The video above is an interview with Haitian journalist and editor Kim Ives from Orinoco Tribune, reproduced with thanks.
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Imperialism’s rise in the late 19th and early 20th century contained a certain progressive component. For the oppressing nations to efficiently exploit their colonies, they needed to build infrastructure (primarily for the purposes of looting and shipping natural resources and wealth back to the imperialist heartlands).
With the building of industrial and transport infrastructure, a local intelligentsia was developed, while members of the dispersed peasantry were drawn into the ranks of a new proletarian class. As a result, a new national-liberation consciousness arose, and began to organise itself into the ranks of the world proletarian and anti-imperialist movements.
Imperialism in its dying days has moved beyond this point: it seems that the imperialists no longer wish for any development to take place.
Who can forget former US president Barack Obama telling Africans that they will never be able to have refrigerators or cars because the “planet will boil over”? The entire NGO-delivered strategy of the United States across the oppressed world can be summed up as: “Don’t develop otherwise you’ll hurt the environment.”
It is against the background of the doom cult propagated by moribund western imperialism that the United Nations’ latest authorisation of a ‘mission’ to Haiti is taking place.
Ransacking Haiti’s human and natural resources
Back in 2011, an opinion piece by Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian acknowledged the true nature of the USA’s relationship with Haiti – and the UN’s role in facilitating and disguising that relationship.
“Make no mistake about it: the UN occupation of Haiti is really a US occupation – it is no more a multilateral force than George W Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ that invaded Iraq. And it is hardly more legitimate, either: it was sent there in 2004 after a US-led effort toppled Haiti’s democratically elected government.
“Far from providing security for Haitians in the aftermath of the coup, Minustah [UN mission forces] stood by while thousands of Haitians who had supported the elected government were killed, and officials of the constitutional government jailed. Recent WikiLeaks cables also confirm that the US government sees Minustah as an instrument of its policy there.” (Is this Minustah’s ‘Abu Ghraib moment’ in Haiti?, 3 September 2011)
This US-controlled occupation under a UN flag is holding back Haitian development and treating its people as so-much disposable chaff. It aims to suppress the national-liberation strivings of the Haitian people, who have a fiercely revolutionary spirit and history, and use them as fuel for its profit-taking machine.
The dollar signs hanging over the heads of the humans in Haiti for the testing of pharmaceutical products, for example, are enormous. As are the profits to be made from seizing Haiti’s natural resources with little or no payment.
Haiti has the world’s second-largest deposits of iridium in the world, a metal worth more than gold or bitcoin today. Its resistance to high temperatures and corrosion makes it perfect for manufacturing a plethora of hard-wearing devices, including aircraft engines, automotive catalytic converters, deep water pipelines, medical and electronic devices, spark plugs, watches and compasses.
In order to try to keep control of all this loot, the USA has been mustering a new proxy force for deployment to the Caribbean island, this time made up principally of Kenyan soldiers. Presumably because the Kenyan state has obediently towed the line on US foreign policy at the UN for decades, its neocolonial police are considered to be reliable, and its comprador rulers are quite prepared to take Uncle Sam’s money in return for services to the empire.
Kenya has promised up to 1,000 troops (for which it expects to be well paid), with other countries contributing funds, personnel and resources. Washington, unsurprisingly, is the biggest ‘donor’, having generously pledged $200m for this ‘humanitarian’ mission. (African nation to send troops to Haiti, RT, 2 October 2023)
Repeated rape scandals follow Minustah forces
There have been many UN missions to Haiti. The last one, officially ‘led’ by Brazilian soldiers was known as Minustah (from the French: Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti). Looking at the record of Minustah’s operations, one is hardly filled with confidence that a ‘Kenyan-led’ force is going to be any different.
In line with what the world has come to expect from occupying forces around US bases in Okinawa (Japan) and south Korea, UN ‘peacekeepers’ in Haiti have consistently behaved very much like just such a hostile force. Writing in response to revelations regarding the gang rape of a teenager by Minustah soldiers, the Guardian article cited above asked: “Is this Minustah’s ‘Abu Ghraib moment’ in Haiti?”
