NAIROBI- President William Ruto on Friday said Kenya will send 600 more police officers to Haiti in November to bolster an international anti-gang mission.
Ruto announced during a visit by the Haitian prime minister, Garry Conille to the president which intended to speed up deployments to Haiti.
Ruto also said that at least 10 countries have promised to send a total of about 2,900 troops to participate in the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS).
However, he added that only about 430 personnel have been deployed since the UN-authorised mission got underway in June, nearly 400 of them are from Kenya.
According to Ruto, the mission was to improve security in Haiti, calling the fight against gangs “the battle that we can win”.
He said the additional 600 officers committed by Kenya were in training and would be ready for duty in November.
Conille praised the police response to last week’s massacre saying “the police and the (Kenyan) contingent were able to deploy by road within really, virtually hours to make sure that the city in question was quickly protected.’’
According to the UN, over 700,000 people in Haiti have fled their homes and over five million are going hungry nearly half the population.
In September, the UN Security Council unanimously authorised extending the MSS’s mandate by another year.
A U.S. push for a plan to turn it into a UN peacekeeping mission was dropped from the resolution due to opposition from Russia and China.
Heavily armed gangs, which control most of the capital Port-au-Prince, have continued to gain territory.
According to a local mayor, members of the Gran Grif gang carried out one of the country’s deadliest attacks in recent years, killing at least 115 people in a farming region, last week. (Reuters/NAN)
