Kenyan President William Ruto promised Thursday that his country’s planned deployment to Haiti will aim to combat the gangs that have decimated the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
Ruto was speaking on a state visit to Washington alongside President Joe Biden, who saluted Kenya’s willingness to assist and promised that the United States would provide intelligence and equipment in hopes of stabilising its troubled southern neighbour.
“Gangs and criminals do not have status. They have no religion,” Ruto told a White House news conference.
He vowed that the international mission would “deal with them firmly, decisively, within the perimeters of the law.”
Kenya and the other nations set to deploy to Haiti aim to “secure that country and to break the back of the gangs and the criminals that have visited untold suffering in that country,” Ruto said.
Asked if the Kenyan deployment can succeed in defeating gangs that have plunged Haiti into near anarchy, Biden said, “Yes.”
“This is a crisis. It’s able to be dealt with,” Biden said, praising Kenya’s “first-rate capability.”
The Biden administration had searched extensively for a country to take the lead but had ruled out sending in US forces, who have a long history of intervention in Haiti.
“We’re in a situation where we want to do all we can without us looking like America, once again, is stepping over and deciding this is what must be done,” Biden said.
“Haitians are looking for help, as well as the folks in the Caribbean are looking for help,” Biden said.
Ruto said that the deployment was a decision by Kenya, not the United States, as his country wanted to advance “peace and stability as a responsible global citizen.”
Biden in 2021 withdrew the last US troops from Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war, and has promised to avoid putting US forces at risk overseas.