Doctors Without Borders halts operations in Haiti’s capital, citing police threats

A vital humanitarian organization said it will suspend activities in Haiti’s capital on Wednesday following a “series of threats” by local police, in a move that threatens to bring a further deterioration of conditions in the Caribbean nation that has struggled for years with gang warfare and political turmoil.

Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), accused authorities of repeatedly stopping its vehicles and threatening its staff with violence, including death and rape.

Following that attack, the organization said it faced four additional encounters with police.

“This series of incidents have left us with no choice but to suspend our activities in Port-au-Prince,” MSF said in a statement.

In recent years, police, civilian vigilante groups and even rival gangs in the lawless capital have been repeatedly accused by doctors and medical staff of breaking into health care facilities where they suspect wounded gang members to be seeking treatment.

“As MSF, we accept working in conditions of insecurity, but when even law enforcement becomes a direct threat, we have no choice but to suspend admissions of patients in Port-au-Prince until the conditions are met for us to resume,” MSF head of mission Christophe Garnier said.

MSF said it will stop admitting and transferring patients to its five medical facilities in the Haitian capital from Wednesday, impacting thousands of people in need of treatment.

“MSF provides care to everyone on the basis of medical needs alone. Each week on average in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, MSF provides care to more than 1,100 patients on an outpatient basis, 54 children with emergency conditions, and more than 80 new survivors of sexual and gender-based violence,” the organization said in a statement.

Brutal gang violence in the capital has resulted in the kidnappings of hundreds of people, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Haitians from their homes.

MSF is the latest international group to halt operations in the Caribbean nation.

Last week, US-based airlines suspended flights to Haiti after three of their jets were struck by bullets while flying over Port-au-Prince. Haiti’s transitional presidential council blamed armed gangs for the gunfire that struck one of the flights, accusing them of aiming “to isolate our country on the international stage.”

Last month, a United Nations helicopter was also hit by bullets while flying over Port-au-Prince. And in a separate incident in October, gangs targeted US Embassy vehicles with gunfire, later prompting the evacuation of 20 embassy staff.

In late February and early March, coordinated gang attacks forced the closure of both the airport and main seaport in the Haitian capital, choking off vital supplies of food and humanitarian aid to the Caribbean nation.