New weapons and big-ticket items, including American-made F-16 fighter jets, have been surging into Ukraine this month, giving striking steam to the nation’s latest efforts to beat back the Russians, including a cross-border foray into Kursk. 

The region’s governor reported to Moscow this week that Ukrainian forces have made it more than 7 miles, across a 25-mile front, into Russian territory. 

Fueling such efforts is the major defense aid package that Congress released for Ukraine earlier this year. Indeed, the question of how to keep track of all that money – $58 billion committed in security assistance – has increasingly been on the minds of American military officials and experts.

That’s because corruption can threaten Ukrainian morale and success – and make U.S. lawmakers skeptical of providing more aid in the future. 

U.S. officials are keenly aware, however, that it’s a tricky topic to raise. Graft seems a bit pedestrian compared with, say, Ukraine’s battle against Russia. 

Ukrainians deserve their “well-earned status as noble warriors for a righteous cause,” notes Col. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. Still, he adds, “Righteousness and corruption can coexist.” 

Corruption has long been a large problem in Ukraine – President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s election campaign railed against it – and it would be unwise to ignore its pervasiveness and insidious effects, analysts say.

For starters, back-burnering malfeasance, usually in the form of graft, risks repeating the kind of disastrous mistakes that the United States made in Afghanistan. The government in Kabul never gained full legitimacy among the people, due in no small part to corruption, and ultimately failed to win its war against the Taliban. This despite the two decades that U.S. troops spent training local forces as well as several hundred billion dollars’ worth of U.S. military aid. 

Mr. Zelenskyy seemed to reinforce ongoing corruption concerns when he last year fired his defense minister – widely liked in the West and key to putting together an arms coalition – for failing to root it out. Earlier this year, Kyiv’s new defense minister suspended a senior official being investigated for graft while buying weapons. 

Still, the U.S. must do its part, too, analysts say. It has yet to hire an independent special inspector general to track U.S. security assistance to the country, for example, despite calls to do just that. A U.S. government watchdog earlier this year found that after providing more than $42 billion in security assistance since February 2022, the Pentagon “does not have quality data to track delivery of defense articles to Ukraine.”

Such data is essential not just to avoid wasting vast sums of money or putting it in the pockets of criminals, but also for the U.S. to have clarity on what makes for effective fighting. 

“It’s not entirely altruistic when we support other nations with our arms,” says Colonel Sullivan. It allows the U.S. military to test weapons and teaches Pentagon planners tactical and strategic lessons. Only if the equipment is properly tracked, however, can America best assess its efficacy in future wars, he adds. 

Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

Ukrainian F-16 fighting aircraft mark the Day of the Ukrainian Air Forces amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in an undisclosed location, Ukraine, Aug. 4, 2024.

Calling on the “presidential drawdown authority”

Today, the sheer “value of the defense articles provided [to Ukraine] and the speed with which it has been delivered has raised concerns from congressional stakeholders about efforts to monitor” it, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned in a report released earlier this year. 

Since 2021, the U.S. has used what’s known as the presidential drawdown authority to send weapons to Ukraine. In this case, the president can authorize the immediate transfer of arms and services from U.S. stocks, up to a funding ceiling, in response to an “unforeseen emergency.”

Historically, U.S. law has capped the maximum value of defense goods provided under the presidential drawdown authority at $100 million per year. For Ukraine, however, Congress increased this cap from $11 billion in 2022 to $14.5 billion in 2023. As of last September, the president had approved 47 separate drawdowns, which amount to some $24 billion, according to the GAO. 

Under the separate Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative – created in 2015 after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea – Congress has spent some $19 billion to buy artillery, ammunition, tanks, and medical supplies, along with services like vehicle maintenance, directly from the private sector or foreign partners on behalf of Kyiv.

Pentagon lacks a single standard for tracking weapons shipments

Amid all this, the Pentagon must determine to what extent providing ammunition and weapons from its own stocks reduces the arms available for training U.S. troops and responding to America’s own emergencies.

To this end, it helps to know where all of these arms are at any given time. As they make their way to Ukraine, however, the separate U.S. military services use vastly different methods of determining when weapons and supplies arrive at their destination. 

