Six children and seven women kidnapped in Kenscoff, in the hills above Port-au-Prince, were released late last week. UNICEF confirmed the release, which included three children under two, a seven-year-old and two teenage girls.

They were 13 of more than 50 people taken. The rest are still held.

What happened at Kenscoff

On the night of 23 August, an estimated 150 armed men attacked Kenscoff, a hillside community overlooking the capital and the suburb of Pétionville. More than twenty people were killed. The mass abduction that followed was among the largest in recent Haitian memory.

A gang leader known as Izo 2, who operates in the area in coordination with other armed groups including the leader known as Izo, threatened to execute all the hostages if police killed any of his men during the operation to retake Kenscoff. That threat is the context in which the partial release happened, and it is why the release is not straightforwardly good news. Thirteen people out of more than fifty were let go while a threat remained over the rest.

UNICEF’s deputy representative in Haiti, Yannig Dussart, called it a rare moment of hope and said in the same breath that the Kenscoff abduction was not an isolated incident but a reminder of the scale and frequency of attacks on children across the country. Both halves of that statement are load-bearing.

The scale nobody reports

The figures underneath this single incident are the story. Some 1.47 million people in Haiti were displaced as of May. Between April and June alone, the UN recorded 1,408 people killed and 656 injured in gang violence. In the same three months it documented 326 instances of sexual violence; across the first six months of the year, humanitarian partners recorded more than 5,500 incidents of gender-based violence — roughly thirty a day.

At one point, as much as 90 per cent of Port-au-Prince had fallen under gang control.

People are still being sent back

The part of the Haitian picture that receives least attention is the direction of travel. In the first eight months of this year, almost 200,000 people were forcibly returned to Haiti — a 10 per cent increase on the same period last year. The returns come from the Dominican Republic and from the United States, where the administration has pushed to remove Haitians living and working legally as well as those whose visas had expired or who entered without authorisation.

Many arrive with nothing, into a country where 1.47 million people are already displaced.

Governments carrying out these returns argue that immigration enforcement cannot be suspended indefinitely on the basis of conditions in a country of origin, and that a general moratorium would create an incentive that outlasts any particular crisis. The opposing argument, made by UN agencies and refugee lawyers, is the principle of non-refoulement: that people should not be returned where they face a real risk of serious harm, and that the documented violence in Port-au-Prince meets that threshold. The dispute is about how much a receiving state must weigh conditions it did not create.

What the international response has achieved

Haitian police and international forces have tried to push back the armed groups with limited success. The first members of a UN-backed Gang Suppression Force arrived in April. Kenscoff, five months later, was attacked by around 150 men who held the ground long enough to kill twenty people and abduct fifty.

The national government is dealing with its own crisis of legitimacy, without an elected president since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. Armed groups have expanded into the space that left.

Thirteen people came home last week. That is worth reporting on its own terms. It is also, on the numbers above, a rounding error in a crisis that produces roughly thirty documented cases of gender-based violence every day and receives a fraction of the coverage of conflicts with comparable tolls.

Sources

Release and UNICEF statement via Al Jazeera and The Washington Times; displacement, casualty, gender-based violence and forced-return figures from the United Nations as reported by CNN.