A cholera outbreak has killed 8,500 Haitians since 2010
and UN forces are responsible, the author argues. Not only
that, but the UN helped consolidate Gérard Latortue’s
post-coup regime.
Since 2010 the UN has been dodging
responsibility for a cholera outbreak that has killed 8,500
Haitians and sickened more than 700,000. Nepalese soldiers
with the UN “peacekeeping” forces caused the outbreak by
allowing their sewage to leak into Haiti’s largest river.
According to the UN itself, cholera could kill 2,000 more
people in 2014.
The UN now faces a lawsuit
in U.S. courts that was brought by some of the victims. The
Obama administration is trying to have the suit dismissed
but, this May, Amicus Briefs filed by prominent
international law experts refuted the U.S. government’s
arguments for dismissal. Scientific evidence of the UN’s
guilt is so conclusive that Bill Clinton, a UN special envoy
to Haiti, acknowledged in 2012 that UN soldiers brought
cholera to Haiti, but he made the UN’s demented excuse that
“what really caused it is that you don’t have a sanitation
system, you don’t have a comprehensive water system.”
By this logic, if I kill a
gravely ill person by knocking them off their hospital bed,
my defense should be that a healthy person would have
survived the fall. In a civilized legal setting, where the
victim cannot be dismissed as irrelevant, making such a
repulsive argument might provoke a judge to hand down the
harshest sentence allowable. Unfortunately, international
law has always been the plaything of the most powerful, and
Haitians have long endured the consequences of that fact.
Criminal negligence is one of many crimes in Haiti for which
UN officials should answer.
On Feb. 29, 2004 – at about
6:15 a.m. – U.S. troops flew Haiti’s democratically elected
president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, out of Haiti. In fact,
they flew him out of the Western Hemisphere – all the way to
the Central Africa Republic. According to the Bush
administration’s comically implausible story, Aristide
simply asked the U.S. to save him from a small group of
insurgents led by a convicted death-squad leader, Jodel
Chamblain. The public face of the insurgents was a crooked
ex-police chief named Guy Philippe who had long standing
ties with local elites and the U.S.. Chamblain was
responsible for thousands of murders and rapes under a
military junta that ruled Haiti from 1991 to 1994, after the
first coup that ousted Aristide. It made sense to put the
far younger Guy Philippe in front of cameras, but nobody
with any knowledge of the 1991 coup had any excuse for
failing to see what was coming in 2004.
The insurgents had been
launching hit and run attacks into Haiti for years (since
2000) from the safe haven offered by the Dominican Republic,
a U.S. client. Jeb Sprague’s book
“Paramilitarism and the Assault
on Democracy in Haiti” documents how key
players among Aristides’ “peaceful opponents” in Haiti,
along with military and government officials from the
Dominican Republic, closely supported the insurgents who
killed dozens of people while the international press (and
the human rights industry) ignored it and depicted some of
the financiers as victims of a “crackdown on dissent”. The
“crackdown” was one of the excuses the Bush administration
used to starve the Aristide government of funds for years
with the help of the OAS. U.S.-led sanctions, among other
things, blocked funds for projects to improve Haiti’s water
supply to protect against the spread of diseases like
cholera. At the same time, tens of millions of U.S.
government dollars flowed to Aristide’s political rivals.
Sprague’s book reveals
that, after Aristide was overthrown in 2004, hundreds of
former rightist paramilitaries were incorporated into
Haiti’s police force under the UN and U.S. Embassy’s close
supervision. Anyone familiar with the 1991 coup will find
this as unsurprising as it is disgusting. When the Clinton
Administration ordered the Cédras military junta to stand
down in 1994 (and permit Aristide to serve out what little
was left of his first term in office), it did so only after
guaranteeing impunity for the junta’s leaders and arranging
for some of its henchmen to remain within Haiti’s security
forces. Aristide, to some extent, countered those maneuvers
by disbanding the Haitian army over strong U.S. objections.
The re-constructed Haitian police remained infiltrated by
officers close to the U.S. and local right-wing forces.
Nevertheless, the U.S. and its allies were forced to a play
a far more direct role in the 2004 coup because Haiti lacked
its own army, the force traditionally used by the U.S. to
bring down governments it dislikes.
A few months after the 2004
coup, UN troops (known by the French acronym MINUSTAH) took
over the task of consolidating Gérard Latortue’s post-coup
dictatorship. Roughly 4,000 of Aristide’s supporters were
murdered under Latortue according to a scientific survey
published in the Lancet medical journal [1]. Hundreds more,
by conservative estimates, became political prisoners. Most
of the killing was done by the police and death squads
allied with them. MINUSTAH generally provided tactical
support but also perpetrated its own atrocities. On July 5,
2005, MINUSTAH went on a shooting spree in the shanty town
of Cité Soleil that was so murderous (and so well
documented) that a MINUSTAH spokesman felt obliged to
promptly state that it “deeply regrets any injuries or loss
of life during its operation”. In 2012, MINUSTAH found some
of its troops guilty of rape and sexual abuse. The actual
perpetrators, to say nothing their commanding officers, have
evaded serious consequences even when found guilty. Over a
hundred MINUSTAH troops have been sent out of Haiti to “face
justice” at home for sex crimes. Little wonder that abusers
have been undeterred.
