Haiti’s slow collapse is not just violence — it’s a national unmaking | OPINION

By Stéphane Pierre-Paul

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Nations, like individuals, can absorb shocks, weather storms, and even turn crushing defeats into reasons to hope for renewal. But repeated collapse, uncorrected failures, and deep, systemic crises that strike at vital organs can threaten their very survival. They can lead to irreversible decline, the loss of meaning, or even oblivion. History is full of such endings—for people and nations.

Haiti, today, is living through an unspoken holocaust. The state lies in pieces. It no longer claims a monopoly on legitimate violence. It has abdicated its sovereign duties. Across large swaths of the country, the state is absent or neutralized. Transitional authorities lack moral standing, legitimacy, and political will. Armed groups—terrorist coalitions—now dominate.

They have overthrown institutions. They control national highways. They’ve shut down regular international air travel through Port-au-Prince. They raid the port. They persecute the population. They have shut down or severely disrupted daily life in entire cities and departments.

The international community is silent, almost indecently silent. All we get are predictable, empty gestures from global powers—especially the United States and France, countries with direct historical responsibility for our tragedy.

Meanwhile, Haiti is bearing unspeakable horrors—violence largely erased from international media coverage and barely mentioned in major political capitals. Despite countless massacres, killings, kidnappings, raids, fires, and the destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, police stations, churches and cemeteries, the global response remains muted.

Each day brings new victims: the dead, the wounded, the maimed, the internally displaced, the exiled. Among them are children, pregnant women, and the elderly. Trauma is everywhere—cardiovascular disease, mental health crises, grief, suffering, and desolation.

We face mass unemployment, the collapse of the middle class, worsening poverty, and a grim shadow over our collective future.

And when it comes to atrocities—human tragedies with apocalyptic echoes—it’s hard to know which gang deserves the “prize” for the most horrific crimes. I can only recall a few examples, not because they are the worst, but because they reveal the depths of barbarity we now face.

In Mirebalais, one notorious gang leader—part of the Viv Ansanm coalition—has rebranded himself as a media mogul. His radio station, Panic FM, now airs under the name Taliban FM. It has become the “voice of death” in Haiti’s Central Plateau, broadcasting threats and propaganda, as if mirroring the genocidal role Radio Mille Collines played in Rwanda in 1994.

Then there is Kenscoff, where rural guerrilla warfare has raged for months. It is now a strategic point in the insurgency’s plan to encircle Port-au-Prince. A grotesque video circulates: gang members laughing as they film the execution of four bound men. One by one, the victims fall, their heads collapsing, as the killers mock them.

In that same region—an impoverished agricultural area—killings and destruction are rampant. A policeman’s murderers staged a mock funeral, draping the coffin in the Haitian flag. The grotesque ritual was widely shared on social media. Yet not a word of protest came from the Transitional Presidential Council, the government, or the top brass of the Haitian National Police. No one even addressed the fate of the officer’s body.

Pacot, once a symbol of Port-au-Prince’s elite neighborhoods, is now under siege. It may soon fall under the grip of armed groups. With each passing day, another piece of the capital becomes a ghost town. On Sunday, April 27, residents who dared to stay watched their historic homes—architectural gems from the early 20th century—go up in flames. They watched their lives and savings vanish in fire, powerless.

In another surreal scene—violence at its most symbolic—outlaws occupying the University of Notre-Dame in Haiti donned medical school graduation robes. Smiling, they posed for a “class photo,” mocking knowledge and the academic system. All of this took place as Haiti’s political leaders remain mired in systemic corruption and drunk on power, indifferent to the consequences of their catastrophic governance.

To paraphrase Che Guevara, reflecting in 1965 on Cuba’s failed guerrilla mission in the Congo: “We cannot liberate a country that does not want to fight. We must create a spirit of resistance, search for soldiers with Diogenes’s lantern and Job’s patience. It’s a mission impossible in such a sea of filth.”

Today, those words could just as easily describe Haiti.

But there’s still time. If we draw on the revolutionary ideals that once upended the world, we may yet reclaim the dream. Let’s embrace the patriotism of our ancestors. Let’s reject the architects of chaos, dismantle the transnational criminal economy, and end social exclusion. Let’s redefine power so that politics once again serves the people, social justice, and a creative nation that dares to embrace modernity without losing its cultural soul.

Stéphane Pierre-Paul is the managing editor at local Radio Kiskeya.

This opinion is part of the author’s ongoing series, “Citizen’s Tribune,” a space for civic reflection and commentary.

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