A British aid worker who is one of dozens of foreigners stranded in Haiti after a gang insurrection against the government has described the “fear and bewilderment” of being marooned in a city under siege.
Matt Knight, the director for the Irish humanitarian aid agency Goal Global in Haiti, flew into its capital, Port-au-Prince, from Europe three days before the uprising against Prime Minister Ariel Henry began on 29 February.
“I spent six months in Ukraine when they started bombing Kyiv and this is worse than that,” the 55-year-old Sheffielder said on Monday morning after another night in which he was woken by the sound of semi-automatic gunfire.
“I just lie there listening to [the shooting]. My mind won’t switch off,” said Knight, who has been kept awake by a series of ferocious gun battles between security forces and gangs trying to storm the international airport.
“It’s … ‘Pop-pop-pop-pop’ and then a blast. ‘Pop-pop-pah, pop-pop-pah’ … Last night it went on for about half an hour. Some nights it has gone on longer … It’s pretty much every day that you can hear it,” added Knight, whose organization has been forced to suspend its activities in Carrefour, an impoverished suburb of the Haitian capital.
Each day an NGO WhatsApp group fills with warnings and video footage of the latest attacks. “It just feels like it’s getting closer and closer,” said the British humanitarian who admitted to feeling baffled by the nature of the violence, which seemed both highly calculated and terrifyingly indiscriminate.
“On the one hand it seems like there is some kind of plan – that [the Haitian gang boss] Barbecue has pulled the gangs together under this umbrella ‘Viv Ansanm’ and they have some kind of mission, which is not allowing [president] Ariel Henry back into the country. So [they are] locking up the airport, attacking the police [and] attacking government infrastructure until he resigns,” Knight said.
On the other hand, much of the turmoil seemed to be the work of highly erratic and heavily armed young men without any clear political motivation. “[You] have looting, pillaging, people being displaced from their neighbourhoods,” said Knight, an experienced aid worker who was in Sierra Leone during the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, Sudan during the 2021 coup and Ukraine last year.
“In Kyiv during the day you could walk around … [Here] it’s a far less controlled situation so the fear factor is much higher because it is just seemingly more random … This is the most frightened I’ve been just because of the randomness,” he said on Monday as the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, flew to Jamaica to attend a summit of Caribbean leaders on what the American diplomat called Haiti’s “dire political and security crisis”.
Knight, a former Public Health England employee, recognized he was in a far better situation than the 300,000-plus internally displaced people his organization was in Haiti to help. “However scary it is for me, it’s not nearly as scary as it is for a four-year-old kid who is having to run from their neighbourhood, grabbing whatever you can carry and hearing gunshots raining over your head.”
Last week, the UN warned that Haiti’s already fragile health system was “nearing collapse”. The medical group Médecins Sans Frontières said its Port-au-Prince trauma unit had been overwhelmed by victims of gunshot wounds. An estimated 15,000 Haitians have been forced to flee their homes since the gang rebellion began. Even before the crisis, nearly half of Haiti’s 11.7 million people were facing acute hunger.
“It’s those people that the world needs to be looking at,” said Knight, whose three adult children have all urged him to return home.
On Monday, Blinken pledged to contribute an additional $100m to a UN-backed multinational security force intended to help Haitian police fight gangs, as well as $33m in humanitarian aid. This brings the US proposed contribution to the force to $300m.
For now, with the bullet-riddled airport encircled by gang fighters, leaving is not an option for Knight. The US military has reportedly started airlifting non-essential embassy personnel from the country by helicopter but aid workers have not so far been offered evacuation.
Knight said he had called the British embassy in the Dominican Republic, the nearest to Haiti, but been told officials could not help since the foreign office’s latest advice was to avoid all travel to Haiti “due to the volatile security situation”.
“At the minute, there’s no way in or out of Haiti … The Dominican Republic has closed off the border completely. The boat routes are not particularly safe even if you were to get to the places where you could launch a boat,” Knight said. “We’re stuck.”
