Category Archives: Peace

Haiti: another military intervention looms large

by Jim Hodgson

Haitians (whose own proposals for building a better country are persistently ignored) once again face an illegitimate government, one that has proposed a foreign intervention force to quell gang violence and to keep itself in power. 

Haiti and the UN: another crossroads. Photo: Jim Hodgson, April 14, 2010, Port-au-Prince.

In reporting by many journalists from the global north, popular protest against the government, increased fuel prices, corruption and intervention is blended with reports of actions by the street gangs.

On Friday, Oct. 21, the UN Security Council approved its resolution authorizing a foreign military intervention and imposing sanctions on only one of Haiti’s gang leaders. (One might ask: when do gang leaders travel? Where do they go? Which banks do they use? Who sells them their weapons?)

The new intervention propositions emerged from the UN general secretary and Haiti’s “interim” prime minister: as if such interventions had worked in 1915, 1994, or 2004 to resolve the problems of people impoverished by the same imperial powers who are now invited to return.

Those powers misunderstand the present crisis. They can’t tell the difference between protest against the unelected government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry and the criminal activity of gangs. On Oct. 15, the United States and Canada delivered armoured vehicles for use by Haitian police.

Worse, the great powers continue to ignore the specific civil society proposals for a way forward that are contained in the “Montana Accord”  (named for the hotel where the group met). The group told a visiting U.S. delegation that it opposes foreign military intervention.

Cholera – never really eliminated after being brought to Haiti by support staff to soldiers in a previous UN force – is back. There are proposals to bring vaccines, but Haiti was able to deliver COVID vaccines to just a few more than three per cent of the population. Only 41 per cent of Haitian children are vaccinated against measles and 51 per cent are fully vaccinated against polio. Effective management of the cholera outbreak would require some sort of humanitarian truce, and that would require negotiations with the gang leaders – pretty much anathema to the imperial powers who seem more inclined to use force.

The current debates over the legitimacy of the government, possibilities for new elections, getting back on track with humanitarian aid and a reasonable development agenda are addressed in a new letter to U.S. President Joe Biden by four U.S. senators and nine members of the House of Representatives.

Recalling “decades of US meddling in Haiti’s internal affairs,” the group lauded the Montana Accord, which proposes a transition period that will ultimately result in elections, adding:

“None of these weighty issues can be addressed effectively in isolation. Neither free and fair elections, nor effective delivery of humanitarian assistance, are possible until the violence is quelled. Yet the Haitian police conspire with the gangs, and past U.S. efforts to build a professional, accountable police force have failed. The violence can only be quelled by Haitian authorities acting consistently with the rule of law through impartial judicial processes.”

News of the UN Security Council resolution (left); earlier, Amy Wilentz, a noted U.S. writer on Haitian events, expressed her doubts about intervention proposals.

I’ll share a short reading list with you:

Edwidge Danticat (my favourite Haitian writer) in The New Yorker: “The Fight for Haiti’s Future.” The United States and its allies should withdraw their support support for Henry and the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (P.H.T.K.), the Haitian Bald-Head Party. “During the Party’s decade in power, Haitians have consistently taken to the streets to protest against P.H.T.K. leaders’ ineffectiveness and corruption, and to demand accountability for the funds misused, misappropriated, and pilfered through Venezuela’s oil-purchasing program, Petrocaribe. Accountability never came.”

If you read French and would welcome regular updates on what is going on in Haiti, I would encourage you to sign up for Info-Haïti. This is the monthly bulletin of Concertation pour Haïti, a Montreal-based coalition of civil society organizations. Write to: communications@aqoci.qc.ca or follow the Concertation on Twitter at: @haiti_pour. 

On Oct. 20, members of the Concertation produced their own letter to the government of Canada with recommendations for a way forward. “Canada must now stop supporting the government of Ariel Henry and put its full weight behind this coalition, which offers the only viable proposal for a transition that would allow Haitians to organize free and fair elections. To continue to support the current Prime Minister is to condemn the country to corruption, impunity, the continued domination of gangs, and ever-worsening food insecurity.”