Abu Ghraib being the now infamous torture camp set up in Iraq by US occupation forces.
“Perhaps the most unnerving part of the video,” commented Weisbrot regarding the evidence that had documented this heinous act, “is the constant chorus of laughter from the alleged perpetrators; to them, apparently, it’s just a drunken party.” (3 September 2011)
The incident was hardly an isolated event. According to Aina Hunter of New York paper Village Voice: “The US embassy [had] started muttering about sending in the marines. At the beginning of June, James Foley, US ambassador to Haiti, told AP reporters that Minustah wasn’t doing its job. That’s about when, critics say, Minustah started hammering down on the poor – in the name of killing off ‘bandits’ and ‘gangsters’.
“After the raid, outraged human rights activists began funding pilgrimages to Port-au-Prince to see the damage for themselves. They returned with eyewitness accounts and photos of dead children, igniting a nationwide series of protests.” (UN to investigate alleged Haiti massacre, 2 August 2005)
Then in 2007, 100 Sri Lankan UN ‘peacekeepers’ were sent home because they were found to have been raping young girls. (Sri Lanka to probe UN sex claims, BBC News, 3 November 2007)
Following this incident, the Sri Lankan Sunday Times wrote: “UN’s office of internal oversight services (OIOS) has concluded that ‘acts of sexual exploitation and abuse (against children) were frequent and occurred usually at night, and at virtually every location where the contingent personnel were deployed’.” (UN confirms sex charges, 30 March 2008)
Even more devastating effects of the occupation were to follow. As reported in a previous article, Nepali UN soldiers were flown from a cholera hotspot into Haiti without any screening or quarantine being put in place, with inevitable and deadly consequences for the Haitian population.
“In the fall of 2010, months after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, a new disaster began: a cholera outbreak that killed thousands of people and continues to sicken people across the country.
“Experts determined that the source of the disease was a UN peacekeeping camp. And now, nearly six years later, the United Nations has admitted it played some role in the deadly outbreak.” (UN admits role in Haiti cholera outbreak that has killed thousands, NPR, 18 August 2016)
It is hardly any wonder that Haiti’s people are not expecting any relief from their sufferings with the arrival of a new force of so-called ‘international peacekeepers’.
Haiti transformed into a laboratory for bioweapons and pharmaceutical experiments
As in the case of other devastated nations like Libya and Ukraine, Haiti has for some time been used by US imperialism as a petri dish for secret bioweapons experimentation and for the unmonitored testing of pharmaceutical products.
This is not a new phenomenon. The history of the 20th century is punctuated by scandals about covert experimentation on random or targeted sections of the population – in the centres of imperialism as well as in the colonised countries. But – as Ukraine’s experience has shown – countries that have been badly ravaged by war and economic disasters, with little or no remaining state machinery, have been particularly favoured for particularly nasty or secret activities.
Focusing on Haiti, it will be remembered that the US-based Centre for Disease Control (CDC) was caught out conducting lethal experiments with a hazardous measles vaccine in 1989. The experiments targeted black children in Haiti, Cameroon and south-central Los Angeles, and dozens of little girls were killed before the programme was abruptly halted. (CDC says it erred in measles study, LA Times, 17 June 1996)
More recently, another vaccination programme in Haiti led not to a reduction of cases but to an outbreak of polio on the island. This has been seen in other poor countries, too. In fact, global health numbers now show more children being paralysed by viruses originating in vaccines than from viruses in the wild. (Polio vaccination causes more infections than wild virus, The Scientist, 25 November 2019)
It is this regime of biomedical tyranny under which the people of Haiti and other nations decimated by imperialist war and superexploition are trying to survive.
For Haiti, this was exacerbated by the strange assassination of President Jovenal Moïse in July 2021 – killed by a team of elite Colombian and US mercenaries with links to US intelligence organisations for reasons that remain unclear.
