B.D.F. and Coast Guard Training in Jamaica for Haiti Peace Mission  

Haiti continues to be plagued by violence as gangs engage in ongoing gun battles with police. This complicates efforts to find a political resolution to the crisis. Last week, you heard from Haitian Alexandra Pierre, who described the horror Haitians are living in. The need for international intervention is clear. Over the weekend, twenty Coast Guard officers and thirty-one Belize Defence Force soldiers arrived in Jamaica to participate in Exercise Trogon Shield. This brings together service members from Jamaica, The Bahamas, and now Belize as they integrate into a CARICOM Joint Task Force. The exercise primarily focuses on training, planning, and executing a variety of scenario-driven security activities. Exercise Trogon Shield aims to enhance regional cooperation and readiness among Caribbean nations. A release from the Canadian Defence Ministry indicates that approximately seventy Canadian Armed Forces members have been deployed to Jamaica. Their mission is to provide training to military personnel from CARICOM nations who are preparing to deploy to Haiti as part of the United Nations-authorized, Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support mission. We spoke to the Commandant of the Belize Coast Guard, Rear Admiral Elton Bennett.

 

Rear Admiral Elton Bennett, Commandant, Belize Coast Guard

“This training that we are currently undergoing is actually the second phase of training. We started to train along with the Canadian military in January of this year. And the same, very same team that is currently over in Jamaica did a one-week training here in Belize where the Canadian military came in country to do an introduction to what peacekeeping operations under the United Nations umbrella really looks like. So they looked at, issues such as international humanitarian law, um, use of force policy and so forth. So now we are moving over into Jamaica to do, um, more operational training along with those other countries that will form a part of the joint task force  in preparation for a possible deployment into Hattie. So they’ll be there for four weeks and they would do operation operational training that will prepare them for the different scenarios in Haiti. We do understand and appreciate the level of risk that there will be taken into Haiti. Therefore this, this training is very, very crucial to prepare these men for the possible deployment. So you’re looking at peacekeeping and stability, operational, um, serials, what to do in certain events, looking at use of force policy and to ensure the men are best prepared to go into that very high risk environment.”