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ariel henry
The Best Thing the US Can Do for Haiti Is Get Out of Its Way
Haiti has a chance at returning to a more stable, democratic path, but only if the Biden administration will let it.
Mar 11, 2024
Haiti’s deepening crisis—armed groups launching an assault on the government, and the de facto prime minister on indefinite layover in the San Juan, Puerto Rico, airport—is a predictable consequence of 14 years of U.S. support for undemocratic regimes connected to Haiti’s PHTK party as it has dismantled Haiti’s democracy.
Haiti has a chance at reversing this descent and returning to a more stable, democratic path, but only if the Biden administration will let it.
Prime Minister Ariel Henry was stranded in San Juan Tuesday on his way back from Kenya, where he had signed an agreement for Kenyan police to come bolster his repressive, corrupt and unpopular regime. The armed groups, including many that had collaborated with Henry’s regime, took advantage of his absence to attack government infrastructure, and free 5,000 prisoners, many of them members of armed groups. Henry had planned to fly to the neighboring Dominican Republic and take a helicopter ride back to Haiti’s National Palace under the cover of darkness. But Dominican authorities refused entry to the prime minister’s chartered plane, which re-routed to San Juan.
No amount of submission to U.S. demands by Prime Minister Henry and his predecessors can justify the absolute horror that our support has allowed them to inflict on the Haitian people.
Prime Minister Henry has not yet resigned, and the State Department denied reports that it demanded his resignation. But Henry has clearly lost the support of the United States, which for two years had allowed him to resist Haitians demands for fair elections. Absent Washington’s support, Henry has little chance of regaining power.
This dire situation is not only predictable, it was predicted. Haitian-American officials, Haitian civil society, members of the U.S. Congress, and other experts had been warning for years that the U.S. propping up Henry would lead to increasing tragedy for Haitians. The United States, which installedHenry in power in the first place, ignored these pleas and stood resolutely by its friend. With U.S. support, Henry’s unconstitutional term as prime minister exceeded any other prime minister’s term under Haiti’s 1987 Constitution. Levels of gang violence, kidnapping, hunger, and misery also reached unprecedented levels.
The United States is still insisting on getting Kenyan troops to Haiti. The State Department has persistently—if so far unsuccessfully—tried to deploy non-American boots onto Haitian ground since Henry requested them in October 2022. The mission’s deployment initially stalled because it was widely rejected as a bad idea that will primarily serve to prop up the repressive regime that generated the crisis. Haitian civil society repeatedly insisted that the first step towards security must be a transitional government with the legitimacy to organize elections and determine how the international community can best help Haiti.
Concerns that the intervention would serve only to reinforce an unpopular regime led the countries that the Biden administration first tapped to lead the mission, including Canada, Haiti’s Caribbean neighbors, and Brazil, to pass. The U.N. itself concluded that the mission would require too much “robust use of force” to be appropriate for a peacekeeping mission. So, the Security Council took the unusual step of authorizing the mission, but on the condition that it not actually be a U.N. mission that the organization would have to take responsibility for. The Biden administration, likely concerned about election-year cell phone videos of troops shooting indiscriminately in crowded neighborhoods—as the last foreign intervention did—declined to send U.S. troops for the mission (but is considering deploying a small Marine contingent to Haiti in early March).
Last August Kenya—which did not even have diplomatic relations with Haiti but did need the hundreds of millions of dollars that the United States offered—agreed to lead the mission. The exploratory delegation Kenya sent to evaluate conditions in Haiti quickly realized how deadly the planned mission would be for Haitians and Kenyans alike, and proposed to limit its scope to protecting public infrastructure.
The United States was not open to renegotiating the deal, and Kenya withdrew its proposed limits. But Kenya’s High Court temporarily blocked the deployment as unconstitutional. Ariel Henry’s visit to Kenya was for the signature of an accord that Kenya’s President William Ruto hoped would overcome the court’s objections. Kenyan lawyers insist that the agreement itself is illegal, and are continuing their challenge. In the meantime, Kenyan officers who had volunteered for the mission are changing their minds. Another obstacle appeared on March 7, when the White House conceded that the mission cannot be deployed without congressional approval of funding.
