The Biden administration has drafted a United Nations Safety Council (UNSC) Decision authorizing the deployment of international troops to Haiti, based on a report within the Miami Herald. The decision is the primary official affirmation that the US is making ready one more invasion of the Caribbean nation, which has suffered for over a century from recurring, blood-soaked navy interventions by American imperialism and its allies.
The draft decision comes within the wake of direct calls, first from Haiti’s hated, US-installed president, Ariel Henry, after which the UN Secretary-Common António Guterres for the dispatch of a “multinational fast motion power” to the island-nation to bolster its repressive police forces, restore bourgeois order and suppress mass fashionable discontent. “We want to see our neighbours like the US, like Canada, take the lead and transfer quick,” Bocchit Edmond, Haiti’s US ambassador informed Reuters Oct. 10.
A replica of the US decision was obtained by the Herald and reportedly confirmed by a number of US and UN officers. The draft comes just a few days after Guterres despatched a letter to the UNSC calling for navy forces be despatched to Haiti within the title of combatting “armed gangs,” who’re allied with opposing sides of Haiti’s political elite and have waged a marketing campaign of violent terror towards the inhabitants whereas gaining a maintain over vital infrastructure.
The decision comes amid mass protests which were ongoing for a number of weeks involving tens of 1000’s within the capital Port-au-Prince and different main cities like Cap-Haïtien and Gonaïves. The demonstrations have raised social tensions to a breaking level. Protesters are demanding the resignation of the unelected, imperialist-backed puppet regime of Henry and an finish to dire social situations within the impoverished nation, marked by rising starvation and skyrocketing costs for gas and different primary items.
In latest days, widespread demonstrations flared in opposition to Henry’s request for international safety forces to assist protect his crumbling regime. Widespread opposition amongst Haiti’s staff and oppressed plenty can be directed towards the gang syndicates that at the moment occupy massive swathes of the nation and have lengthy collaborated with main authorities officers in finishing up massacres towards the civilian inhabitants.
The rebel motion of the Haitian working class and poor is emblematic of developments internationally, the place employee unrest has sprung up in lots of elements of the globe in response to exploitation, rising social inequality and mass dying created by the COVID-19 pandemic. This international strike wave has emerged in numerous international locations, from Argentina and South Africa to Lebanon and the US.
The US and Canada introduced Saturday that that they had deployed armored autos and different navy provides to Haiti’s police, which have needed to give up management of territory, together with in a lot of Port-au-Prince, to highly effective gangs. A spokesman for the US navy’s Southern Command mentioned the availability of apparatus was a joint operation involving the US Air Power and Royal Canadian Air Power.
A US State Division assertion mentioned the tools would help Haiti’s Nationwide Police (HNP) “of their battle towards felony actors fomenting violence and disrupting the move of critically-needed humanitarian help.”
Loading Tweet …
Photographs circulated on social media Sunday displaying a Canadian Boeing C-17 Globemaster III touchdown at Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture worldwide airport and unloading the primary batch of navy tools. Though Canada’s embassy in Haiti declared the cargo was not for impending Canadian and American troops, many on social media discovered the declare doubtful at finest and noticed it as an indication international intervention is imminent.
The US-drafted UNSC decision singles out some of the infamous gangs and felony leaders rampaging the nation, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, and his G9 Household and Allies. The draft proposes sanctions be imposed on teams and people who “threaten the peace, safety or stability of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation,” together with an asset freeze, journey ban and arms embargo on perpetrators.
A attainable tipping level for the choice to ship armed reinforcements got here from a gang-related blockade of Varreux gas terminal north of Port-au-Prince, a storage facility that’s one in every of Haiti’s largest gas distribution facilities. The terminal homeowners introduced Saturday that “armed males” had attacked their installations and fled with greater than 28,000 gallons of petroleum merchandise.
The pictures of Canadian tools touchdown in Port-au-Prince remembers the scenes in February of 2020 when US forces delivered armored autos to then-president Jovenel Moïse that he subsequently used to crack down on a broadening protest motion towards his plans to consolidate a presidential dictatorship.
Gear delivered to the Moïse authorities was transferred instantly into the palms of G9 and Chérizier, a former officer of the HNP who would turn out to be a henchman of Moïse in terrorizing the inhabitants and crushing dissent. Among the many most notorious terror campaigns launched by G9 and sanctioned by Moïse have been an August–September 2020 bloodbath that left 22 lifeless, and the April 2021 bloodbath staged within the Bel Air slum of Port-au-Prince.
