Haitians, Peace Activists Denounce Plan for Another US-Backed Intervention

Haitians are saying "no to armed invasion from the international community, because every time there is the so-called 'help' invasion... it results in chaos," said one activist

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As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met Thursday in Ottawa to discuss a possible multilateral invasion of Haiti in the name of restoring “stability,” Haitian and antiwar voices denounced the prospect of yet another U.S.-backed intervention – which they say will bring the opposite of stability to the crisis-ridden nation.

The Biden administration is seeking a nation to lead a rapid-deployment international military force, an intervention backed by the United Nations Security Council and requested by de facto Haitian prime minister Ariel Henry to quell the gang violence that has spiked since last year’s presidential assassination, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake, and a hurricane that devastated much of the deeply impoverished nation.

While some Haitians – especially elites – and the US corporate media push for armed intervention, other Haitians and peace activists have taken to the streets and to social media to condemn any new invasion.

“The US wants another country to invade Haiti on its behalf to put down protests against the U.S.-installed government. They’re also ready to make it happen with or without U.N. approval,” tweeted the women-led peace group CodePink on Thursday. “The entire world must demand #HandsOffHaiti right now.”

In a recent interview with Democracy Now!, Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said that Haitians “are saying no to an invasion, no to armed invasion from the international community, because every time there is the so-called ‘help’ invasion, that people go to Haiti, it results in chaos.”

Madame Boukman, a prominent Haitian political commentator, recently tweeted that “U.S.-style ‘humanitarian’ intervention is like a massive blow to the spine.”

“It has completely paralyzed Haiti’s development,” she added. “Haitians call for a localized, Haitian solution based on the principles of self-determination.”

Jemima Pierre, a sociocultural anthropologist, UCLA professor, and co-coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace team on Haiti, said in a Wednesday interview on the progressive radio show “Between the Lines” that “the Haitian people… absolutely do not want foreign armed soldiers on the ground.”

“Haiti has been invaded many times by the US government,” Pierre continued. “And every single time it’s been complete brutality, rape… And so the last thing people want is to have these soldiers going around with guns and tanks pointing at them, right?”

Each time the United States has invaded or backed intervention in Haiti – the only nation born from a successful slave revolt – it has cited the restoration of order and stability as its pretext.

The US, which had coveted Haitian territory since the 19th century, used civil unrest sparked by a gruesome presidential assassination to justify a 1915 invasion and subsequent 19-year occupation.

US Marines, wrote Time at the end of the occupation, “landed at Port-au-Prince and began forcibly soothing everybody.” Thousands of Haitians who resisted were killed. Rape of Haitian women and children by US troops ran rampant and went unpunished. Occupation forces implemented forced labor, Jim Crow segregation, and oversaw the looting of the country’s finances and resources for the benefit of Wall Street banks and investors. All the while, US politicians and press hailed what they called America’s “civilizing mission.”

The US would occupy Haiti until 1934. In the decades that followed, successive administrations in Washington supported Haitian dictators including the brutal Duvalier dynasty. Democracy was finally restored with the 1990 election of then-priest and progressive populist Jean Bertrand Aristide, but a year later he was ousted in a military coup whose plotters included CIA operatives.

Amid calls for an international intervention to restore stability, President Joe Biden, then the junior US senator from Delaware, in 1994 opined that “if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot to our interests.”

Then-President Bill Clinton did not agree, and that 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 Palais National. Ten years later, he was ousted in another U.S.-backed coup.

When UN troops deployed to Haiti following a devastating 2010 earthquake, they brought more than the stability they were tasked with maintaining. A cholera epidemic traced back to Nepalese UN peacekeepers infected more than 800,000 people in four regional countries, killing over 10,000 of them.

A fresh cholera outbreak has been cited by some people seeking renewed intervention in Haiti, but Jozef said that “that itself is a result of the UN being in Haiti after the earthquake.”

In related Haiti news, US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and 15 colleagues – including progressives Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) – this week urged the Biden administration to “immediately extend and redesignate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti,” a move that would allow Haitians currently in the United States to remain in the country until conditions improve in their homeland.

Haiti’s current TPS status is set to expire in February 2023. The Biden administration has deported tens of thousands of Haitian asylum-seekers – many of whom report human rights abuses by US immigration authorities – despite the grave humanitarian situation in the country.

Brett Wilkins is is staff writer for Common Dreams. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace. This originally appeared at CommonDreams and is reprinted with the author’s permission.