The State Department’s insistence that the Kenyan deployment must nevertheless happen raises fears that the United States will also continue its policy of installing and propping up undemocratic regimes in Haiti. Finance Minister Patrick Boisvert, who Henry tapped as interim prime minister when he left for Kenya, increased concerns of authoritarian governance on March 6 when he declared a three-day curfew and state of emergency throughout the Port-au-Prince region in an edict that did not even mention the legal basis for his authority. The next day Boisvert raised more fears by extending the emergency measures for a month and adding in a ban on all protests.
The State Department’s rescinding its support for Henry might have been promising had the gangs not already made his ouster inevitable. State’s claim that it now supports “an empowered and inclusive governance structure” that will “pave the way for free and fair elections” might have been promising if it had not added the condition that the new government must “move with urgency to help the country prepare for a multinational security support mission.”
A legitimate, broadly supported, sovereign transitional Haitian government might request foreign police assistance. But a government allowed to form only if it accepts a U.S.-imposed occupation force originally designed to prop up a hated, repressive government is not sovereign. It may not be legitimate or broadly supported either.
The United States tasked CARICOM, the federation of Haiti’s Caribbean neighbors, to forge a civil society consensus. CARICOM has enjoyed credibility in Haiti in the past, but over the past few months it has faced criticism for trying to strong-arm civil society into an agreement that maintained Henry’s power. Not surprisingly, CARICOM-led talks on March 6 and 7 failed.
When allowed, Haitians have a history of coming together to make their way out of a crisis. Haiti became a country in 1804 by defeating Napoleon, with almost no outside help. In 1986, when the U.S. finally withdrew its support from Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Haitians eventually wrested power from the military and held fair elections. In 2006, they voted their way out of the crisis created by the U.S. kidnapping of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide two years before. In August 2021, shortly after the killing of Haiti’s last president, Jovenel Moïse, a broad-based group presented the Montana Accord that would have created a transitional government leading to elections in two years. The U.S. vetoed the accord, citing, among other reasons, that the two-year time frame was too long. That was 30 months ago, and there are no elections in sight.
No amount of submission to U.S. demands by Prime Minister Henry and his predecessors can justify the absolute horror that our support has allowed them to inflict on the Haitian people. It is time for the United States to let Haitians come together and make their way out of the current crisis. Civil society sees an opportunity for democracy in the crisis, and people all over Haiti have been meeting, discussing, and negotiating to develop platforms for a broad-based, legitimate transitional government that can hold fair elections. It is expected that soon—maybe within weeks—one of these platforms will rise to the top, and civil society will coalesce around it. The United States needs to let that process happen without interference or conditions.Keep ReadingShow Less
Antiwar Voices Condemn UN Authorization of US-Backed, Kenyan-Led Invasion of Haiti
"EVERY foreign military invasion and occupation of Haiti has brought nothing but pain and misery to our people," said one Haitian-American critic.
Oct 02, 2023
Peace proponents in Haiti and around the world condemned Monday's authorization by the United Nations Security Council of a U.S.-backed, Kenyan-led multinational military invasion of Haiti to help its unelected government fight gangs that have run roughshod over parts of the Caribbean nation's capital.
The U.N. resolution—which was reportedly co-authored by the United States and Ecuador with input from Kenya—was approved by the 15-member Security Council, with 13 votes in favor and Russia and China abstaining. The measure authorizes a Multinational Security Support (MSS) force supported but not carried out by the U.N. to deploy for up to one year, with a review after nine months.
Kenya has offered to contribute 1,000 police officers to the invasion force, with the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Antigua and Barbuda also pledging to send forces. The U.S., while not sending any troops to Haiti, has offered $100 million in logistical support for the operation.
While no date has been set for the deployment, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that the intervention could begin "in months," while Kenyan Foreign Affairs Minister Alfred Mutua told the BBC that the force should be in Haiti by next January, "if not before then."
