How US "Foreign Aid" Has Helped Destabilize Haiti
03.12.2024
United States Haiti
AN INTERVIEW WITH
JAKE JOHNSTON
A surge of gang violence in Haiti has now led to the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. Through its heavy-handed use of foreign aid to intervene in Haitian politics, the US government bears significant responsibility for Haiti’s ongoing instability.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti meant a devastating loss of life, shelter, and livelihood. More than two hundred thousand people in the country died, 1.5 billion became homeless, and upward of $7 billion worth of damage was incurred across the affected area. The massive scale of the earthquake’s destruction was met by an influx of foreign aid. In the United States, fundraising for the crisis reached unprecedented proportions, with some sources estimating that nearly half of all US families donated to the relief efforts.
Much of this money, however, did not go to feeding, sheltering, and supporting the financial recovery of Haitians. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, distributed 130 tons of genetically modified seeds — donated by chemical giant Monsanto — in a costly relief program aimed at rural farmers. Haitian farmers, however, didn’t need foreign seeds: they needed money. And for a fraction of the cost of the USAID program, foreign donors could have purchased all necessary food aid from local rice producers, jumpstarting the rural economy.
In his new book, Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti, Jake Johnston offers a century-long history of aid in Haiti. He shows that the Haitian earthquake, far from a singular disaster, was an inflection point in the history of a country whose experience of occupation and foreign interference has often been cloaked in the guise of aid. Arguing forcefully against the US-style intervention that has prioritized “stability” measures, he makes the case that Haiti needs self-determination to thrive.
In the wake of a surge of gang violence in Haiti earlier this month — leading to the just-announced resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry — Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn spoke with Johnston for Jacobin about the origins of the current crisis, the fine line between aid and occupation, and the present and future prospects for autonomy for the Haitian state.
More:
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/us-foreign-aid-destabilize-haiti/
= new reply since forum marked as read
More stark, mad hopeless suffering without escape?
The same people who have been gathering up dirt, adding lard and sugar, and baking it as "cookies" to calm the wretched pain of their childrens' hungry, hungry stomachs? Sure, there's always a need for more living nightmares and shocking sudden grief. The goal is to bring such pain the helpless, desperate victims of the fascist regimes will finally become so paralyzed with pain and fear they give up hope, seeking help, begging the demons to have mercy and leave them alone.
That won't ever happen. Sober, sane people know how that works. We see how the powerful predators run their "democracies."
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Stop the massacres in Haiti: End US and UN support for the criminal regime of Jovenel Moise
November 23, 2020
by Haiti Action Committee
The human rights crisis under the US-backed dictatorship of Jovenel Moise has continued to widen and deepen with the proliferation of “Tonton Macoutes” style death squad repression across the country. In Haiti, impunity continues to embolden the reign of terror against the population by the Haitian police and affiliated death squads, such as the “G9” headed by former policeman Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier. Notorious for its repeated human rights violations against peaceful demonstrators and community residents, the police – trained mostly by the US and Canada as part of the nearly 17-year UN occupation since the 2004 coup d’etat – once again lived up to its murderous reputation.
On Nov. 18, 2020, as demonstrations ended, a police vehicle at high speed ran over two protestors on a motorcycle leaving the Channmas (Champs-de-Mars) area, as depicted in the attached video. Horrified witnesses identified the BOID police unit vehicle as they rendered assistance to the gravely injured.
Since Trump took office, the US has nearly quadrupled its support to Haiti’s police – from $2.8 million in 2016 to more than $12.4 million last year.
Three peaceful protestors were deliberately killed by the police. The newly appointed police chief, Leon Charles, accused of gross human rights violations in previous years, sent out his praise for the actions of the police. This latest act of brutality builds upon a systematic campaign of terror by the regime that has been intensifying over recent months. World condemnation of the regime and solidarity with the Haitian people are urgently needed; actions are listed at the bottom of this article.
On Nov. 5, Joseph Etienne. also known as “Papayi,” a long-time community leader in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Kafou (Carrefour), was snatched in downtown Port-au-Prince and beaten with iron bars by members of the G9 death squad, a highly armed network of paramilitary affiliates of the regime (labeled “gangs” in the media) led by former police officer Jimmy Cherizier, aka “Barbecue.” Left for dead on a pile of trash near the “Tet Bef” farmers’ market, he was rushed to the hospital where he died from the torture and beating.
