Even before the
Haitian government authorized it, Washington began deploying
22,000 troops to Haiti after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake,
despite U.S. Embassy officials saying there was no serious
security problem, according to secret U.S. diplomatic cables
provided to Haïti Liberté by the media organization
WikiLeaks.
Washington’s decision to send thousands of troops in response to
the 7.0 earthquake that rocked the Haitian capital and
surrounding areas drew sharp criticism from aid workers and
government officials around the world. They criticized the
militarized response to Haiti’s humanitarian crisis as
inappropriate and counterproductive, claiming Haiti needed “gauze
not guns.” French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet
famously said that international aid efforts should be “about
helping Haiti, not about
occupying Haiti.”
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez also decried “Marines armed
as if they were going to war,” in his weekly television
address. “There is not a shortage of guns there, my God.
Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that is what the
United States should send.
They are occupying Haiti in an undercover manner."
The
earthquake-related cables show that Washington was very
sensitive to international criticism of its response, and U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mobilized her diplomatic
corps to ferret out “irresponsible journalism” worldwide
and “take action” to “get the narrative right.”
Meanwhile, the UN in Haiti claimed its 9,000 occupation troops
and policemen were sufficient to ensure security. On Jan. 19,
with Resolution 1908, the UN Security Council unanimously
approved sending more than 3,500 reinforcements to Haiti “to
support the immediate recovery, reconstruction and stability
efforts,” increasing MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Stabilize
Haiti, as the occupation force is called) to 12,651.
But Obama administration officials said the additional U.S.
troops were necessary.
"Until
we can get ample supplies of food and water to people, there is
a worry that in their desperation some will turn to violence,”
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters six days after
the quake. “And we will work with the UN in trying to ensure
that the security situation remains good."
Seeking
to avoid the appearance of a unilateral U.S. military action,
the U.S. asked Préval to issue a joint communique with U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Jan. 17.
Haiti “requests
the United States to
assist as needed in augmenting security,”
said the communiqué, providing the rationale for what would be
the third U.S. military intervention of Haiti in the last 20
years.
The
revelations that US officials in Port-au-Prince did not believe
there was, in fact, a security threat to justify a military
intervention come in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to
Haïti Liberté by WikiLeaks.
Deployment
First, Authorization Later
After the quake,
Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince resembled a warzone. Bodies lay
strewn, collapsed buildings spilled into dust-filled streets,
while Haitians frantically rushed to dig out survivors crying
out from under hills of rubble. Several flattened neighborhoods
looked as if they had been destroyed by bombing raids.
But the
one element missing from this apocalyptic scene was an actual
war or widespread violence. Instead, families sat down in the
street, huddled around flickering candles with their
belongings. Some wept, some sat in shell-shocked silence, while
others sang prayers, wailing for Jesus Christ in Kreyòl, “Jezi!”
In the
quake’s chaotic aftermath, Haitian President René Préval and his
prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, were out of touch with U.S.
government officials for about 24 hours. When they did connect,
the Haitian leaders held a 3 p.m. meeting on Jan. 14 with U.S.
Ambassador Kenneth Merten, the Jamaican Prime Minister, the
Brazilian and EU ambassadors, and UN officials.
President Préval laid out priorities: “Re-establish telephone
communications; Clear the streets of debris and bodies; Provide
food and water to the population; Bury cadavers; Treat the
injured; Coordination” among groups amidst the catastrophic
destruction, a
Jan. 16, 2010 cable explains. Préval did not
mention insecurity as a major concern. He did not ask for
military troops.
But the
same cable reports that “lead elements of the 82nd Airborne
Division arrived today, with approximately 150 troops on the
ground. More aircraft are expected to arrive tonight with troops
and equipment.”
The U.S. government had already initiated the deployment of
considerable military assets to Haiti, according to the secret
State Department cables. At its peak, the U.S. military response
included 22,000 soldiers -- 7,000 based on land and the
remainder operating aboard 58 aircraft and 15 nearby vessels,
according to the Pentagon. The U.S. Coast Guard was also flying
spotter aircraft along Haiti’s coast to intercept any refugees
from the disaster.
A
Jan.
14 cable from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to U.S.
embassies and Pentagon commands worldwide said that the U.S.
Embassy in Haiti “anticipates significant food shortages and
looting in the affected areas.” But
subsequent dispatches
from Ambassador Merten in Haiti repeatedly describe only “sporadic”
incidents of violence and looting.
In those
early post-quake hours, it appears that Préval was reluctant to
call in U.S. troops. A
Jan. 19 cable reported that a “radio
talk show host blasted President Préval on Signal FM on January
18 for hesitating to authorize the
U.S. military to deploy.”
But
Washington wasn’t waiting for authorization apparently. In a
Jan. 15 cable, Clinton told diplomatic posts and military
commands that “approximately 4,000
U.S. military personnel will be in
Haiti by January 16 and 10,000 personnel by January 18.”
However, not until two days later, on
Jan. 17, did Clinton and
Préval issue the “joint communique” in which Haiti
requested the U.S. “to assist as needed in augmenting
security.”
Aware
that there would be international dismay about U.S. troops
playing a security role, Clinton outlined a series of “talking
points” for diplomats and military officers in
her Jan. 22
cable. She said they should emphasize that “MINUSTAH, has the
primary international responsibility for security,” but that
“in keeping with President Préval's request to the United
States for assistance to augment security, the U.S. is
providing
every possible support... and is in no way supplanting the UN's
role.”
