Category Archives: Official Development Assistance

Haiti: “The biggest disgrace is indifference”

by Jim Hodgson

More than 42 years after my first visit to Haiti, I can’t disagree with that assessment. It was offered June 16 by UN secretary general António Guterres near the end of his one-day visit to Port-au-Prince.

The visit came 40 years after the fall of the Duvalier family dictatorship; 36 years after the election of a liberation-theology-inspired priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide; 35 years after the first coup against him; 22 years after the second coup; 16 years after the earthquake killed at least 220,000 people; five years after the assassination of Haiti’s last elected president; and after a decade of still-surging gang violence in the capital city and beyond.

A week after the visit by Guterres, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand announced $35 million in new funding Tuesday for projects aimed at shoring up security and curbing violence in the Caribbean. Just $7.5 million was to support the Haitian National Police service’s fight against gang violence.

Now two-and-a-half months have passed since Guterres denounced indifference and Anand offered money. But by any measure, everything has gotten worse. 

Two events caught my attention over in recent days.

Gang coalition attacks Kenscoff

First was a vicious gang attack in Kenscoff, a farming community high in the mountains above Port-au-Prince. At least 47 people were killed, including five children. Fifty others were abducted, though six children and seven women in the group were later released. Many of those killed had sought refuge in a church compound at L’église de l’Arche de la Nouvelle Alliance.

Days later, Pope Leo XIV called for release of all remaining hostages. Bishop Pierre André Dumas of the diocese of Anse-à-Veau et Miragoâne called for more action from Haiti’s government to protect the population and to end impunity:

“Haiti cannot become an immense cemetery where we come now and then to leave flowers, recite our condolences and publish statements.”

Gang violence has displaced about 1.5 million people in Haiti, where at least 3,050 people were reported killed from January to June, according to U.N. statistics released Aug. 25.

My first visit to Kenscoff came during my first visit to Haiti in March 1984. In Kenscoff, the repression was blatant. Duvalier was still in power, and we watched as his militia, the infamous Tontons Macoutes, extorted payments from vendors in a market in Kenscoff. In subsequent years, I passed through Kenscoff during visits to a Methodist congregation in nearby Furcy and to a school in Duplan rebuilt after the 2010 earthquake. (Photo: Jim Hodgson)

The Trump regime’s assault on Haitians in the U.S.

The second matter that grabbed my attention is that the United States has abruptly ended the “temporary protected status” that had kept Haitian asylum-seekers in years since the earthquake from being deported. On Aug. 27, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “Haiti TPS has been TERMINATED. Those with TPS are in our nation illegally. They have two options: LEAVE IMMEDIATELY or be DEPORTED.” Attached was a video of chained Black men and women being moved through the rain toward a waiting plane.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote: “Officials at DHS chose to publish a video of Black people in chains that evoked the slave coffles of the Old South.”

That news came at around the time that Eleazar S. Fernandez, a theologian from the Philippines currently teaching in Minnesota, wrote an excellent appreciation of Haitians and their rebellion that ended slavery in 1804. When he posted the text on Facebook, however, it was met with vile, bot-driven racist attacks that recalled phrases used by Trump, Vance and others in the current U.S. regime to malign Haitians.

UN Security Council speeches reveal the failure of the international community

The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting about Haiti on Friday, Aug. 28. Like conversations about Gaza, Sudan or Somalia, the meeting only revealed failures.

Gotson Pierre, editor of Haiti’s Alterpresse news service, wrote: 

“Three years after authorization of an international mission intended to support the Haitian National Police action against the gangs, results remain largely insufficient when measured against announced objectives.”

After one failed effort (known as the Multinational Mission to Support Security, MMAS), the UN created the Gang Suppression Force (FRG). 