. . .
Working-class women in popular neighborhoods are subjected to rape by regime forces as part of their war on the Haitian poor. One example among countless such crimes was the murder of Christella [last name withheld due to security concerns] on Aug. 24, 2020, in Lasalin. She resisted rape by a G9 death squad member and he shot her in the head in front of her child. This provoked outrage in the Haitian popular movement and social media but received no coverage whatsoever here in the US media.
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“But for his long-suffering countrymen, Cherizier’s G9 is evoking the horrors of the Tontons Macoutes, the government-backed paramilitaries that terrorized Haiti for decades under dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude.”[iii]
More:
https://sfbayview.com/2020/11/stop-the-massacres-in-haiti-end-us-and-un-support-for-the-criminal-regime-of-jovenel-moise/
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An article published during the former President Clinton's presidency, made available through a website a DU'er shared here which allows people to read some articles which have been unavailable without subscriptions:
CLINTON GRAPHICALLY DETAILS ATROCITIES IN HAITI
PUBLISHED: September 16, 1994 at 4:00 a.m. | UPDATED: September 25, 2021 at 3:32 a.m.
The reports of human rights abuses are horrifying: An army officer accuses a man of stealing fruit, cuts off the man’s ear and forces him to eat it, before carving his initials in the man’s buttocks. A priest is savagely beaten for distributing a Catholic newspaper. People wake to find mutiliated bodies – some of them young children – lying in the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
In July alone – the last full month for which information was available – there were 41 illegal executions, 200 cases of arbitrary arrests, 76 cases of inhuman and degrading treatment and 150 cases of searches and various forms of intimidation. Those are unofficial reports the United Nations compiled from information supplied by a group of Haitian civil rights protection organizations. There has been no first-hand information since early July, when Haiti expelled U.N. human rights observers.
Those abuses were cited by President Clinton Thursday night as he sought to convince the American public that invading Haiti was the only way of removing military leader Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras and restoring exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. “Cedras and his armed thugs have conducted a reign of terror. Executing children. Raping women. Killing priests. As the dictators have grown more desperate, the atrocities have grown ever more brutal,” Clinton said.
“International observers uncovered a terrifying pattern of soldiers and policemen raping the wives and daughters of suspected political dissidents. Young girls – 13, 16 years old. People slain and mutilated, with body parts left as warnings to terrify others. Children forced to watch as their mothers’ faces are slashed with machetes.”
Clinton’s detailing of repeated human rights abuses in Haiti paralleled those cited earlier this summer in a report by U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who said Haiti was suffering an “unprecedented” human rights crisis.
For the better part of a year, a 92-member U.N. human rights monitoring group documented murders, torture, rapes, kidnappings and beatings by Haitian soldiers and their allies. Just in the first half of this year, the U.N. group and other human rights groups reported about 400 political killings, 120 abductions, 50 rapes and several hundred beatings in what they said was a campaign by paramilitary forces to wipe out lingering support for Aristide.
On July 13, the Haitian military kicked the observers out of the country. “The mission is troubling internal public order and threatens state security,” the expulsion order said. Less than three weeks later, the U.N. Security Council authorized a U.S.-led invasion.
As the multinational task force prepares to invade, however, it is approaching the shores of a country with a long history of similar human rights abuses. Under Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his Tonton Macoutes in the 1960s, thousands of Haitians were murdered and thousands more fled the country. The Tonton Macoutes were later disbanded, but remnants of the former militia periodically resurfaced and were blamed for numerous incidents of bloodshed.
The latest chapter began in 1991 when Aristide was overthrown in a military coup. Since then, an estimated 3,000 people, many of them Aristide supporters, have been killed by soliders or allied gunmen, human rights monitors say. The observers cited an average of 50 political murders a month this year. There was evidence the violence escalated after the U.N. observers were expelled. More people were killed, their bodies dumped in the streets to sow fear and intimidation.
“Let me be clear,” Clinton said Thursday. “Gen. Cedras and his accomplices alone are responsible for this suffering and terrible human tragedy. It is their actions that have isolated Haiti.”
https://www.removepaywall.com/article/current
( https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1994/09/16/clinton-graphically-details-atrocities-in-haiti/ )