The Army, for example, considers weapons and supplies delivered “as soon as they begin movement from Army points of origin, which are generally storage facilities in the U.S.,” the GAO notes. The Navy, by contrast, checks this box “once they arrived at their designated overseas delivery location,” rather than when delivered to Ukrainian officials. For the Marines, it’s “when they receive email confirmation.” The Air Force “had not determined a standardized delivery confirmation process,” the GAO report notes.

“Without clarifying the guidance for data entry or taking steps to address potentially inaccurate data,” the report says, “DOD will be unable to assess the extent to which the defense articles are meeting recipients’ needs or U.S. objectives in Ukraine.” 

It concluded, “For the purposes of advising their Ukrainian counterparts, [defense officials] were confident they had reliable information,” though “they acknowledged there continued to be weaknesses that warranted attention.” 

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian gunners of the 148th Separate Artillery Brigade load shells into an American-made howitzer to fire at Russian positions, July 24, 2024, near Marinka, Ukraine.

Does U.S. need an independent inspector general for Ukraine?

Such attention should include establishing an independent inspector general for Ukraine, says retired Col. Mark Cancian, who worked for years on Pentagon budget strategy and war funding issues. 

Though he sees no current evidence of widespread corruption connected to U.S. weapons flowing into Ukraine – and though there are inspectors general at the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies who already monitor aid – critics in Congress “are ready to pounce” on any cases of graft that might come to light, says Mr. Cancian, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Colonel Sullivan agrees, citing benefits that an independent inspector general would bring to U.S. national security as well. 

U.S. strategic planners are carefully tracking how Russia wages war, mostly to learn how to best respond should the need arise. 

Without accurate monitoring of equipment, those insights could be flawed, limiting not only U.S. strategic gains but also Ukraine’s war-fighting effectiveness. 

“If you’re losing a lot of tanks or losing a lot of personnel because of bad tactics or bad operational decisions – or if there’s something about the technology that’s ill-suited for the battlefield – then you’ll adjust your tactics,” says Colonel Sullivan.

But first, the U.S. must be very clear on “how this stuff is being employed,” he adds, “and to what effect.”

Who should be allowed to stay in the United States? 

That question lurks beneath the nation’s immigration debate.

Former President Donald Trump is vowing he would start “the largest deportation operation in American history” as he campaigns to be elected again. Meanwhile, fast-tracked deportations are picking up steam in the current White House. 

President Joe Biden had come into office on promises of reforming the U.S. immigration system to be more humane. Then in June, after coming under Republican fire for months amid record-high levels of illegal immigration, he limited access to asylum along the U.S. southern border. The White House says that measure has led to more deportations of people who are not authorized to stay in the U.S.

Deportation continues to feature in the 2024 presidential election, even with Mr. Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. She faces conservative criticism that she was ineffective at curtailing unauthorized immigration. Mr. Trump’s deportation plan draws ire from the left.

As debate swirls around immigration policies, here’s some context on how deportation works in practice – and the different shapes it can take.

What is deportation, and how does it work?

The U.S. has long repatriated immigrants who violate laws, sending individuals back to their home country or a third country. Generally, though, these individuals may seek relief, such as asylum, even if they entered the country illegally. That relief just isn’t guaranteed.

The nation’s deportation power emerged in the late 1800s, as the federal government began to cement its authority over matters of immigration. 

“Deportation has long been a bipartisan effort,” says Adam Goodman, who teaches history at the University of Illinois Chicago and authored “The Deportation Machine.” “The federal government has always used a combination of force, coercion, and fear campaigns” to compel people to leave, he says.

People the government considers deportable include those who entered the country unlawfully, or entered lawfully then overstayed their visa, as well as lawfully present noncitizens who commit crimes. 

Immigration officials have discretion around whom they arrest, detain, and deport, informed by each administration’s priorities. During Mr. Biden’s first year in office, 2021, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called for a focus on unauthorized immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security.” 

Jae C. Hong/AP

Female migrants, mostly Mexican nationals recently deported from the U.S., eat dinner at a migrant shelter in Nogales, Mexico, June 25, 2024. Many migrants who fail interviews are deported to Nogales.

Removals, returns, and expulsions

“Deportation” can refer to a few different things.