The intent was to deploy a force of 5,500 international members but, as Dominican foreign affairs minister Roberto Álvarez Gil told a UNSC meeting in July, barely 1,000 were on the ground. On the surface, the problem was logistical – insufficient aircraft to bring police from countries that had promised them (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire and others) – but it shows the deeper problem of UN member-state arrears. As you might guess, the United States under Trump is the largest and most reluctant debtor.  And the United States seems to have plenty of aircraft that it uses for deportations all over the planet.

At the Aug. 28 meeting, UNSC members called for rapid deployment of the FRG forces, renewal of the FRG mandate in September, and for tighter enforcement of an arms embargo. 

Two other problems. As noted in the Drop Site report above, the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate. Meanwhile, Haiti’s illegitimate interim government, headed now only by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé after U.S.-led manoeuvres in January that removed the previous Transitional Presidential Council, is trying to hold general elections for the first time in more than a decade on Dec. 13. It has been registering voters in Port-au-Prince and beyond. 

But, given the history of U.S. interference (and worse) in Haiti over more than a century, my expectation is that such an election will have a low voter turnout and produce a new president who is favourable to U.S. security and business plans, much like those of Michel Martelly (2011-16) and Jovenel Moïse (2017 until his assassination on July 7, 2021). Again, the parties, popular organisations and social movements with different visions for Haiti will be shoved aside.

"Another World is Possible," World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brasil (2005)

The old order is dead. Let’s make a new, more just order.

by Jim Hodgson

It was too much to hope that the well-heeled audience at Davos would boo Donald Trump from the stage a day after they had offered Mark Carney a standing ovation. But by the end of Wednesday, it seemed that the wall of resistance to any U.S. take-over of Greenland was successful, and the president backed down. An important victory.

Still, “la rupture de l’ordre mondial” of which Carney spoke remains. And he’s right: we shouldn’t mourn it. The international financial institutions invented in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, gave overwhelming power to the rich countries of the Global North. 

And the United Nations system that followed, with a veto given to each of the five most powerful countries, has protected their interests – even in the face of overwhelming contrarian votes in the UN General Assembly. Think, for example, of the annual vote to end the cruel U.S. blockade of Cuba.

That order was designed by the nations that existed at the end of World War II, especially the colonial or neo-colonial states of Europe and the Americas. Most of the Caribbean, Africa and large parts of south Asia were still under colonial rule. That order imposed and perpetuated a Global North-based order on all the new nations that were born in the 25 years or so after the war: the majority of nations that exist today.

And that order, at least in the eyes of three of the five veto-holders, effectively imposed capitalism as a synonym for democracy. The United States and its allies were satisfied with a sort of formal democracy, a certain alternance between parties of the right and centre-right, and if that failed, then a military government was a useful interlude until the real order could be re-established and markets were safe. 

Canada would “go along to get along,” as Carney admitted. 

Just as it did less than three weeks ago when the United States bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president. And just as it has for more than two years over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In his speech, Carney seemed to offer a vision of capitalism without the now-erratic United States. It’s still reliant on resource extraction, military spending, and massive capital investment.

But if we are all to grow and thrive, we must demand more. We require an end to practices that exploit social inequities and our shared ecology. 

Alternatives

Because of the paths on which my life has taken me, one that is especially close to my heart is the call from the Indigenous people of Zapatista communities in southern Mexico for “a world with room for all” – “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.” But other visions come from other places, including three decades of gatherings of the World Social Forum.

More than 50 years ago, the majority world united behind a vision of economic decolonization, sovereign development, and international cooperation across areas such as debt, trade, finance, and technology. That vision became known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and was adopted by the UN General Assembly. But, power relations being what they are, it was never implemented. (Progressive International put together a set of reflections that trace its history and update the proposals for the 21st century.)

In March last year, the World Council of Churches and several global communions of churches repeated their call for a New International Financial and Economic Architecture (NIFEA). “It is immoral that over a billion people – half of them children – subsist in poverty whilst billionaires increased their wealth by over 15% in 2024 to US$15 trillion. It is outrageous that the richest 10% of the global population receives more than half of global income, whereas the poorest half earns merely 8.5% of it,” they said in a statement.