Thanks to Wikileaks, we
need not speculate about exactly what the U.S. government
wanted to get out of MINUSTAH in Haiti. In a 2008 cable, the
U.S. Ambassador to Haiti predicted that the “security
dividend the U.S. reaps from this hemispheric cooperation
not only benefits the immediate Caribbean, but also is
developing habits of security cooperation in the
hemisphere…” She identified “resurgent populist and
anti-market economy political forces" in Haiti as a threat
to the entire hemisphere. She highlighted the importance of
having other countries contribute towards neutralizing the
threat:
"This
regionally-coordinated Latin American commitment to Haiti
would not be possible without the UN umbrella. That same
umbrella helps other major donors — led by Canada and
followed up by the EU, France, Spain, Japan and others —
justify their bilateral assistance domestically."
It won’t do for allies to
explain to their own people that they are doing the USA’s
dirty work in Haiti – helping it contain the political
threat posed by “populist and anti-market forces” or, in
other words, sacrificing Haiti as a pawn on a regional
chessboard imagined by U.S. officials.
After two years of
terrorizing Aristide’s supporters – murdering, imprisoning
and driving them into exile -the U.S. and its allies allowed
Haitians to elect a government to replace Latortue’s
dictatorship. The presidency was won by René Préval – a
former president and Aristide protégé who had played no role
at all in the 2004 coup. It was a stunning refutation of
the propaganda used to justify the coup. Préval won the
election in the first round despite barely being able to
campaign. Candidates who had been prominent leaders of the
coup (Charles Baker, Guy Philippe) received single digit
percentages of the vote.
The cables procured by
Wikileaks show that Préval worried about being given the
Aristide treatment while in office and treaded very
carefully around U.S. officials. Former Brazilian diplomat,
Ricardo Seitenfus, says that in 2010 MINUSTAH chief Edmond
Mulet explicitly threatened Préval with a coup and exile for
opposing U.S. interference in Haitian elections. Préval
supposedly responded to Mulet’s threat by saying: “I am not
Aristide. I am Salvador Allende”. Préval and Colin
Granderson, head of the CARICOM-OAS Electoral Mission in
Haiti in 2010-2011, have backed up the claim that Préval had
been “asked” to step down.
Seitenfus has also strongly
denounced the corruption and hypocrisy of the key
governments that sustain MINUSTAH – in particular the
infamous “core group”: the USA, Canada, France, Spain, and
Brazil. Commenting on the impact of the 2010 earthquake that
may have killed 200,000 people, Seitenfus remarked:
“Traditionally in Haiti, the ‘goods’ such as hospitals,
schools, and humanitarian aid are delivered by the private
sector, while the ‘bads’ — that is, police enforcement — is
the state’s responsibility. The earthquake further deepened
this terrible dichotomy.”
An “aid” sector made up of
foreign NGOs that are not accountable to the vast majority
of Haitians breeds corruption and inefficiency, as former
CARE employee Timothy Schwartz has also pointed out. It
gives many NGOs, with some honorable exceptions, a strong
incentive to thwart the development of democratic
institutions in Haiti that would hold them accountable and
take over many of their functions.
Brazil stepped up to play a
leading role in MINUSTAH. Today, despite various MINUSTAH
related scandals, Brazil continues to supply the largest
contingent of troops. Uruguay supplies the second largest
contingent though President Mujica has pledged to withdraw
them. Bolivia and Ecuador also supply troops. Venezuela’s
Chavista governments, on the other hand, always recognized
the 2004 coup for what it was and never took part in
MINUSTAH.
Thankfully, the backlash
from Latin American governments was fierce when the USA and
Canada maneuvered at the OAS to weaken a strong regional
response against the 2009 coup in Honduras. Sanderson’s
dream of “hemispheric cooperation” with the U.S. to defeat
“populist and anti-market economy political forces” quickly
became more of a fantasy. Edward Snowden’s revelations of
extensive U.S. spying on the Brazilian government also
poured cold water on the USA’s imperial dreamers. This
year’s upper-class revolt in Venezuela – an undisguised
attempt at “regime change” – was strongly opposed by the
OAS, much to the Obama Administration’s dismay.
Rejecting coups and coup
attempts is very important step in the right direction.
However, Latin American governments should move beyond that.
They should call for the prosecution of MINUSTAH officials
like Edmond Mulet. Eventually, the prosecution of his bosses
in Washington, Ottawa, and Paris might become a realistic
option.
This article was first published by
Telesur.
Notes
[1] Athena R. Kolbe and Royce A. Hutson, "Human rights abuse
and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a
random survey of households," The Lancet, Vol. 368, No.
9538, September 2, 2006. |