Category Archives: Migration

Haiti will get support for its police. What it needs is a new government.

by Jim Hodgson

Now that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has approved deployment of a multinational force to Haiti, Haitian politicians and civil society organisations (CSOs) and their allies abroad respond with an array of positions.

UN Security Council (Alterpresse)

A new transitional government is urgently needed, says Pierre Espérance of Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH). Writing in the New York Times, Espérance called for renewed negotiations among CSOs and politicians (none of whom are elected) towards change.

“The talks should specify what qualifications are required for an individual to join the transitional government — and, critically, what would be disqualifying, to avert yet another criminal takeover.

“It wouldn’t be an easy task. But a new government formed along these lines would begin to bring long-awaited accountability to the police, as well as branches of government like the judiciary. Gangs would not disappear, but they would eventually exert less power and lose some of the vast territory they now control.”

Haiti has a “transition council” named by the interim government of the unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry. Head of the council is Mirlande Hyppolite Manigat, a constitutional law professor, presidential candidate in 2010, and widow of a man who was one of the 1988 coup-era presidents. 

At a news conference held in the presence of Henry and government ministers, Manigat expressed concern over Haiti’s “accelerated tumble” and said she saw the UNSC’s decision as an “expression of will to take charge of the deplorable situation” in which the country lives. 

“The country is going badly,” Manigat said. “It’s our fault that the UNSC has adopted this resolution.” “Velvet glove, iron hand,” responded Gotson Pierre, founding editor of Alterpresse, of Manigat’s comments. “Ariel Henry, serait-il sous pression?” [Is Henry under pressure?]

James Beltis, a member of the Montana Accord, the group made up of CSOs and opposition politicians that has its own transition proposal, called authorization of the mission a “setback.”

“We seem to be stuck with the same solution we’ve been using for the past 30 years” (referring to military interventions in 1994 and 2004), he told the Washington Post. “From a political perspective, this appears to be support for the current government.”

Beltis was also cited by the Haitian Times: “There is no possibility for Montana [political parties] to cohabit with Ariel Henry while he remains as prime minister.”

Past foreign interventions in Haiti and especially the one that followed the removal in February 2004 of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide are remembered for sexual abuse by UN soldiers and the introduction of a cholera epidemic that infected 800,000 people and took almost 10,000 lives.

This time, emphasis is placed on support to the Haitian National Police (PNH). The force will be led by Kenya (which has its own policing issues), with support from Bahamas, Jamaica and Antigua and Barbuda. The mission would be reviewed after nine months and be funded by voluntary contributions, with the United States promising up to $200 million.

Global Affairs Canada (GAC) said this country is likely to deploy RCMP officers to Haiti to act as trainers in the multinational intervention, promising an added emphasis on preventing sexual violence. 

The RCMP will be “focused on technical training,” GAC’s Lisa Vandehei told the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Oct. 5. She said they would probably train agents of the PNH in “very specialized” technical areas using a model where each trained agent would continue to teach other Haitian peers. Vandehei leads an inter-departmental task group on Haiti.

From Jan. 1 through Aug. 15 this year, at least 2,439 people had been killed and a further 902 injured. In addition, 951 people were  kidnapped. Meanwhile, ever-larger numbers of Haitians are choosing to leave any way they can. (UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) Headlines and photos about recent attacks from Alterpresse.

Will it work?

Kenyan police “don’t know the turf, don’t speak the language,” said Amy Wilentz, author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier and a professor at the University of California, Irvine. She told CBS News the mission was “unlikely to be a success.”

“First, it’s too small,” Wilentz said of the projected 10,000-person deployment. “There are an estimated 20,000 active gang members in Port-au-Prince, and they are heavily armed. So in combat, the Kenyans will be outmanned and perhaps outgunned.”

Other critics are even more severe. “It is not ‘solidarity’ with the people of Haiti to respond to the unconstitutional request formulated by a dictatorial government, put in place and maintained by the same ‘international community’ that now redoubles its support contrary to the legitimate demands of a huge range of Haitian social, political and humanitarian organisations,” says a new statement by Latin American CSOs in 17 countries, among them Jubileo Sur/Américas.

“We reject the new invasion of Haiti!” “For a Haiti that is dignified, sovereign and free of all occupation.” (Partial text of poster announcing the new Latin American civil society declaration.)

“It is to once again disregard the sovereignty and self-determination of the Haitian people with their demands and proposals to resolve this crisis generated by the same long-standing foreign intervention.

