In September, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution establishing the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) to curb violence and restore public order in Haiti. The GSF will transform the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support mission (MSS), whose first 400 police officers arrived nearly 18 months ago.
Conceived as a global south-led response to Haiti’s crisis, the MSS aimed to demonstrate solidarity among developing nations by helping to stabilize Port-au-Prince through policing support rather than traditional peacekeeping.
The GSF will provide expanded resources for an initial 12-month period, including around 5,500 police and military personnel and logistical support from a U.N. Support Office in Haiti. A “standing group of partners” comprised of the Bahamas, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kenya, and the United States will coordinate the new force.
The MSS faced criticism for its inability to achieve its goals, hobbled by a lack of resources and deep-seated issues within Kenya’s security apparatus. The GSF reflects the U.N.’s attempt to solve such problems: Unlike the MSS, which operated with voluntary funding and limited oversight, the GSF will receive additional medical care, rations, transportation, and strategic communications from the U.N. support office.
The GSF will occupy a hybrid space between an official peacekeeping mission and a U.N.-backed mission like the MSS: financed through voluntary contributions yet logistically supported by the United Nations. Though no longer leading the mission, Kenya will remain a key contributor.
After the Security Council vote, which occurred just days before the MSS’s deadline for renewal, Korir Sing’Oei, Kenya’s foreign affairs principal secretary, described the GSF mandate as a “welcome development in the pursuit of a more peaceful and secure Haiti.”
Yet though the GSF is intended to address the weaknesses of the MSS, its establishment resurfaces questions about the U.N.’s ability to learn from past mistakes and about the logic of exporting flawed policing models abroad.
The U.N. Security Council approved the MSS in October 2023, after Haiti’s acting prime minister requested an international force to aid the national police in establishing security and facilitating humanitarian aid in 2022. Kenya stepped up to lead the force in July 2023 after other countries hesitated, largely due to Haiti’s deep mistrust of U.S.-led interventions and the controversial history of past U.N. missions in the country.
Unlike a U.N. peacekeeping mission, the MSS operated outside the U.N. command structure but was still authorized by the Security Council and relied on U.N.-coordinated funding channels, which organized the distribution of voluntary contributions from 11 countries, including Canada, Germany, the United States, and South Korea.
Kenya deployed 744 personnel to Haiti—far short of its initial pledge to contribute 1,000 police officers to the promised force of 2,500—who were joined by small contingents of troops from Guatemala, El Salvador, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.
Confined largely to a base near the Port-au-Prince airport, the MSS failed to dislodge gangs that still control as much as 90 percent of the capital. The toll of violence has been staggering: According to the U.N., at least 4,864 people were killed between October 2024 and June. More than 1.2 million people were internally displaced as of June, a 24 percent increase since last December.
At a high-level meeting on Haiti on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in September, prior to the Security Council vote, Kenyan President William Ruto explained why the MSS was struggling: “We have been operating at 40 percent capacity,” he said, citing broken-down vehicles and absent reinforcements. Ruto called for a “predictable resource package” that would commit funding, logistics, and equipment in advance.
For Ruto, the MSS was intended to showcase Kenya as a global south problem-solver. Instead, it underscored the risks of projecting power without fixing governance deficits at home. From the start, the mission carried the baggage of Kenya’s police system, which has a documented history of corruption, abuses, and extrajudicial killings. (Security forces landed in Port-au-Prince on the same day that police in Nairobi opened fire on demonstrators protesting against a tax bill.)
Although Kenyan officers have not been accused of misconduct in Haiti, their reputation for heavy-handed tactics at home and a culture shaped by force rather than service constrained the mission’s ability to build trust among locals. This, in addition to Kenyan officers’ seclusion on the base, led to limited engagement with Haitian communities, for which the mission faced widespread criticism from rights groups.
Haitians experienced a “growing sense of fatalism,” Robert Fatton Jr., a Haitian-born political scientist at the University of Virginia, said. “People say, ‘The Kenyans are here, but nothing’s changed.’”
In both Kenya and Haiti, people tend to see police less as protectors of the public than as enforcers for political elites. Rather than establishing its own independent intelligence network or civilian liaison units, the MSS relied on the Haitian National Police—a force that is underfunded, poorly trained, and infiltrated by gangs—for intelligence and local coordination.