Jean Victor Généus, the foreign affairs minister under Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry—who has served as acting president since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse—called the Security Council action "more than just a simple vote."
"This is in fact an expression of solidarity with a population in distress," Généus said, according to the Associated Press. "It's a glimmer of hope for the people who have been suffering for too long."
While some Haitians support an intervention as ongoing gang warfare has forced thousands of Haitians to flee their homes in the capital Port-au-Prince, others condemned what they are calling the latest chapter in a long history of imperialist invasions and meddling in the country.
"EVERY foreign military invasion and occupation of Haiti has brought nothing but pain and misery to our people," Jemima Pierre, a Haitian-American associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and member of the Black Alliance for Peace coordinating committee, wrote on social media. "So if you're still advocating that as some kind of solution, we know you hate us and think that we are only deserving of violence and degradation."
"The U.N. occupation of Haiti brought us a cholera epidemic that sickened a million and killed more than 30,000," she added, referring to the MINUSTAH "peacekeeping" operation authorized in 2004 by Security Council resolution 1542. "No 'gang' in Haiti has killed that many people while creating an ecological disaster. The U.N. has never paid reparations for that massacre."
The MINUSTAH mission was also marred by a sexual abuse scandal in which U.N. personnel reportedly raped girls as young as 11 years old before abandoning them to raise children—dubbed "petit MINUSTAH"—alone.
"Every invasion of Haiti is sold as helping to quell 'chaos.' Each time it just strengthens the neocolonial elite and the associated exploitation by Western companies," wrote U.S. journalist Eugene Puryear.
Referring to Kenyan President William Ruto—under whom the country's armed forces and allied militias have been accused of war crimes including the murder, rape, and torture of civilians in counterinsurgency operations—Puryear added: "This one will be no different. Shame on President Ruto for trying to use Pan-Africanism to cover for imperialism."
Imperialist invasions and meddling are as old as Haiti, home of the world's only successful nationwide slave revolt and the second country in the Western hemisphere to win its independence, after the United States. Haiti was the first truly free nation in the Americas, and the world's first Black republic. Its revolution also belied the hypocritically egalitarian pretensions of the French and U.S. revolutions, the latter of which fought to preserve and expand slavery while declaring that "all men are created equal."
While recognizing the crushing debt imposed by France as a condition for independence, the United States withheld diplomatic recognition of Haiti until 1862. Half a century later, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a professed champion of national "self-determination," ordered a U.S. invasion in the name of "stability" following the assassination of Haitian President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The murder sparked widespread violence and U.S. Marines, wroteTime, "landed at Port-au-Prince and began forcibly soothing everybody."
U.S. troops occupied Haiti until 1934, killing thousands of Haitians who resisted the invaders. Occupation forces and administrators implemented forced labor to build infrastructure and public works projects. The occupiers introduced Jim Crow segregation while looting the country's finances for the benefit of New York banks. Rape of Haitian women and children by U.S. troops ran rampant, and went unpunished.
After U.S. troops left, successive U.S. administrations backed Haitian dictators including the brutal kleptocrat Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, even as his death squads murdered as many as 60,000 Haitians.
Haiti finally held democratic elections in 1990. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest, was elected with two-thirds of the vote. However, less than a year later he was overthrown in a military coup whose plotters included CIA operatives.
In 1994 Joe Biden, then the junior U.S. senator from Delaware, said that "if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn't matter a whole lot to our interests." President Bill Clinton did not agree, and that same year his administration secured United Nations Security Council authorization to stage a U.S.-led invasion to "restore democracy" to Haiti. Clinton sent 25,000 troops on a "nation-building" mission, and Aristide was returned to the presidency.
However, a decade later the George W. Bush administration actively worked to topple Aristide's government in events culminating in a 2004 coup, in which the same CIA-trained forces that previously ousted the president again played a key role.
"Once again, the U.S. government is using the United Nations to push for a genocidal military intervention in Haiti," the International People's Assembly, a network of over 200 leftist groups, wrote on social media Monday. "The disastrous experiences of foreign interventions show that they only serve to deepen violence, poverty, and injustice against the Haitian people."
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