Two main buckets of deportations are what the government refers to as “removals” and “returns.” Their subcategories carry different penalties – sometimes yearslong bans and potential criminal prosecution if they reenter. Removals typically involve harsher consequences than returns do.

• “Removals” are confirmed departures that are based on an order of removal. One example could involve Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deporting an individual back to their country, via a chartered flight, after an immigration judge grants a final order of removal. 
• “Returns” are confirmed departures that are not based on an order of removal. Individuals, not the government, may arrange their own departure this way. For example, officials can grant unauthorized immigrants a voluntary return, which avoids putting an order of removal and its consequences on an individual’s record. 

Because of these two categories, analysts draw different conclusions about the rates of deportation under recent presidents. Those that take a broad view – including the Department of Homeland Security – count both removals and returns as deportations. Others, like the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, generally consider only “removals” as official deportations. 

This matters because some critics of Mr. Biden say his deportation rate is inflated to look tougher on border security by including “returns” as well as “removals.” (Former President Barack Obama, dubbed by critics the “Deporter in Chief” while in office, also faced this debate over his record.)

Then, separately, there are “expulsions.”

Expulsions were carried out under Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden only during the pandemic – nearly 3 million times total – and didn’t promise access to asylum or penalties for reentry. This period coincided with a sharp spike in recidivism, or repeated efforts by individuals to illegally cross the U.S. southern border. Such efforts are tracked by the Border Patrol, which operates between ports of entry.

What makes it hard to deport certain immigrants back to their home countries? 

In a phrase, it’s international relations. The U.S. relies on coordination with other countries to accept repatriations. But not all countries do – especially when diplomacy is strained. 

ICE labels as “uncooperative” or “recalcitrant” those countries whose lack of cooperation delays or inhibits deportations of their citizens. Asked for the current list of countries, the agency referred the Monitor to the State Department, which declined to comment on the record.

One such country, China, recently accepted what the U.S. calls the “first large charter flight since 2018” of deported Chinese nationals. That followed an uptick in illegal border crossings by Chinese immigrants. 

Regional cooperation has been key. Mexico, for example, accepts certain migrants on behalf of the U.S. And the new president of Panama, inaugurated last month, has pledged to crack down on migration through the Darién Gap, a dangerous jungle that historically high numbers of migrants have traversed en route to the U.S. In exchange, the Biden administration has agreed to fund migrant deportation flights out of Panama. 

Expanding deportation comes down to governments’ capacity and coordination, says Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. 

Deportation can require “not only a massive amount of resources, both at the border and in the interior, but also the ability to negotiate with a lot of different countries,” she says. “It’s really quite a multistep process.”

How do the Trump and Biden administrations compare on deportations? 

According to a Monitor analysis of Department of Homeland Security data, Mr. Trump oversaw more removals, and Mr. Biden has overseen more enforcement returns.

Combining those categories, Mr. Trump’s 1.4 million total deportations have outstripped Mr. Biden’s 1.2 million so far. Current figures are available through April, so there are still several months of data to come for the incumbent. Worth noting is that the president has been scaling up: More than half of his overall deportations were carried out within the past year. 

Nonetheless, Mr. Biden has overseen historically high illegal immigration along the southern border. As of the end of June, Border Patrol agents have recorded some 7 million encounters between ports of entry at the southern border during his presidency. By comparison, there were around 2 million such encounters during Mr. Trump’s term in office.

Read these companion articles:

Trump calls for mass deportations. How would that work?
The Republican Party has sought to capitalize on voter concerns over record-high illegal immigration during the Biden years. Here we look at the feasibility of a pillar of Donald Trump’s plan for addressing that influx and disincentivizing such crossings.

How Biden and Trump compare on border crossings and immigration
Immigration is a top issue in the U.S. presidential race amid questions about the pace of illegal border crossings and candidate track records. Here’s what the available data tells us.

Jean-Marc Bouju/AP/File

Fighters from the United Liberation Movement of Liberia shoot their way through downtown Monrovia, Liberia, April 16, 1996, during the West African country's civil war.

It has been two decades since the end of Liberia’s second civil war, but Adama Kiatamba Dempster’s memories of the conflict are still vivid and haunting. 