Haiti has also turned to U.S. private military companies to carry out anti-gang operations and drone strikes, further delegitimizing the MSS forces. “Haiti’s security crisis has created a vacuum that private military companies are eager to fill,” said Diego Da Rin, a Haiti analyst at the International Crisis Group. “It’s a model that has failed before—in Africa, in Latin America—and its reemergence in Haiti reflects desperation more than innovation.”
Two centuries of foreign interventions, from the U.S. occupation to U.N. missions, have promised stability and delivered disappointment in Haiti. The MSS has particular parallels with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), the peacekeeping mission that operated from 2004 to 2017 and struggled to equip troops and sustain operations despite its $7 billion budget.
Like the MSS, MINUSTAH also relied heavily on the Haitian National Police, and both missions failed to establish meaningful engagement with local institutions. Ultimately, MINUSTAH was tarnished by allegations of human rights abuses, sexual abuses, and other scandals—particularly following the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake—and left Haiti unable to maintain security once foreign forces withdrew.
The MSS lacked realistic objectives and adequate resources from the start, initially launching just 400 personnel to face gangs with superior knowledge and firepower. Like MINUSTAH, the MSS will be remembered as part of the cycle of interventions that has left Haitians more skeptical and their institutions weaker.
“There’s a deep sense of fatigue in Haiti toward these so-called international interventions,” Fatton said. “Every time, they come in saying they’re here to help, and what follows is more chaos and more dependence.”
The MSS’s troubles reveal how symbolism and political expediency eclipse substance at the United Nations. Despite countless post-mission reviews and studies, each deployment to Haiti seems to unfold as if lessons were never documented or absorbed.
“The U.S. and the U.N. needed someone willing to take on the job, and Kenya said yes,” said Jake Johnston, director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “That’s not about strategy. … It’s about finding a partner who would sign on the dotted line.”
The United States played a decisive role in creating the MSS, spearheading the Security Council authorization and committing more than $600 million in financial and operational support.
Though the MSS was presented as a non-U.N. mission, the distinction is “largely without a difference,” Johnston said. The same power dynamics have persisted, as the United States funds the missions, the U.N. provides political cover, and Haitians are excluded from decision-making.
Kenya is among Africa’s most experienced nations when it comes to U.N. peacekeeping, and it cast the MSS deployment as a milestone: the first African-led security mission in the Americas. Despite the “African solutions to African problems” ethos that the African Union has sought to project on the continent and beyond, a lack of meaningful African contributions to the mission compounded the mission’s problems: Algeria pledged financial support but never delivered, while other major powers kept their distance.
Under the GSF, Kenya will become just one partner in a shared command with countries from outside the global south. And if Kenyan forces cannot sustain the mission in Haiti, doubts will grow about the viability of “African solutions,” which Ruto continuously champions.
At UNGA, Ruto remained defiant about Kenya’s role in Haiti, saying that the MSS had delivered results that “many thought impossible,” and citing the restoration of government control over the presidential palace and police headquarters, reopened schools, free movement on once-blockaded roads, and a sharp reduction in kidnappings.
“If so much could be achieved with limited resources and stretched personnel within just 15 months,” Ruto asked, “what more could have been accomplished if the United Nations fraternity had truly acted together in solidarity with the people of Haiti?”
In Ruto’s telling, the mission’s struggles reflected not flawed design on Kenya’s part but the failure of international solidarity to match Kenya’s commitment. The GSF seems to answer some of those frustrations with the creation of the support office—established by the U.N. Security Council, operated by U.N. personnel, and likely based in Port-au-Prince. The move signals a more predictable and centralized system, the kind of “resource package” that Ruto demanded.
But the promise of more troops and resources fits a familiar pattern: The GSF will arrive in Haiti after a fragile mission has already faltered. As of November, no major deployments have followed the GSF announcement, aside from a U.S. delivery of 20 armored vehicles.
Ultimately, Ruto sought to reframe the MSS’s setbacks to push for reform and representation, casting the Haiti mission as evidence that Africa is ready to shoulder global responsibilities even under impossible conditions. He noted that Africa dominates much of the Security Council’s agenda and contributes significant peacekeeping forces yet remains the “only continent without a permanent seat at the main table where decisions about our destiny are made.”
But for the U.N., the MSS is just another chapter in a long pattern of institutional amnesia. Despite billions of dollars spent and decades of lessons from past Haiti missions, the same mistakes have reappeared: under-resourced deployments, reliance on compromised local institutions, and the prioritization of political expediency over pragmatic planning.
The GSF now faces the same test as the long list of missions preceding it: whether Haiti’s long cycle of intervention and disappointment can finally be broken.
