Protesters demand the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, in the Pétion-Ville area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on October 3, 2022. (Photo: RICHARD PIERRIN / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has succumbed to US pressure and endorsed a new invasion of Haiti. Once again Haiti has no friends among its neighbors.
Originally published in Caribbean Empowerment Blog.
As had been widely predicted, CARICOM caved in to the intense and relentless US pressure on it that the regional body threw its support behind the planned US military attack on Haiti.
Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, from 3-5 July, in its 45th Heads of Government conference, which also marked the 50th anniversary of the organisation, CARICOM abandoned its months long opposition to the US assault on its fellow member state and issued a statement in support of the “immediate creation of a Humanitarian and Security Stabilization Corridor under the mandate of a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution, and agreed to seek support from international partners to help finance its establishment and the strengthening of security in Haiti”.
This change of mind on CARICOM’s part was no doubt influenced by the presence not only of a bipartisan US Congressional delegation led by Democratic politician Hakeem Jeffries but also of Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State.
A day after the CARICOM meeting on 6 July it became clear, at the United Nations security briefing on Haiti, just what the Humanitarian and Security Stabilization Corridor would actually mean for the people of Haiti. María Isabel Salvador, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) issued a call for the introduction into Haiti of a “robust international force”. This call echoes that of her boss, UN Secretary General, António Guterres, who has been actively campaigning for some time now in support of the US military attack.
To confuse public opinion and hide their real aims in Haiti, the US and its supporters have put together a lying propaganda narrative which claims that they want to militarily attack Haiti to “help the Haitian people who are suffering terribly at the hands of criminal gangs”. This justification is as old as the hills and has been used for centuries by the enslaving and colonial powers who have always presented their criminal attacks on others as a good deed the attacker is doing for the attacked. “We have travelled thousands of miles to arrive in your country, we have killed you, stolen your land at gun point and grabbed all the resources you have but we want you to understand that we did this out of our humanitarian concern for you”. This is the essence of the racist ‘white man’s burden’ narrative that the US is peddling to justify its attack on Haiti. It has zero credibility but, unfortunately, CARICOM has signed up to it.
In February this year, over 40 Haitian organisations and individuals, in an open letter to CARICOM, explained the problem of the criminal gangs in Haiti. They stated, “It is no longer necessary to demonstrate that the gangs which have been made all-powerful on purpose, having the right of life and death over the people, are the political workers of the International (ed. the Core Group). They are designed to reinforce insecurity. This is a criminal invention that bears the signature of the Core Group which includes, among others, the OAS, Canada, France and the United States of America….”.
In fact the question can be directly posed to the Core Group: “since you have been controlling Haiti and running it as a UN trustee territory since 2004, how is it that you have allowed the problem of criminal gangs to reach its current state?”
The US and its Core Group couldn’t care less about Haiti, its people or their security. The sole purpose of its so called stabilisation corridor is to stabilise and reinforce those corrupt Haitian politicians who serve its interests and who the Haitian people have rejected and are fighting against.
It is revealing that it took the representative of the Russian Federation to make a number of points at the UN Security Council briefing on Haiti that should have been made by CARICOM. He stated among other things, “Systemic crisis in Haiti was preceded by many years of destructive external interference both through direct interventions and politically engineered manipulation. The vicious practice of imposing alien political models on Haiti that disregard national political interests of the country eroded the fragile foundations of Haitian statehood…..” and “We don’t quite understand why, with a stalled political dialogue and crisis of legitimacy, with no control over weapons trafficking and an underfunded humanitarian plan, the idea of sending a multinational military force to Haiti is seen by some stakeholders as a cure-all solution to all Haiti’s problems. The history of external interventions in Haiti shows that externally imposed models do not take root in Haitian society. They bring much more trouble than good and serve only as a cover for promoting the interests of other nations. It is no coincidence that even now, despite all the problems, there are voices in Haiti against any form of foreign interference. It is our duty to listen to those voices rather than try to silence or ignore them”. Not surprisingly, the UN secretariat omitted these comments in their summary of the Security Council briefing.
It is an outrage that heroic Haiti, which blazed a trail in ending the barbaric enslavement of African people in the Caribbean and Americas and which through its people’s struggle emerged as the first independent Black state in the Caribbean, is today being run as a UN trustee territory by the very enslaving and colonial powers that it fought against for so long. It is even more outrageous that CARICOM, which just a year ago was outspoken in its defence of Ukraine which is thousands of miles away and not a member of CARICOM, could not find the same courage to defend Haiti and her people. They deserve much more than this cowardly treachery from CARICOM.
Nicaragua's recent elections were conducted with transparency and freedom of choice for voters. The only problem is with the United States and its determination to undo the will of Nicarag
COP26 ended the way climate summits always do, with promises for change from countries which have every intention of keeping the status quo.
Rich capitalist nations use a variety of means to escape paying compensation to the Global South for climate change damage. The outcome at COP26 was no different in this regard.
The island nations of the Caribbean are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
In this extensive interview, socialist activist and writer Issa Shivji discusses the peasantry, capitalist development and socialism.
