NAIROBI, Kenya
Kenyans on Wednesday welcomed a government decision to halt plans to deploy at least 1,000 police officers to Haiti following the unprecedented violence that erupted in the Caribbean nation.
Kenya had agreed last October
to lead a U.N.-authorized international police force to Haiti, but the
country’s top court in January ruled this was unconstitutional, in part because
of a lack of reciprocal agreements on such deployments between the two countries.
Nairobi resident Lameck
Ochieng said he was not surprised by the court ruling. "Our children
who were going to be killed outside (in Haiti) now are safe" he said.
"As a Kenyan, this is the
situation which we saw before, even the courts ruled against it (deployment of
Kenyan police to Haiti). But the outcome has not that much maybe scared me
because we knew that it was something which was not going to be achieved" A police officer patrols near the police headquarters as Haiti continues in a state of emergency in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on March 6.
Kenya’s President William Ruto
said that he and Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry had witnessed the signing
of the reciprocal agreements between Kenya and Haiti on March 1, clearing the
path for the deployment.
"Haiti has no government,
it has no structure so it's not advisable, you know. Let's say like, if our
government really cares for our people, they wouldn't even consider doing that
(deploying Kenyan Police to Haiti)" said Rose Wanjiku, a student.
Under the plan, the
U.N.-backed multi-national police led by Kenyan officers was to help quell gang
violence that has long plagued Haiti.
But violence escalated sharply
since Feb. 29, with gunmen burning police stations, closing the main
international airports and raiding the country’s two biggest prisons, releasing
more than 4,000 inmates.
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