One in particular is seared in his mind. Rebels had set up a checkpoint, where they asked each person passing through to state their tribe. As Mr. Dempster waited his turn, he watched people who gave the “wrong” answer being ushered away from the line. Then “you hear gunshots, and you never see those people come back,” he remembers. 

Today, Mr. Dempster is a human rights activist and father of four. But like many who experienced the horrors of Liberia’s two civil wars, which lasted from 1989 to 2003 and killed around 250,000 people, he has struggled to fully put the past behind him. 

This is in part because there has been so little accountability for the crimes of that era, which included widespread rape, massacres, and the forced conscription of thousands of child soldiers. Although a few of those responsible have been convicted in international courts, not a single suspect has been prosecuted in Liberia itself. 

“No wounds have been healed, no reparations have taken place, no form of apologies have been recorded,” says Mr. Dempster, co-founder of the Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for accountability for war crimes. 

That could now change. In May, Liberia’s president, Joseph Boakai, signed an executive order to create a special war crimes court. Now, activists say, the fight is to ensure that promise does not fall by the wayside, and that victims are given a path to justice before it is too late. 

Olamikan Gbemiga/AP

Liberian President Joseph Boakai poses for a photo prior to the start of a meeting for the Economic Community of West African States, in Abuja, Nigeria, July 7, 2024.

A long road to reconciliation

For more than a century, Liberia was ruled by the descendants of formerly enslaved people from the United States. Indigenous Liberians were an oppressed underclass. In 1980, an Indigenous-led faction of the military overthrew the government, setting in motion a bloody struggle for power that eventually exploded into two back-to-back civil wars. 

Over the course of that conflict, 10% of the population died and half were forced to flee their homes. More than 20,000 children fought on the front lines. 

The wars’ extraordinary brutality blurred the lines between perpetrators and victims, and left few Liberians untouched. After the war, a truth and reconciliation commission was set up to allow Liberians to record the horrors they experienced or inflicted. 

The commission collected more than 20,000 testimonies. In 2010, it issued a set of recommendations based on that evidence. It called for, among other things, the creation of a war crimes court. 

That never happened.

A big part of the problem, experts say, was that many of the people likely to be tried by such a court were then running the country. 

“The politicians who once played major roles in bringing the war, executing a war, violating people’s rights are the ones who want to move forward and say let bygones be bygones,” says Ahmed Sirleaf, a scholar of transitional justice at the University of Minnesota, who was himself a refugee during the first civil war. 

He helped the truth commission to collect testimonies of Liberians living in the diaspora, and he says that even today, a generation after the war, the conflict remains an open wound. In particular, he says, few citizens have been given the mental health care they need to recover from their traumas. “People are hurting. The country is not moving forward,” Mr. Sirleaf says. 

Meanwhile, a few of the conflict’s leaders have been tried in international courts, notably Charles Taylor. In 2012, the rebel leader-turned-president was sentenced to life in prison by a special court in neighboring Sierra Leone, whose own parallel civil war he helped instigate. The court found him guilty of “aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes in recorded human history.” 

Koen van Weel/AP/File

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor (left) waits for the start of his appeal judgement at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Netherlands, Sept. 26, 2013.

“Justice and closure”

In Liberia itself, however, justice has remained largely elusive. That is, until April of this year, when the country’s Legislature voted almost unanimously in favor of establishing a new government office whose purpose was to set up a war crimes court. When Mr. Boakai signed the bill in early May, he explained the court was key to “bringing justice and closure” to the country. 

Activists stress that the court must be victim-focused and independent of local political power struggles if it is to succeed. Organizations supporting survivors and other human rights groups must be allowed to act as “the moral guarantor” of the court, argues Mr. Dempster.

For now, the court remains a long way off. The executive order created an office, which in turn is meant to come up with the “mechanisms and processes for the establishment of a Special War Crimes Court.”  

Years of campaigning by survivors, as well as diplomatic efforts by foreign governments, helped bring Liberia to this point. But some politicians’ support for the court remains difficult to parse. For instance, among those who voted to establish the court were former rebel leaders, including Prince Johnson, who was infamously filmed drinking a beer as he ordered his forces to torture and kill the country’s then-president, Samuel Doe, in 1989. 