“It is not ‘support’, to continue to ignore the people of Haiti, ignoring their denunciations that link Ariel Henry, the current de facto government and its ‘international protectors’, led by the US, with the proliferation of the armed gangs that these same actors now intend to control through this new invasion.”

In comments made after the UNSC vote, several members of the council, including China and Brazil, reiterated the necessity of a strong Haitian government. 

“This force is being considered as just one instrument to help stabilize the security situation in the country,” said Brazil’s UN ambassador, Sérgio França Danese. “This is just a first step in what we hope will be the direction in terms of assuring those security considerations that will allow the political process to go forward.”

“It is a condition that is necessary but, of course, not enough.”

China’s U.N. ambassador Zhang Jun said that while Beijing “appreciates Kenya’s willingness” to lead the mission, “without a legitimate, effective, and responsible government in place, any external support can hardly have any lasting effects.”

The UNSC expanded a UN arms embargo to include all gangs, a measure China wanted. Haitian officials have said guns used by gangs are believed to be mostly imported from the United States. The embargo previously only applied to specific individuals.

Turning the world upside down: systemic change needed now

Photo: Granma.cu

by Jim Hodgson

In the face of deep inequality within and among the nations of the world, leaders of the so-called “less developed countries” find they must still appeal for basic fairness from their richer neighbours.

More than 75 years after the United Nations was formed, and almost that long since the first development programs were implemented (e.g., the Colombo Plan, 1950), and almost 60 years since the first gathering of the Group of 77 developing nations, leaders gathered last week in Havana and this week in New York to plead their case again.

Not that you would have read about the Havana meeting in mainstream media, but representatives from 114 countries attended the G77+China meeting in Havana. Among them were 30 heads of state or government, as well as senior officials from international organisations and agencies, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The meeting was held under the banner title, “Current development challenges: The role of science, technology and innovation,” but the talk was all about the systems of wealth and power that are rigged against developing countries.

In their final declaration Sept. 16, the G77 demanded fair “access to health-related measures, products and technologies” – a problem highlighted by “vaccine apartheid” during the Covid pandemic when richer countries had first access to vaccines. 

G77 called for an end to “existing disparities between developed and developing countries in terms of conditions, possibilities and capacities to produce new scientific and technological knowledge.”

They revived calls for a “new international economic order” and “new financial architecture,” including “through increasing the representation of developing countries in global decision and policy-making bodies which will contribute to enhance the capacities of developing countries to access and develop science, technology and innovation.”

Among the countries participating (including the host, Cuba) were several that have been harmed by sanctions that are usually imposed by wealthier countries to try to provoke changed behaviour by less powerful countries. Sanctions (referred to in the declaration with the UN Human Rights Council term “unilateral coercive measures”), together with external debt, inflation, displacement of peoples, inequality and “the adverse effects of climate change” are all among the “major challenges generated by the current unfair international economic order” and there is “no clear roadmap so far to address these global problems.”

Criticism of the existing international order carried over from the G77 meeting to the UN General Assembly, which met days later in New York.

“They don’t have the $100 billion to aid countries so that they can defend themselves against floods, storms and hurricanes,” said Colombian President Gustavo Petro, referring to the Loss and Damage Fund promoted at the COP climate negotiations to “new and additional” funding from donor nations.

Wars and climate change, he said, are related to that other unprecedented crisis: migration. “The exodus of people toward the north is measured with excessive precision in the size of the failure of governments. This past year has been a time of defeat for governments, of defeat for humanity.”

The political systems that we use to effect policy changes are failing to respond to the urgent needs of our time. Most politicians are beholden to the corporations and rich people who fund their political parties and perpetuate their hegemony. In four-to-six year electoral cycles, the deep changes needed to confront those problems are rarely undertaken. 

In Canada, think of the power that mining corporations have wielded to block meaningful investigation of human rights and environmental abuses by their subsidiaries overseas. Or the influence land speculators have over the Ontario government. Or the actions of oil, gas, coal and pipeline companies to stall meaningful action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. 

And then scale that up globally. Think of the ways pharmaceutical companies blocked access to HIV and AIDS medications until a global fund was found to pay them – and then pulled the same stunt over Covid vaccines. At the UN on Sept. 20, Guterres said time was running short for climate action thanks to the “naked greed” of fossil fuel interests.

What is delivered through Official Development Assistance and Sustainable Development Goals may be crumbs and band-aids. While necessary, those funds are not sufficient to counter instruments of power like corporations and their allies in the international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Political change is required to make the systems change.

