Hundreds of Kenyan police officers have arrived in Haiti as part of a US-backed security intervention aiming to rescue the Caribbean country from a criminal insurrection that toppled the prime minister and brought death and chaos to the streets.

About 400 members of the Kenya-led multinational police operation stepped off a Kenyan Airways plane at Port-au-Prince’s international airport on Tuesday. The US president, Joe Biden, hailed their arrival as the start of “an effort that will bring much-needed relief to Haitians”.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    5 months ago

    Kenya may be a relatively stable democracy in Africa, but there’s still rampant corruption in their police forces. Police officers are typically underpaid, so to supplement their income they’ll do things like set up random checkpoints on roads in order to shakedown drivers for money. Them going to Haiti doesn’t seem like it’s really going to help with anything.

      • paddirn@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        Yeah, they’ve had shitty elections for years now. Odinga has been in like every election and contests it everytime, even causing really bad election violence at multiple points. This led to them reviving the role of Prime Minister specifically for him to placate Odinga that election. They’ve literally only ever had two prime ministers in their history (President is their head of state), they abolished it again after Odinga’s term was over.