“We are up for peace, and we do not want any trouble,” Mr. Johnson told local journalists in April, before adding that his own actions in the war had been just. “I am a brave soldier. I came to liberate my people,” he said.

The next best thing to a time machine, says A.J. Jacobs, is a wardrobe change. Dressing and acting like someone from another era subtly alters how you think and see the world, he explains: “The outer affects the inner.”

So, when Mr. Jacobs authored “The Year of Living Biblically,” a bestselling book about trying to obey every rule in the Old and New Testaments, he grew a bushy, Karl Marx-style beard (per instructions in Leviticus) and roamed the streets of New York in a flowing robe and sandals. 

Likewise, for his newest project, “The Year of Living Constitutionally,” he donned a tricorne hat, lugged a musket around town, and shunned electricity in favor of reading by candlelight and writing with a goose quill pen. The goal was to climb inside the heads of America’s Founding Fathers and explore the logic of basing today’s Supreme Court rulings on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

Mr. Jacobs practices a modern form of “stunt journalism,” in which the reporter directly participates in a story instead of merely observing it. “I like to understand things by living them,” he says. Immersion journalism, as it is also called, dates to the 1800s in the U.S.

Although Mr. Jacobs didn’t invent the genre, he has put his own stamp on it.

“He uses immersive experiments not just for spectacle, but to explore deeper truths about human behavior and societal norms,” says Peter McGraw, a humor researcher and professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. “His work brings comedy and insight together, making complex topics accessible and engaging.” 

Nonetheless, understanding things by living them is easier said than done when attempting to conjure the late 1700s from an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As one historian warned him, “The past is another country. It’s like trying to get inside the mind of a mollusk.”

Undaunted, Mr. Jacobs plunged ahead in frequently comic fashion, chronicling his efforts with a blend of humor, fascinating facts, and quirky trivia: In the nation’s formative years, before settling on the title of “president,” officials considered “His Highness,” “His Excellency,” and even “Washington,” in the same way “czar” derives from Julius Caesar.

Courtesy of AJ Jacobs

A.J. Jacobs poses on the steps of the Capitol in Washington in 2023. He says he visited Congress to petition for redress of grievances, as is his First Amendment right. He’s wearing a tricorne and regimental coat, which was hand-stitched.

Marinating in the Bible and the Constitution – along with other lifestyle experiments – produced surprising aftereffects, Mr. Jacobs says. Most are positive, but there’s a caveat. Playing a role 24/7 sometimes drives his wife and three sons bonkers.

“Every dad is embarrassing to his children,” Mr. Jacobs notes, “but I’m embarrassing on a different level.”

Why become a “human guinea pig”?

A La-Z-Boy recliner sparked his transformation into a self-described “human guinea pig.”

In 1990, after earning a philosophy degree at Brown University and realizing that “no Fortune 500 firms were hiring in-house philosophers,” he turned to journalism, landing at Entertainment Weekly.

There, he penned an article about spending 24 hours aboard a turbocharged chair equipped with built-in telephone, beverage compartment, massager, and answering machine. “I thought maybe I could put myself in other unusual situations or experiments,” Mr. Jacobs recalls thinking. A few years later, that eureka moment germinated into “The Know-It-All,” an 18-month quest to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and become “the smartest person in the world.” The book cracked bestseller lists, but – in a portent of future family resistance – Mr. Jacobs’ wife began fining him $1 every time he injected an “irrelevant fact” into conversations.

So began a steady stream of off-the-wall exploits, such as trying to live without plastic for 24 hours or outsourcing his life (including arguments with his spouse and reading bedtime stories to his kids) to India.

From Nellie Bly to George Plimpton

Stunt journalism has a long history in the U.S. In 1887, Nellie Bly had herself committed to what was then called an insane asylum and wrote about the nightmarish conditions for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World newspaper. On a lighter note, inspired by Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in Eighty Days,” she circled the globe in 72 days while filing dispatches along the way.

More recently, George Plimpton posed as a quarterback trying out for the Detroit Lions, and turned it into a book. He followed that with stints as a circus acrobat and symphony musician.

Mr. Jacobs, who read Mr. Plimpton in high school, continues that tradition.