As Xiomara Castro, president of Honduras, told the G77 in Havana: “The time has come to put an end to the backyards [using a U.S. term referring to its relationship to Latin America] because we are not pieces on a chessboard of those who are apologists for dependence. Our nations should not continue to suffer the mass privatization of their territories.”

Mafalda: But Liberty, you’ve put the map upside down!
Liberty: Upside down compared to what? Earth is in space where there is no up or down.
Liberty: That story that says the north has to be above is a psychological trick invented by those on the top to make those who are on the bottom continue to believe that we are the bottom. But, beginning today, conventional ideas are over!
Last panel, a voice: Where were you, Mafalda?
Mafalda: I don’t know, but a conventional idea has taken a blow.

(For that last line, Quino, the great Argentinian cartoonist who created Mafalda, wrote in the original Spanish version, “No lo sé, pero algo acaba de sanseacabarse” – the sense being that something has ended.)

Summit of the Americas: U.S. can’t break old habits

That the White House announced Canada’s planned response to the flow of refugees in Central America said a lot to me about the way the Biden administration mishandled the Summit of the Americas, held in Los Angeles last week.

Canada will welcome 4,000 additional migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, the White House announced on June 10. That number is insignificant compared to the size of the challenge: 

  • Mexico reported apprehending 307,679 undocumented migrants in 2021. About one-third were deported; another third sought asylum in Mexico. The main countries of origin of those apprehended were Honduras (41%), Guatemala (26%), El Salvador (8%), Haiti (6%), Brazil (5%), Nicaragua (5%), Cuba (2%), and Venezuela (1%). None of the leaders of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador chose to attend the summit – and Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela were told by Biden not to come. It’s hard to solve problems when you’re not talking to people who can do something about them.
  • As of February in the United States, about 164,000 (Reuters) or “just under 179,000” (Axios) migrants are currently in alternatives-to-detention programs managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement  (ICE). This is “roughly double the total on Sept. 30, 2020, before Biden took office,” Reuters reported, and doesn’t include dependents – or the people actually held in detention.

The White House announcement of Canada’s support included commitments from other countries on migration issues, and was reported by Canadian Press in an article widely shared in Canadian media (CBC, CTV, the Globe and Mail, among others).

“The agreement also includes a pre-existing Canadian commitment to bring in an additional 50,000 agricultural workers this year from Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean.” (Those are temporary workers whose rights are limited.)

To its credit, the government (via the Prime Minister’s Office, not Global Affairs Canada) also announced an additional $118 million for “progressive initiatives” aimed at improving the lives of people where they already live in Latin America and the Caribbean. That includes $67.9 million to promote gender equality; $31.5 million in health and pandemic response spending; $17.3 million on democratic governance and $1.6 million for digital access and anti-disinformation measures. It will also spend $26.9 million to address “irregular migration and forced displacement” in the hemisphere.

Washington “still trying to dictate” to neighbours

But it was the exclusions and boycotts that drew most attention. Because Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua were excluded by the host country, Mexico, Honduras, Bolivia and some Caribbean leaders chose to stay away. Leaders of Guatemala and El Salvador did not attend because of issues with U.S. treatment of allegations of corruption and abuses of human rights in their countries. In the end only about 20 of potentially 35 heads of state or government attended.

Apparently modelling the art of understatement, Reuters reported: “Hosting the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, Biden sought to assure the assembled leaders about his administration’s commitment to the region despite nagging concerns that Washington, at times, is still trying to dictate to its poorer southern neighbours.”

The presence of the unelected prime minister of Haiti, Ariel Henry, drew fire. During a panel discussion on “journalistic freedom,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had the good grace to seem embarrassed when challenged over Henry’s presence. As Alterpresse pointed out, “not only does Henry govern without a mandate in violation of the Haitian Constitution, he is also implicated in serious crimes, including the death of a Haitian journalist in February 2022 by Haitian police.” (Two other journalists had been killed in January in a gang attack.)

In the tradition of each Summit of the Americas (including the teargas summit in Quebec City in 2001), a People’s Summit was held, gathering more than 250 community organizations, social movements, trade unions and other progressive groups. “In the ‘richest country in the world,’ 140 million live in or near poverty. The US government is addicted to militarism and war and will spend over $800 billion in 2022, on death and destruction,” said the final declaration. “Instead of preparing for war, society must be organized to meet human needs. We want a future without evictions, police violence and mass incarceration, deportations, sanctions, and blockades. We say: no more!”