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haiti
11 Haitians—Including 8 Children—Killed in 'Kamikaze' Drone Strike on Birthday Party
"Who, ultimately, will assume responsibility for this attack: The prime minister? The transitional presidential council? Private security companies? The leadership of Haitian National Police?” asked one advocate.
Sep 23, 2025
A weekend attack by a pair of so-called "kamikaze" drones attributed to Haiti's fragile government killed at least 11 people including eight children, drawing widespread condemnation this week and demands for accountability.
The Miami Herald reported Monday that kamikaze drones, also known as suicide drones, targeted a party in Simon Pelé, a gang-controlled area in the Cité Soleil neighborhood of the capital, Port-au-Prince, where Albert Steevenson, a gang leader also known as Djouma, was celebrating his birthday and handing out gifts to local children.
According to The New York Times, the first exploding drone killed three adults including a pregnant woman and eight children ages 2-10, and wounded six others. A second drone then exploded outside the gang's headquarters, killing four members and injuring others.
Mimose Duclaire, 52, told the Herald that children including her 4-year-old granddaughter Merika Saint-Fort Charles were playing outside when she heard an explosion.
"I heard a ‘boom’ and when I looked I saw her both of her knees were broken and her head was split open," Duclaire said.
"If they cannot effectively use the drones they need to stop their use."
Nanouse Mertelia, 37, told The Associated Press that she was inside her home when she heard an explosion and ran outside to see what was happening, because her son had just left to go get something to eat. That's when she saw her child on the ground with one of his arms and legs blown off.
“Come get me, come get me, please mama,” she said he told her, but it was too late. “By the time we got to the hospital, he died.”
There is still some uncertainty over who carried out the attack. There has been speculation that mercenaries from the private contractor Vectus Global, which was founded by Erik Prince—the founder and ex-CEO of the notorious mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater—was involved in the strike.
The Times previously reported that Haiti's government is working with Prince “to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital.”
According to the new Times reporting, it is unclear whether Prince's contractors or the Haitian National Police (HNP) were responsible for Saturday's massacre. Neither Prince nor the HNP have responded to Times' requests for comment.
Romain Le Cour, head of the Haiti Observatory at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, told The Guardian Tuesday that the attack raises “urgent questions of accountability."
“It has now been [over] 48 hours since the incident, and the authorities have yet to issue any official communication or assume public responsibility," Le Court said. "Who, ultimately, will assume responsibility for this attack: The prime minister? The transitional presidential council? Private security companies? The leadership of Haitian National Police?”
Regardless of who committed the killings, they have sparked renewed focus on the use of kamikaze drones in Haiti. Pierre Esperance, who heads Haiti's National Human Rights Defense Network, told the Herald that—as in the case of the killing of two elite police officers in a drone strike last month—the culprit appears to be lack of coordination and oversight.
“We’ve always said that the use of drones have to be coordinated with the security forces,” Esperance said. “This is why you have collateral damage... If they cannot effectively use the drones they need to stop their use."
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The American Reckoning
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know US leaders belong there too.
Sep 11, 2025
I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me.
As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame.
The United States cannot keep living in that shrug. We armed, funded, and protected Israel as it has carried out the genocide of the Palestinian people. We have supplied not only weapons but coordination, intelligence, and political cover. We let the American Israel Public Affairs Committee function as the arm of a foreign government, not as a lobbying group. We looked away from the checkpoints, the administrative cruelty, the killing of children. This is our legacy.
But Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror held up to the long history of our interventions. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953, not because he was a tyrant but because he dared to nationalize oil. We turned that nation toward dictatorship and decades of repression, then had the arrogance to call it democracy. In Central America, we toppled leaders and propped up death squads. In Chile, we helped usher in the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet, betraying yet another democratic choice in favor of authoritarian brutality.
We speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous ways as if they are foreign to us. They are not. We have assassinated leaders. We have sanctioned extrajudicial killings, calling them “targeted strikes.” We have funded militias and trained torturers. We still carry Guantánamo on our conscience. We are not better than Putin. We are his rival and his mirror.
We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
In Vietnam, we unleashed hell. Entire villages were burned to the ground. At My Lai, US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed civilians, women, children, elders. It was not an accident, not a one-off. It was part of a culture of violence we exported and excused.
And then there is the School of the Americas, now rebranded as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US military institution in Panama where we trained some of the worst dictators and death squad leaders in Latin America. The manuals we gave them were explicit: torture, execution, terror as tools of governance. We sowed horror and called it security.
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know we belong there too. For Mossadegh, for Pinochet, for Central America, for My Lai, for every extrajudicial killing and every sanctioned massacre, and most immediately for Gaza, we should be in the dock as well. We should stand in handcuffs, our heads lowered in shame, finally facing the truth of what we have unleashed in the world.
The truth is that our foreign policy has been one long history of intervention, violence, and betrayal of human dignity. We were in Haiti. We were in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan. We have left the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa littered with the bones of our experiments. Always we tell ourselves it was complicated. Always we tell ourselves we meant well. But what we meant was power, and what we left was ruin.