To prepare for “The Year of Living Constitutionally,” Mr. Jacobs spent three months devouring history books and consulting legal experts of all stripes, including one who was “so originalist he refuses to capitalize the word supreme in Supreme Court” because it’s lowercase in the Constitution.

Once underway, Mr. Jacobs dined with ye olde two-pronged forks (a culinary disaster, he says), wore garters to hold up his elastic-free woolen stockings, and splattered so much quill ink (which is made from the nests of wasp larvae) that “my clothes started to look like a Jackson Pollock painting.”

Courtesy of AJ Jacobs

A.J. Jacobs writes his book by candlelight in his New York apartment with a goose quill and black ink made from wasp nests, in 2023, wearing a wool tricorne hat.

There were several concessions to modern times. To visit a Revolutionary War reenactment in New Jersey, he drove a car. (“It’s hard to find a place that rents horses for interstate travel,” he quips.) And he ordered much of his garb online. Also, even though the 16th Amendment – which ushered in the federal income tax – didn’t pass until 1909, Mr. Jacobs happily deducted the cost of his musket and other accoutrements as business expenses.

Some of his attempts to revive 18th-century rituals, such as voting aloud on Election Day instead of by secret ballot, played like “Candid Camera” pranks, drawing astonished reactions. The funniest was when he met with Rep. Ro Khanna of California. Mr. Jacobs formally applied – under an obscure passage in the Constitution – to have Congress deputize him as a pirate so he could commandeer a water-ski boat to seize enemy vessels, a practice that helped colonists defeat the British. 

“Wow,” Representative Khanna reportedly replied. “We will look into this.”

Throughout the book, Mr. Jacobs uses such antics to examine how America’s founding document was interpreted in the 1780s versus now. Free speech, for example, was originally reined in by bans on blasphemy, cussing, and even certain theater performances. And the First Amendment’s sanction against establishing an official religion applied only to the federal government, not states.

“This project made me grateful for democracy,” Mr. Jacobs reports, “and for modern forks.” Today, he still writes by quill, saying the slower process encourages more thoughtfulness. And though he no longer reads Ben Franklin’s twice-weekly 1790 newspaper, he decided to stick with that era’s reduced media diet because the current “firehose of negative news” undermines mental health.

Meanwhile, his family is happy to have everyone in the household living in the same century again. Jasper, the oldest son, enjoyed his dad’s costumed escapades, likening them to “performance art.” But his twin teenage brothers felt mortified. In public, “they wouldn’t let me wear my tricorne hat within 50 yards of them,” Mr. Jacobs says.

The 18th-century props also jangled his wife’s nerves on occasion. She outlawed the scratch-scratch-scratch of the quill in her presence. And she nixed the burning of beef tallow candles in the apartment, saying they reeked of “unrefrigerated meat loaf.” Mr. Jacobs switched to beeswax.

“My wife would tell you I go overboard,” he acknowledges. 

In this case, the immersion was so intense that she advised Mr. Jacobs to take a six-month break before turning himself into a Viking or whatever might be next. “She was a constitutional widow,” he says. “So I’m taking a quick respite.”

Marie-Marcelle Deschamps was speaking at a conference in Washington last spring about her work running one of Haiti’s most innovative hospitals when the startling news started spilling in: Criminal gangs were releasing incarcerated people from a prison in Port-au-Prince, police stations and government buildings were under attack, and the international airport was shuttered.

“Gangs were shooting at the hospital campus yesterday,” the doctor told her audience at the Women Building Peace event on March 1. “There are no police to call.”

Many people would have considered it a blessing to be out of the country at that moment. But for Dr. Deschamps, it felt as though the timing couldn’t have been worse.

“Every day that I can’t go back is a catastrophe for me,” she said with a sigh, speaking from her hotel room in Miami several weeks later, where she was anxiously awaiting the possibility of flying back to Haiti. “I can’t sleep at night. My staff are struggling, people are dying ... and me? Hiding over here, unable to help them? No, no, it’s not fair.”

Dr. Deschamps is co-founder and deputy executive director of Gheskio, a hospital in Port-au-Prince known by its French acronym, where she has worked for the past 42 years. It’s not a typical clinic; it looks beyond physical health to tackle issues such as education, women’s leadership, job training, and community-building. The project is seen as a Haitian-led solution to challenges that historically the international community has tried to resolve from the outside.