The phony declare that the sending of arms to Haiti is important to help the HNP in combatting gang violence is refuted by the violent repression the police has meted out to protestors all through the wave of demonstrations prompted by the ever-worsening financial scenario, together with final month’s elimination, on the behest of the IMF, of oil value subsidies.
Final week police shot at protestors demonstrating towards a international navy intervention, killing not less than one younger girl.
The fact is that the thuggish gangs share deep connections with important sections of Haiti’s Nationwide Police courting again not less than to Moïse’s regime. Based on a survey performed by Sant Karl Lévêque, a human rights group, an estimated 40 to 60 % of cops have connections with gangs.
The US media’s protection of the social catastrophe unfolding in Haiti has more and more sought to use the gang violence to justify a colonial-style occupation of Haiti geared toward reasserting Washington’s domination in its Caribbean “yard.”
By far the loudest purveyor for this filthy propaganda drive has been the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Publish, which has issued editorial after editorial demanding “boots on the bottom” to stop the nation from being “sucked deeper right into a vortex of anarchy.”
The latest was printed October 11, underneath the title “Sure, intervene in Haiti—and push for democracy.” The editorial concedes Henry is a US puppet, who presides over an “unelected, illegitimate authorities” that “has both enabled or promoted the nation’s dissolution into felony gang fiefdoms allied with the nation’s elite.” However then, with out lacking a heartbeat, it suggests a US-led navy intervention can promote democracy, going as far as to assert “Haitians would assist—if with misgivings—the possibility” international troops would offer “at restoring some semblance of regular life.”
American imperialism’s repeated occupations of Haiti
For the reason that daybreak of the twentieth century there have been three main US-led navy interventions in Haiti—launched in 1915, 1994 and 2004. All have been geared toward upholding American imperialism’s function because the central financial and geopolitical energy within the Caribbean area, and guaranteeing the impoverished nation was saddled with a authorities totally servile to Washington and the US monetary elite.
The primary occupation, which lasted till 1934, was not Washington’s first occasion of interference in Haiti however reasonably consolidated its grip over the nation. Six months beforehand, US Marines had marched on the state treasury in Port-au-Prince and took the nation’s whole gold reserve. On the top of the US navy presence, 5000 Marines have been stationed within the nation of lower than 3 million and brutally suppressed a radical and largely peasant-based resistance motion, the Caco. The combating led to the homicide of over 15,000 Haitians however solely 16 US fatalities.
In in search of to crush the anti-occupation rebel, the US employed the nascent strategy of aerial bombardment. Caco villages with households, youngsters and livestock have been bombed in indiscriminate aerial assaults. Floor troops have been then despatched to kill survivors.
The resistance to the occupation reached a climax when insurgent Charlemagne Peralte was pinned to a door and left on a avenue to rot to dying for days on the finish of 1919. The US navy described Peralte because the “supreme bandit of Haiti.”
On the outset of the occupation, American forces seized Haiti’s customs homes, imposed martial legislation, instituted press censorship, and outlawed dissent. The US put in a pliant president, imposed a one-sided “treaty” ratified solely by the US Senate and rewrote the structure to get rid of a ban towards international land possession.
After 20 years of occupation, American forces left the nation within the palms of military and police skilled within the violent strategies of the Marines, and a skinny layer of enterprise elites and politicians who enriched themselves whereas the plenty languished in poverty. The US-trained Haitian military grew to become the spine of capitalist domination for the following 5 many years. For nearly thirty years, the US backed to the hilt the stridently anti-Communist dictatorships of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier after which his son, Jean-Claude “Child Doc” Duvalier, regardless of the atrocities they perpetrated by means of their tonton macoutes paramilitary forces.
The second occupation got here in September 1994 when a 20,000-strong US occupation power landed on the island to return to energy Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who three years earlier had been ousted in a Washington-backed coup led by Common Raoul Cèdras. With the de facto assist of the Bush senior and Invoice Clinton administrations, Cèdras presided over a reign of terror in Haiti’s poorest neighborhoods perpetrated by his navy and CIA-backed dying squads.
However in the end Clinton determined capitalist rule in Haiti and Washington’s international agenda of “human rights” imperialism can be higher served by permitting Aristide—who following his ouster has prostrated himself to the US and pledged to impose IMF austerity and privatization insurance policies—to be returned to energy and serve out the remaining 16 months in his presidential time period. The Pentagon’s occupation power encountered no resistance from its longstanding Haitian military allies and with Washington’s blessing Cèdras was allowed to retire to Panama, the place he lives to at the present time.