They expressed deep concern about “a rapidly escalating climate and biodiversity emergency that jeopardises livelihoods and poses an existential threat to all life.” It notes that “several tipping points are close to being crossed or have already been crossed, leading us to recognise that we may be beyond a point of no return.”

The old order is dead. The time in which we are living demands we do better.

The “feminist foreign policy” is dead. What next?

by Jim Hodgson

A decade of promises and at least a measure of good will were flushed away with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s declaration that his government does not have a feminist foreign policy.

Speaking in Johannesburg at the end of the G20 summit, he said issues such as gender equality and reducing gender-based violence are an “aspect” of his government’s foreign policy. “But I wouldn’t describe our foreign policy as feminist foreign policy.”

Frankly, it was always hard to reconcile proclamations of feminist foreign policy (FFP, as it came to be known) by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his foreign ministers with Canada’s efforts to sell weapons abroad, inaction in Gaza, and preference for threats and sanctions over dialogue in Venezuela. After all: wouldn’t a truly feminist foreign policy veto arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of its suppression of women’s rights? 

House of Commons finance committee chair Karina Gould, who served in several cabinet posts under Trudeau and ran against Carney for the Liberal leadership, told the Canadian Press that Carney’s words “certainly” mark a departure from the previous government. But she insisted the policy the prime minister described remains feminist.

“The ideals that he was talking about continue to be feminist, and I think that what it means is that as Canadians, we expect that we’re going to stand up for gender equality around the world and here in Canada,” she said.

“Prime Minister Carney is making it very clear he is no friend to women and he is no friend to gender equality in this country,” NDP MP Leah Gazan told reporters Nov. 24.

International Women’s Day march, Guatemala City, March 8, 2023 (Jim Hodgson photo)

Feminist aid policy

The Trudeau government did somewhat better with its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP). Beyond policy documents, FIAP seemed to produce some results across the development cooperation sector with promotion of gender equity, empowerment of women and girls, and rights and inclusion for 2SLGBTQIA+ people. 

Even so, there were calls for more. Canada’s ecumenical justice coalition KAIROS said FIAP was “sound policy” but that its funding priorities needed “to align the advancement of human rights and women, peace and security with economic empowerment.”

After the Harper government in 2009 refused to support the KAIROS international assistance work, funding was restored by the Trudeau government to a revamped KAIROS Women, Peace and Security program. 

Now Trudeau is gone, his “sunny ways” undermined by the SNC Lavalin affair and his treatment of cabinet ministers who were women. And international development cooperation is being buried in favour of investment regimes, eternal debt and oceans that rise along with temperatures.

“Inside/outside strategies”

And so I find myself thinking in different ways. Sometimes I feel that I placed too much faith in the official spaces, even as I always identified most strongly with social movements. Sometimes we used “inside/outside” strategies: those who could talk to the politicians would do so; the rest of us would march in the street outside. I think of anti-free-trade demonstrations in Québec City in 2001 or the protests at the Toronto G7/G20 meeting in 2010.

Today in Mexico City’s La Jornada newspaper, Raúl Zibechi has a column in which he decries the “pyramids” of power we build within our progressive movements even as we denounce the pyramids of power in our capitalist “democracies.” He points to an event the Zapatistas will hold in San Cristóbal de Las Casas,  Chiapas, Dec. 26-30 this year. Zibechi and others will offer their “analyses on pyramids and on how histories are handled within the economic system, bad governments, laws and the judicial structure, resistance movements, the left and progressivism, human rights, the feminist struggle, and the arts.”

I can’t attend this year, but I will pay attention. As the new accord between Carney and the premier of Alberta showed this week, we can’t trust conventional power to make good choices on behalf of the people. We need to propose alternatives and press to make them reality.