Victoria Onelien/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Dr. Marie-Marcelle Deschamps is one of the founders of Gheskio, a health clinic that also tackles issues such as education, women's leadership, job training, and community-building.

The doctor has guided the organization through earthquakes, epidemics, state coups, and political unrest. But when she finally returned to Port-au-Prince in April, she says she was faced with the most severe crisis she has ever seen. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians had fled their homes due to insecurity, many of whom began flooding her hospital in search of safety and treatment. Some people arrived close to starving, others with gunshot wounds, she says. 

The crisis has only escalated since the spring.

“The rainy season has started, and people live in tents or on the streets,” she says in mid-June, noting an uptick in cases of tuberculosis and pneumonia. “A lot of women have been raped – they have no doors to close around them.”

“My goal and mission in life is to bring peace where I am,” she says.

Taking risks 

Haiti hasn’t held presidential elections in almost eight years, and its last president was assassinated in 2021. In March this year, then-Prime Minister Ariel Henry was blocked by gangs from returning to the country and had to resign. Some 600 Kenyan police officers, part of a mission backed by the U.S. and the United Nations, have arrived this summer to try to halt the spreading violence and hunger here.

Gheskio is in downtown Port-au-Prince, adjacent to an enormous, gang-controlled area known as the City of God. The dusty access roads are teeming with heavily armed gangs, whose ranks have been reinforced by people who have escaped from prison. They regularly block the roads and kidnap people from passing cars. 

Victoria Onelien/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Children from Gheskio's elementary school wait in line in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, July 1, 2024.

Only a handful of hospitals have survived the past year’s violence in Port-au-Prince, according to Jean Bosco Hulute, head of UNICEF’s health program in Haiti. About a five-minute drive from Gheskio is the State University of Haiti Hospital, the largest health facility in the country. For more than four months this year, it was under gang control; doctors and patients were chased off the grounds and wards were looted of everything from medical supplies to ceiling fans. 

Nationwide, some 60% of hospitals aren’t operating because of shortages of fuel or medical supplies, according to a recent assessment by the Ministry of Public Health and Population and the World Health Organization. “A lot of people can’t afford the services that are left,” Mr. Hulute says.

“Without Gheskio, much of the vulnerable population would be without any facility to use,” he adds. 

Gheskio receives some funding and equipment from UNICEF, requiring Mr. Hulute to occasionally visit. These trips require “careful planning and authorization from the head office” for safety purposes, he says.

“Dr. Deschamps, however,” he says with a chuckle, “she just takes her car and drives there.” 

She holds weekly meetings with local community representatives, helping to earn respect for her organization’s work – even among gang leaders. When armed men on the street see her hospital ID, they let her pass, she says. 

The grandmother of four knows it could be a dangerous choice. Every time she arrives at the hospital, she calls her family with a sigh of relief.

Victoria Onelien/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Gheskio, in Port-au-Prince, is one of Haiti's most innovative hospitals.

“I created [Gheskio] 42 years ago, and it’s the battle I have chosen for my life,” she says. “I have to take the risk.” 

Dr. Deschamps decided to study medicine when she was 11 years old, following her father’s death. She founded the Gheskio hospital along with six other doctors in 1982, when she was in her 20s. It was one of the first institutions in the developing world solely dedicated to HIV/AIDS research. The project has grown into a general hospital that now serves more than 200,000 patients annually.

Today, the Gheskio grounds are like an oasis amid Haiti’s political and security-related chaos. Dr. Deschamps says she comes here to regain her strength, surrounded by green lawns, verdant gardens, and birds chirping from towering palm trees.

She has always loved nature. Growing up, she felt free playing in Haiti’s mountains and visiting its beaches. “I live between the Haiti of my past and this today,” she says of the country’s unrest. “I try to bridge the gap between those two worlds by making changes.”

“I have no fear”

Shortly after founding Gheskio, Dr. Deschamps was selected by a group of Haitian and American doctors to study in the U.S. There, she trained under Dr. Anthony Fauci, who would later become a household name during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“He always had a positive attitude, so we were similar in that way. It has become a strategy in my life to team up with positive people,” she says.