How Washington and Ottawa collaborated with fascist killers to overthrow Aristide
Having returned Aristide briefly to energy in 1994, the US navy performing in live performance with Canadian and French navy forces, and in shut coordination with former Tonton Macoutes and armed forces personnel who had served as killers for the Cèdras’ dictatorship, organized his bloody overthrow in 2004, 4 years after he had been re-elected as president. In his second time period, Aristide was much more servile to US pursuits and at their behest carried out neo-liberal insurance policies and ceded key positions in his authorities to opposition forces. However this was not sufficient to calm the nerves of the standard ruling-elite who wished to have the ability to plunder the sources of the state at will and considered Aristide, due to his earlier affiliation with social opposition, with pathological hatred.
For a number of years, the George W. Bush administration positioned financial and diplomatic strain on Aristide, demanding that he comply with power-sharing with the representatives of the standard Haitian capitalist elite—bankers, sweatshops capitalists, and Duvalierist state functionaries—and right-wing center class professionals. Subsequently, little question buoyed by the supposed success of the US invasion of Iraq lower than a yr earlier than, Washington opted for regime change. Towards this finish, it and Ottawa inspired, if indirectly set in movement, a rebel of former military officers and Tonton Macoutes. North America’s imperialist governments refused all requests from Haiti’s elected authorities for help till the rebels have been on the gates of Port-au-Prince, then intervened underneath the pretext of preserving order and democracy and promptly kidnapped Aristide and bundled him on a aircraft for the Central African Republic.
Right this moment’s gang leaders, equivalent to the previous officer Chérizier, allied with sections of the HNP and safety forces, observe within the footsteps of the homicidal terrorists mobilized for the 2004 coup, like Man Phillippe and Louis-Jodel Chamblain. Each have been former Haitian military officers with US ties. Phillippe acquired coaching from US Special Forces, whereas Chamblain was a frontrunner of the CIA-backed FRAPH group that carried out state terror within the early Nineties.
Other than having a authorities in Port-au-Prince much more at Washington’s beck-and-call, an essential motivation for the third American navy occupation of Haiti was to stop Haiti’s socio-economic and political disaster from triggering a refugee disaster. The Bush administration feared an outpouring of refugees would destabilize neighboring Dominican Republic—a website of unfettered domination by US companies—and the better Caribbean area, and additional expose the hypocrisy and brutality of US imperialism’s remedy of refugees.
The US, Canadian and French navy forces that ousted Aristide and his authorities, have been quickly changed by a UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). This was largely staffed by navy personnel from lesser developed international locations, together with Brazil, Jordan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. MINUSTAH troops would stay within the nation till 2017, serving as a backstop for a succession of right-wing, US backed governments. The UN “stabilization forces” additionally inadvertently launched cholera to Haiti scary a significant well being disaster.
Following the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed greater than 200,000 folks, US and Canadian troops have been redeployed to Haiti underneath the MINUSTAH mandate. Underneath the guise of offering humanitarian aid, they ensured the disaster didn’t ignite a social explosion or mass refugee exodus, then promptly left Haiti to its destiny. The whereabouts of the $13 billion donated for Haitian earthquake aid, little or no of which reached the Haitian folks, and the function Invoice Clinton, who served as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Restoration Fee, performed in its dispersal stay reside political points in Haiti.
The navy intervention in Haiti that the US, with the assist of Canada, and different of its allies is now making ready is motivated by the identical predatory imperialist pursuits and intrigues as those who preceded it.
Washington is anxious that the political disaster and rising social unrest will destabilize the area. Dominican president and multi-millionaire Luis Abinader together with a number of different Dominican officers have been pleading for months that the imperialist powers place occupation forces in Haiti. They concern that the insurrectionary motion in Haiti may encourage Dominican staff and worsen the Dominican Republic’s personal refugee disaster.
Above all, Washington needs to make sure that no matter authorities holds energy in Port-au-Prince, whether or not headed by Henry or one other member of Haiti’s kleptocracy, its main personnel are chosen by Washington and its insurance policies tailor-made to US pursuits.
Furthermore, at a second when the US is main a felony NATO-instigated conflict towards Russia over Ukraine, American imperialism needs to protect the sordid fiction that it has the accountability for sustaining “order” within the Americas and for launching “humanitarian” interventions on the worldwide area.
The working class in the US, Canada and worldwide should come to the protection of Haitian staff in opposing any US-orchestrated navy intervention in Haiti. The democratic and social rights of the Haiti’s staff and rural toilers will solely be secured in revolutionary battle, led by the working class on a socialist internationalist program, towards imperialism and the venal nationwide bourgeoisie.