Rumours were rife at the time that the true motive for his killing was his opposition to the WHO’s Covid-19 vaccination programme. Given Haiti’s experience as a big pharma testing ground, there was certainly good reason for any president there to be cautious.
And the Haitian president’s was not the only death to create such concerns. A spate of deaths amongst black leaders in Africa who died suddenly in 2021 sparked similar speculation. The phenomenon caused enough concern for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) to carry a paper about it, and for Reuters to issue a defensive ‘fact-checking’ article. (Why have so many African leaders died of Covid-19? by Jean-Benoît Falisse et al, 29 April 2021 and No evidence five leaders were killed for opposing Covid-19 vaccines, 22 July 2021)
Solving ‘gang violence’?
More recently, Al Jazeera pointed to the fact that “gang-related violence has spiked since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse two years ago”, as providing the pretext for the latest armed intervention. (Why Kenya volunteered to lead UN-approved forces to Haiti by Hamza Mohamed, 3 October 2023)
So on the one hand US-backed mercenaries murdered the president, and on the other the USA is supposedly taking colonial control of Haiti in order to suppress the explosion of social unrest and violence that followed his assassination. This strategy is redolent of the USA’s now notorious international wars ‘on drugs’ and ‘on terror’: first create a problem in the targeted country, then send in your forces on the pretext of helping to ‘solve’ it!
Recent events in the Sahel indicate just how ‘helpful’ the people there found the presence of French and US soldiers in ending the carnage created by the (west-backed) jihadi terrorists who fanned out across the region after the destruction of Libya in 2011. Indeed, it was only with the eviction of the French that the armed forces of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger began to make real progress in wiping out these mercenary invaders.
In a recent interview with the Orinoco Tribune, Kim Ives of media outlet Haiti Liberté explained that many of the ‘gangsters’ and ‘bandits’ being fought by the USA and Minustah are actually ordinary people organising themselves to fight for social change in a country where the rule of law has broken down and society has become a corrupt petri dish of human experimentation, child and drug trafficking, overseen by mafiosi gangs in the service of US imperialism. The similarities with Libya and Ukraine are, indeed, striking.
“The revolution is coming from the streets of Haiti,” said Ives. “There is an armed uprising, and they [the US] are presenting it as ‘gangs’. Of course, all revolutionaries or people resisting US imperialism with whatever degree of consciousness are always called bandits, always called outlaws or terrorists – as we see in Palestine today.” (US sponsoring military intervention in Haiti to stop revolution, 20 October 2023)
Haitian masses will not be kept down forever
More protests are bound to erupt in Haiti against the illegitimate comprador government that is welcoming these occupation forces with open arms. Meanwhile, new boots on the ground will do nothing to quell the real gangsters who actually do terrorise ordinary Haitians – undoubtedly under the direction of the CIA and US intelligence-linked mafiosi.
“The Haitian people have kept the bitter taste of a foreign force in charge of our situation: theft, rape, cholera, food dependence, deregulation of the economic system, without mentioning the fact that we don’t remember seeing then-gang leaders be arrested or rendered unable to do harm,” a Haitian think tank, Groupe de Travail sur la Securité (the Security Working Group), said in a statement last year. (RT, ibid)
As US imperialist power wanes, it is forced into numerous retreats. It can no longer be seen to occupy Haiti directly, but has to delegate its occupation to proxy forces and lickspittle governments hoping to curry favour and earn kickbacks for their services. But the failed Ecowas plan for intervention in Niger demonstrates how even those regimes that are still willing to sell their souls to the devil are finding that such services, far from strengthening their position domestically, are rendering them vulnerable to popular anger from their own increasingly restive masses.
As the desperate situation on the island continues to deteriorate and the popular will of the masses continues to be thwarted, the question placed before the Haitian people is becoming ever more urgent. As Josef Stalin put it in 1924:
“Either eke out a wretched existence as of old and sink lower and lower, or adopt a new weapon – this is the alternative imperialism puts before the vast masses of the proletariat.” (Foundations of Leninism, Chapter 1)