But she has learned that even optimists can hit their limit: Almost half her staff members have left the country since Gheskio was founded. She has her bleak days, too. Lately, she has had a hard time seeing an end to the violence, she says by telephone from the capital. She fears the Kenya-led police force is arriving too late. But then, someone or something always pops up to remind her why she keeps going, she says.

Victoria Onelien/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

A group of women receives vocational training in carpentry in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, July 1, 2024. Gheskio has focused on women's empowerment.

Recently, that was Ginette Pierre, who arrived at Gheskio after gangs attacked her home. “They killed my sister. I didn’t know where to go,” Ms. Pierre, in her mid-30s, recalls of the events that unfolded last year. “I met with Dr. Deschamps, and she asked me, ‘What do you dream to do with your life?’” she recalls. “I said I always wanted to become a stylist and open my own salon. The same day, she put me in a course in cosmetology here, at the clinic.”

Ms. Pierre is part of a women’s program integrated into Gheskio by Dr. Deschamps, offering K-12 education, workshops on making handicrafts to sell, and trauma counseling. The women’s program was founded in 2005 with an eye toward the key role that women – and their empowerment – can play in combating HIV and stamping out gang wars. For the same reason, Dr. Deschamps created a primary school for the participants’ children.

“It’s easy to be a doctor,” Dr. Deschamps says. “But to have the creativity to bring a primary school into a health center?” She grins from ear to ear. “I must say I’m very proud of this work.”

Leading a hospital in Haiti means learning from every crisis. Dr. Deschamps recently relocated some of Gheskio’s medical services to mobile clinics, shortening employees’ dangerous commutes to work. 

“I’ve come to a [point] where I have no fear. Neither do the people around me,” she says. “I don’t think we would be able to evolve in a situation where we were fearful.” 

AP

Liberia's President Joseph Boakai

In the last 40 years, more than 70 truth commissions have been established to help restore societies emerging from conflict. Many have offered amnesty to perpetrators of violence if they explain their actions. Yet that pardon often comes with a condition that governments have been reluctant to enforce – a threat to prosecute those who fail to come forward or testify honestly.

The West African country of Liberia now seeks to fix that shortcoming. Two decades after the end of a brutal 14-year period of civil war, the government is working with judges, lawyers, and civil society organizations to establish a special court on economic crimes and human rights violations committed during the conflict.

“For peace and harmony to have a chance to prevail, justice and healing must perfect the groundwork,” President Joseph Boakai said when he signed the order in May creating the new tribunal.

Mr. Boakai’s comment reflects a tension at the core of building peace through reconciliation. Restorative or transitional justice involves weaving individual stories into a larger shared narrative. By bringing perpetrators of violence face-to-face with those who have been harmed, it can tap wells of empathy and forgiveness through deep listening and genuine remorse. It ties justice to individual reformation and redemption.

The hard part is what to do about those who refuse to participate. As the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission noted in its final report, in order “to avoid a culture of impunity and to entrench the rule of law, the granting of general amnesty in whatever guise should be resisted.” In countries where political leaders have been reluctant to follow truth commissions with prosecutions, victims of war crimes feel doubly harmed.

Following through, on the other hand, accelerates the recovery of democratic principles and the institutions that defend them. In Chile and Argentina, prosecutions that followed truth commissions led to reduced violence, renewed judicial independence, and a restoration of military respect for civilian command, a study by the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway found.

Liberia has made solid gains in recovering from a conflict that left an estimated 250,000 dead, displaced more than three times that number, and turned children into soldiers. It elected Africa’s first female president and convened a truth and reconciliation commission. Its economy is growing.

For more than a decade, politicians resisted the truth commission’s recommendation to establish a new court on economic and war crimes. It relied on international courts to convict its most infamous warlords. Meanwhile, corruption and mutual suspicion among political rivals persisted.

The decision to set up the new court, observes Aaron Weah, a Liberian postgraduate student at Ulster University’s Transitional Justice Institute, now sets truth and justice in a new direction. “It is not about retributive versus restorative justice,” he told African Arguments. Liberia may be forging a new model for the rule of law that honors individual dignity over self-interest.