Opinion | Haiti Has Overcome Other Crises. This Time, We Can’t Do It Alone.

As an infectious disease doctor working in Haiti for over 40 years, I have wrestled with countless tragedies. I have battled problems like H.I.V., tuberculosis, Covid-19, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods. Each time, our community of health care providers, police officers, humanitarian workers, government officials and citizens have pulled together and come up with a solution to steer Haitians to safety.

We now have around 200 gangs, armed with military-grade weapons, rampaging through our neighborhoods, killing, kidnapping and raping our citizens. Civilian casualties are at wartime levels. Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, recently called our situation “a living hell.”

We do not have a government. Our president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated almost two years ago, and not a single elected official remains in office. The army is poorly trained and equipped. Our police force of 9,000 is powerless, its members having become targets of gruesome gang violence or recruitment efforts. Some Haitians, desperate for change, are turning to retaliatory vigilante attacks against the armed groups. Left unchecked, the escalating violence could push us into a civil war, and it has fallen to doctors, lawyers, business owners, farmers, students — all of our 11 million citizens — to find a solution.

Over the past several months, it has become clear to me that we can’t do it alone. Haitians cannot overcome this crisis — the worst I have seen in my life — without foreign intervention.