A former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Dan Foote, has warned that if the U.S. moves forward with the UN plan to send armed forces into Haiti, the result will be a predictable catastrophe.

And The New York Times has managed to produce pretty useful lesson plans for teachers about Haitian history and culture.

World Council of Churches: for peace, against sanctions, and sexuality talks continue

From this small city in southwest Germany, impacts of the WCC Assembly may be felt from Cape Town (9,284 km) to to Phnom Penh (9,519 km).

KARLSRUHE – As sometimes happens in large gatherings, I found myself on a single track in this Assembly of the World Council of Churches. For several years, I have participated in Rainbow Pilgrims of Faith, a global coalition that has accompanied the WCC work on sexuality (specifically) and gender justice (generally). 

Here in Karlsruhe, I led the group’s media work: blog posts, news releases and a few interviews. My colleagues managed more direct forms of engagement with delegates and other participants through an information booth and in various panels and workshops. 

At the same time, 660 delegates and more than 2,000 other participants from all parts of the world worked to shape ecumenical priorities for the next eight years or so.

Signs are positive that WCC will continue work on sexuality (sexual orientation, gender identity and expression), but that was just one thread in a tapestry of concerns addressed here.

There are many documents and scores of news releases to pour over, but two stand out for me. 

One, the more theological or spiritual of the two, is A Call to Act Together. For inspiration, it drew from the last book of the Bible, Revelation, and its themes of human suffering at work in the world: war, death, disease, and famine. “We were conscious of their manifestations in the world today. In their wake come injustice and discrimination, where those who have power often use it to oppress others rather than to build inclusion, justice, and peace.”

The message continues: “As the climate emergency accelerates, so does the suffering experienced by impoverished and marginalized people.”*

A sign of peace in Toronto’s distillery district.

The second document, The Things That Make For Peace, is also worthy of attention. It is longer and more focused on policy options.

“We understand that making peace involves addressing racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, hate speech and other forms of hatred of the other (all of which have increased and intensified during these years, in large part encouraged by populist nationalist movements); crisis and competition for essential resources for life; economic injustice and inequality in the marketplace; interstate conflicts and re-emergence of war; and the raising of the spectre of nuclear war.”

It is specific about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other armed conflicts – from Colombia to Eritrea and Ethiopia – calling for a global ceasefire “as an urgent moral imperative.”

Particularly close to my heart are sections that call for “support for the churches and peoples of Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and Zimbabwe in the midst of oppression due to international sanctions that affect these populations’ human rights and dignity.” 

Syria is an important case in point, the document says. “International and unilateral sanctions are contributing to worsening the humanitarian situation, harming a civilian population already made vulnerable by war. Moreover, sanctions are damaging the historical multicultural and multi-religious fabric of the Syrian society, forcing Christians and other indigenous groups to flee the country.”

The document calls for the removal of Cuba from the U.S. list of countries that sponsor terrorism and to “accompany the churches as prophetic voices of peace, hope, cooperation and mutual respect.”

* There is a third, equally-impressive document that I found later: The Living Planet: Seeking a Just and Sustainable Global Community. The document calls governments to “practical actions… to meet the pressing need to avert ecological disaster.”

On murder and a birthday cake: Reflections on Colombia’s search for peace with justice

In human rights work, one’s first duty is to those who are harmed. But once in a while, one of the murderers says something that seizes attention as it reveals again the full banality of evil.

On July 19 in northern Colombia, the former professional solider Álex José Mercado asked forgiveness from a young woman for the murder of her father, saying: “The day that he was turned over to me (for killing), he had gone out to get a cake for your birthday.” In another moment, he said that he was not worthy to ask forgiveness from family members, but could only ask for pardon from God. “I lent myself to murder innocent people,” he said. He was 19 at the time at the time of his crimes.

