PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: Haiti’s interim council was sworn in Thursday, a major step forward toward restoring a functional government in a country wracked by months of gang violence.
Ariel Henry, the unelected prime minister of the Caribbean nation, announced that a new nine-member governing body will be tasked with restoring a semblance of order as he officially resigned.
“This morning’s ceremony confers on you the reins of the destiny of the nation and of the people,” Michel Patrick Boisvert, until now the economy minister and now the acting prime minister in this transitional phase, told the council consisting of eight men and one woman.
As the ceremony progressed, the sound of automatic gunfire from gang members echoed through central Port-au-Prince and the suburbs of Delmas, a sign of the task ahead of the new authorities.
Images shared on social networks show city council members taking oath at the Prime Minister office.
Henry pledged in March to resign once a council was formed, amid an uprising by gangs calling for his ouster.
“Haiti will be reborn,” he wrote in his resignation letter, which was released Thursday from Los Angeles.
The council is first likely to appoint a new full-fledged prime minister.
The Caribbean country has no functioning parliament and hasn’t had a president since the assassination of Jovenel Moise back in 2021. Elections were last held in 2016.
The new transitional body is mandated to lead the country until fresh elections, with an elected government to take over by February 6, 2026.
With a population of 11.6 million, Haiti has suffered from poverty, political instability and natural disasters for decades.
However, things took a turn for the worse in late February, when powerful and armed gangs controlling large swaths of the capital went on the rampage, claiming they were trying to overthrow Henry.
They attacked police stations, prisons, government buildings and airports, causing a social breakdown so severe that the head of UNICEF compared life in Haiti to a scene from “Mad Max”.