What reparation looks like now is not cash or aid dropped into a void. It is restoring justice. It is ending our culture of nation building and intervention, and replacing it with support for people, families, language, culture, dignity, and jurisprudence. It is standing against genocide, no matter who commits it. It is admitting that our strength lies not in military power but in whether we can build schools instead of prisons, communities instead of empires.
This is not just a populist opinion. It is a moral imperative. We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
I am a doctor. My oath is to heal, to do no harm. But as a citizen, I see harm everywhere our government touches. We cannot keep pretending that this is someone else’s crime, someone else’s burden. This is ours.
The reckoning will not wait forever. The question is whether we face it with honesty now, or whether we let it destroy us later.
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From Revolution to Reparations: Black August and Haiti’s Ongoing Struggle for Freedom
Haiti’s struggle for restitution is not a historical footnote—it is the next chapter in the global struggle for Black liberation.
Aug 30, 2025
As we mark Black August, the struggle that launched the global fight for Black liberation—the Haitian Revolution—remains unfinished. Over 200 years after enslaved Haitians lit the first beacon of Black resistance in August 1791 and set a precedent for abolition by winning their freedom, they are fighting the next chapter in the struggle for Black economic and political liberation—one that could set another precedent, this time for reparative justice.
On August 22, 1791, Haitians revolted against their French enslavers, liberating themselves and forming the world’s first free Black Republic, and the first country to abolish enslavement. The Haitian Revolution was not just a simple victory against one of the world’s most powerful empires. It was a global rupture, proof that Black freedom was possible and European domination was not inevitable. It lit the fire of revolution globally, inspiring enslaved and colonized people worldwide. As Frederick Douglass, one of the 19th century’s leading advocates for Black rights in the United States, said in his speech to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, “[in] striking for their freedom, [Haitians]... struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.”
France and other enslaving countries realized the power of the Haitian Revolution as a herald of global Black liberation and a threat to their supremacy. They sought to punish Haiti for the crime of being Black and free. In 1825, France sent a fleet of 14 warships equipped with 528 canons to Port-au-Prince and demanded that Haiti pay 150 million francs as compensation for the loss of what they considered their “property,” including captive Haitians. In exchange for this payment, France would recognize Haiti’s independence—an independence already paid for by the blood and lives of the Haitians who fought Napoleon’s army and won.
The strength of Haiti’s claim poses just as much of a threat to the global white supremacist order now as the success of Haiti’s revolution did in 1804.
Under threat of attack and re-enslavement, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer and his allies agreed to pay. The ransom—and subsequent extortionate loans by French banks to finance payments—crushed Haiti’s economy, prevented it from investing in its own development, and left it vulnerable to foreign intervention and exploitation that further impoverished and destabilized the country. Many of the conditions used to paint Haiti as a “failed state” today can be traced directly to that original grave injustice.
The Independence Ransom and other measures delayed broader liberation, but the promise of Black freedom and autonomy that Haiti gave the world remained alive. In his speech, Douglass called Haiti “the Black man’s country, now forever”—and Haitians are still fighting for their freedom and inspiring others. These are the struggles we honor during Black August, born in the 1970s in California’s prison system to commemorate the lives and assassinations of revolutionary brothers Jonathan and George Jackson: the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in August 1831; the March on Washington on August 28, 1963; and every uprising that has dared to defy enslavement and racial capitalism.
This August, Haiti stands at the heart of another urgent struggle: the fight for restitution for the Independence Ransom. Calls for France to pay restitution have increased in recent years, not just from Haitians but from all around the world. The strength of Haiti’s claim poses just as much of a threat to the global white supremacist order now as the success of Haiti’s revolution did in 1804. In fact, when the United States and its powerful allies realized the power of Haiti’s claim to balance the global economy in 2004, they overthrew Haiti’s democracy rather than risk its claim succeeding.
Haiti’s struggle for restitution is not a historical footnote—it is the next chapter in the global struggle for Black liberation. Restitution would not only address the grave injustice done to Haiti, it would also lay a powerful legal and political foundation for broader reparations. Just as Haitians won their freedom in 1804, they will eventually win restitution for themselves and unlock the door to reparations for all. But that victory will require sustained pressure—on France, the United States, and the banks and companies that facilitated and profited off this economic extraction—not just from Haitians, but from all people who wish to honor the memories of those who paid the ultimate price in the fight for liberation. This means support for restitution, but also for a democratic, sovereign government that will assert the claim and otherwise be accountable to the Haitian people.
This Black August is not just a commemoration, it is a call to action. It is a call to join the 60-plus leading organizations from Haiti, the United States, the Caribbean, France, and beyond that sent a letter to French President Emmanuel Macron demanding restitution and reparations. And it is, above all, a call to remember Haitians’ pivotal role in the global Black struggle for liberation and to recommit ourselves to the unfinished work they started in 1791.
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