This occurred during a hearing in Valledupar of Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (referred to in Spanish as JEP). It’s the transitional tribunal that was set up to prosecute the perpetrators of crimes committed during six decades of armed conflict between the FARC-EP guerrilla fighters and the Colombian state. This hearing focused on the  falsos positivos, the false positives, that occurred just in the northern departments of Cesar and Guajira. In the country as a whole, Colombia’s armed forces kidnapped more than 6,000 young men, murdered them, dressed them as guerrillas, and then tried to pass them off “successes” in its war on “terrorism.”

Others spoke for the victims: 

Left: Pedro Loperena, representing the Wiwa Indigenous people, said: “The economic aid policies of those who gave funds to the military forces must also be re-evaluated, because those resources were used to carry out these misdeeds.” Right: Daniela Rodríguez, spokesperson for the legal representatives of the victims and in the name of the Political Prisoners Solidarity Committee and the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective (CCAJAR), asked that the “centrality of the victims, their desires and expectations, be drives these proceedings.”

When he spoke about aid to the Colombian military, Loperena was polite and understated the problem:

This chart from U.S. civil society organizations shows more than two decades of U.S. aid to Colombia.

Over decades, the U.S. and Colombian governments have successively painted the war as: first, a war against communism; then, a war against drugs; and now, a war against terrorism. But the war in Colombia had its roots in the same struggle that has gone on in Latin America since the time of the European Conquest: the struggle by small farmers, Indigenous people and urban workers for land, social justice and basic human rights.

In the face of a peace process that has had limited support (and sometimes overt opposition) from the Colombian state, headed these past four years by Ivan Duque, that these tribunals continue to function is a triumph. 

One of the hardest parts of achieving a peace agreement between the Colombian state and the FARC guerrillas was to find language about how to manage crimes committed by state and non-state actors during the conflict. The two sides began negotiating in Havana in November 2012. The agreement on transitional justice and reparations was achieved in 2015 and the full peace accord signed in December 2016. The former adversaries agreed to a form of transitional justice, creating special tribunals to judge crimes committed by both members of the FARC and by state agents. 

It is not an amnesty, despite former president Álvaro Uribe’s characterization of the accord. In fact, that was what was avoided. Under international law that has come into force since the South African transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994, a full amnesty would not be legal. 

In November 2019, the Mesa Ecuménica por la Paz (Ecumenical Table for Peace) presented its report, “Blood of Martyrs, Seeds of Liberation,” to the chair of Colombia’s Truth Commission, Fr. Francisco de Roux SJ. In presenting the report, Omar Fernández acknowledged that it was not possible to encompass all of the many Christian martyrs of this long war: the team focused on those whose pastoral work represented the Church of the Poor.

Another triumph in recent weeks is the publication June 28 of the report of Colombia’s Truth Commission. Speaking July 14 to the United Nations Security Council, commission president Fr. Francisco de Roux said  that Colombia has demonstrated that those wounded by war can come together to build peace, happiness and “produce a tomorrow where there is hope”.  Over the last four years, the Commission has heard from more than 30,000 individuals and bodies and reviewed over 1,000 reports from victimized communities. He urged  the international community to give Colombia “nothing for war.”

Top of the list of recent triumphs is, of course, is the election of a new president, Gustavo Petro, and vice-president, Francia Márquez. Like the truth commission, Petro has criticized the U.S.-led war on drugs. The truth commission has urged Petro to lead a global conversation on changing drug policies, with a focus on regulation over criminalization.

Petro and Márquez will take office on Aug. 7, and already there is talk of capital flight – in effect, a boycott of Colombia by rich investors, including Colombians who already have one foot in Miami. The road ahead – ending the alliances of military forces with paramilitary death squads and drug-traffickers, ending the practice of assassinating leaders of social movements (at least 145 in 2021), protecting rain forests and reducing the grotesque gaps between wealth and poverty – will be difficult as evidenced by this long (and nevertheless incomplete) list of U.S.-sponsored coups and invasions launched against left leaders in Latin America.