A move some diplomats claimed was made to appease China and Russia, the United States has abandoned its push for the UN Security Council to request a plan to convert a security mission that is assisting in the fight against armed gangs in Haiti into an official UN peacekeeping operation.
Rejecting that assessment, a senior US administration official stated that Washington had shifted course to back Edgard Leblanc, the head of Haiti’s transition council, when he called for a UN peacekeeping force last week.
“We are not in any way submitting to individuals who may not have the welfare of the Haitian people at heart,” the official, who wished to remain anonymous, declared. “We are strategic about how we’re going about this and building on the shot of momentum that we heard from the Haitian president.”
The fifteen members of the Security Council will vote on a draft resolution to extend the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission’s mandate until October 2, 2025, on Monday. The Caribbean nation requested aid, and the UN initially authorized the mission a year ago. According to diplomats, Russia and China did not want the council to request a plan to transform the UN-backed security force into an official UN peacekeeping operation, so the US withheld that language from the draft resolution, which Reuters was able to view.
On Sunday, Dmitry Polyanskiy, the deputy Russian ambassador to the UN, stated that Russia wants to give the security force more time to establish itself and does not want to predict how the MSS will turn out. It’s too soon to draw conclusions.
