood,” he said.
The UN Security Council last month extended the policing mission for one year, without transforming it into a peacekeeping mission as floated by Port-au-Prince.
Though it is operating with the blessing of the United Nations and the Haitian government, it is not a UN-run force.
Marauding gangs continue to wreak havoc in the country, one of the world’s poorest.
Gangs have taken over the capital and security and health systems have collapsed.
More than 3,600 people have been killed this year in “senseless” gang violence in Haiti, according to the UN human rights office.
The wave of violence and a humanitarian crisis have forced more than 700,000 people from their homes, half of them children, according to the UN migration agency.
