Will the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) Be Enough for Haiti?

  Protection now, yes. But Haiti's future still depends on the election that keeps disappearing from the calendar.

On September 29, the UN Security Council extended the mandate of the Gang Suppression Force in Haiti for six more months, to March 31, 2027. Twelve votes in favor; China, Russia, and Pakistan abstaining.

On October 6 and 7, Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council indefinitely postponed the elections that were supposed to take place on December 13, the first round of presidential and legislative elections, with a second round to follow in February. No new date was given. Since registration opened on July 20, only about 769,000 voters have been registered, out of a population of 11 million.

And on Sunday, gangs ambushed a Gang Suppression Force armored vehicle in Croix-des-Bouquets. Four Salvadoran soldiers are unaccounted for. The vehicle was attacked with explosives and set on fire; the helicopters sent to rescue them came under fire too. It is the first major attack since the force began operations, and the Security Council met on Haiti today.

On October 14, the Council had also renewed its Haiti sanctions: an arms embargo, a travel ban, and an asset freeze, for another year, with 14 votes in favor and Russia abstaining. The international instruments keep accumulating: a six-month force mandate, a one-year sanctions regime. Meanwhile the calendar that matters to Haitians, the election timetable, is still blank.

Hold those facts next to each other for a moment.

The stated purpose of the international security force was to create the conditions for credible, free, and inclusive elections. Now the force has been extended and the elections are gone. We have funded security to create conditions for a process that no longer has a date.

I say this not to diminish the courage of those serving on the ground. Four of them are missing tonight. Security is necessary. Armed groups continue to hold large parts of Port-au-Prince; nearly 1.5 million Haitians are displaced; the UN rights chief reported at least 5,700 people killed or injured this year. Order matters. No one builds anything in chaos.

But security is necessary without being sufficient, and that is the leadership lesson here.

Security can protect a process. It cannot substitute for one. A people cannot be secured into self-determination; they must be given a way to choose. An election is, at its core, a question of dignity: whether the people who bear the consequences of decisions get a voice in making them. As one woman registering to vote in Delmas told AFP, Haitians have long been kept out of the political debate: "We finally want to vote for a government that will bring solutions to the masses."

That is the voice this moment keeps delaying.

Haiti has not held elections since 2016. Its last elected president was assassinated in 2021 and has not been replaced. Now, for the first time in a decade, an election was within reach, and the calendar has been erased again. The postponement is understandable; no one can credibly vote where polling stations cannot be secured. But understandability is not the same as acceptability. Every delay deepens the legitimacy crisis it claims to be waiting out.

There is a temptation, in leadership, to treat stability as the whole of the work, to believe that if we hold the line long enough, legitimacy will follow. It rarely does. Order imposed from above eventually runs out; consent renewed from below is what endures. That is true in a nation and in any organization: you cannot secure your way to a future people have not chosen.

So the question for the international community is not only whether the force can hold territory through March 2027. It is whether, in the same breath, the machinery of the people's voice gets rebuilt: registration that reaches far beyond 769,000, a timetable the public can believe, and partners on the ground who can say, this is ours.

For those of us who work with and love Haiti, this is where faith and service meet. We do not abandon the work when the timeline collapses; we hold both truths at once. The country needs protection now, and protection is a bridge to something, not a destination. Leadership is the discernment to understand and serve people with integrity and compassion. Understanding means seeing the whole picture. Serving means working toward the day the Haitian people choose their own leaders, and making sure that day keeps its place on the calendar.

Haiti's story is not finished. The security must hold, and the vote must come.