UN Says It
Should Provide Security
In the Jan. 18
meeting between Préval and international officials in Santo
Domingo, former Guatemalan diplomat Edmund Mulet, MINUSTAH’s new
chief, said that his troops “were capable of providing
security” in the country. (Mulet had flown into Haiti on a
Pentagon plane to take over from MINUSTAH chief Hédi Annabi, who
was killed with 101 other UN personnel when the Hotel
Christopher, which acted as UN headquarters, collapsed in the
quake.) Mulet “insisted that MINUSTAH be in charge of all
security in Haiti, with
other foreign military forces limited to humanitarian relief
operations.”
In fact, many Haitians looked on in disbelief as heavily armed
UN soldiers, after rushing to rescue their own personnel,
resumed driving through the devastated capital and its suburbs
in armored troop carriers, bristling with the guns. Many
Haitians have long resented and denounced the MINUSTAH as a
flagrant violation of Haiti’s 1987 Constitution and an affront
to Haitian sovereignty. The UN troops brandishing guns in front
of devastated earthquake victims added insult to injury.
Even
before the earthquake, President Préval had called on the UN to
change its mission from costly, mostly pointless, and sometimes
repressive military patrols to building desperately needed
infrastructure. “Turn your tanks into bulldozers” Préval
pleaded in his 2006 inaugural speech. UN and U.S. officials
repeatedly and dismissively rebuffed the request.
After
the quake, Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim and
Organization of American States (OAS) Representative to Haiti
Ricardo Seitenfus echoed Préval’s call. Even Mexico “sought
an unproductive debate on reviewing MINUSTAH’s mandate” at
the UN Security Council, a proposal which was thankfully “avoided,”
a Feb. 24, 2010 cable from the U.S. Mexican Embassy reported.
Even though the UN boosted its force, US troops in and around
Haiti eventually outnumbered it by almost 2-to-1, and they
remained for six months. Those troops poured into Haiti as U.S.
officials fretted about the Haitian police force’s ability to
reorganize itself and maintain order, the cables show. (At the
same time, the cables reported no marked increase in violence.)
But following her boss’ “talking
points,” Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s Chief of Staff, “assured
Préval... that the [U.S.]
military was here for humanitarian relief and not as a security
force,” explains a Jan. 19
cable.
But that’s not what journalists on the ground saw.
On Jan.
19, 2010, Democracy Now’s crew along with Haïti
Liberté’s Kim Ives arrived at the General Hospital around 1
p.m., shortly after troops from the 82nd Airborne
Division. There, they found the soldiers, guns in hand, standing
behind the hospital’s closed main gate. The troops had orders to
provide “security” by denying entrance to a crowd of
hundreds, including injured earthquake victims and family
members of patients bringing them food or medicine. “Watching
the scene in front of the
General Hospital yesterday said it
all,” said Ives in a
Democracy Now! interview the next day. “Here were people
who were going in and out of the hospital bringing food to their
loved ones in there or needing to go to the hospital, and there
were a bunch of... U.S.
82nd Airborne soldiers in front yelling in English at this
crowd. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were creating
more chaos rather than diminishing it. It was a comedy, if it
weren’t so tragic... They had no business being there.”
The
journalists finally managed to get into the hospital and alerted
the hospital’s interim director, Dr. Evan Lyon, about the
problem. He immediately sent word down that the soldiers should
stand down and open the gate. They did, but then assumed
positions in the hospital’s driveway, continuing to act, among
the injured hobbling into the hospital, as a completely
unnecessary and unrequested “security force,” contrary to
what Mills had promised Préval.
The
entry point for much of the military personnel and equipment was
the capital’s Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport. Timothy Schwartz,
an anthropologist who has consulted for USAID, rushed into
Port-au-Prince the day after the quake to help. “Ben and I
are at the airport, on the tarmac, helping soldiers of the 82nd
Airborne load thick, heavy metal plates into the back of my
pickup truck,” he writes in a forthcoming book. “Then it
occurs to me, ‘what the hell are these things?’”
“‘Body
armor,’ Ben says.”
Schwartz reflected: “Fear must be the reason why all this
military hardware and these soldiers around us are setting up
base camp behind a ten foot fence. Fear must be why they are
walking around in the near sweltering heat with 80 pounds of
gear strapped to their bodies and machine guns swung over their
shoulders.”
One
doctor from Colorado who flew in with colleagues (at their own
expense) on Jan. 17 to help the injured was shocked by the
military deployment he saw at the airport. “We need gauze,
not guns,” he told the Democracy Now crew.
The enormous influx of U.S. military personnel, weapons and
equipment into the airport prompted a chorus of protest from
mid-level French, Italian, and Brazilian officials, as well as
the aid group Doctors Without Borders. They were outraged that
planes carrying vital humanitarian supplies were prevented from
landing, or delayed, sometimes for days.
“We
had a whole freaking plane full of the friggin’ medicine!”
Douglas Copp, an American rescue worker, exclaimed outside a UN
base not long after the quake. The U.S. military, which had
taken over the Port-au-Prince airport, would not give clearance
for the Peruvian military plane to land. It had to divert to the
Dominican capital, 150 miles away. “In
Santo Domingo, we got a bus, and we
came into Haiti with just the things we could fit in the bus,”
he said.
Getting the
Narrative “Right”
Secretary Clinton
brooked no criticism, which was growing worldwide, of the U.S.
military’s role in the relief effort.“I am deeply concerned
by instances of inaccurate and unfavorable international media
coverage of America's
role and intentions in Haiti,”
she wrote in a stern
Jan. 20 message to embassies across the
globe. “It is imperative to get the narrative right over the
long term.”
She
asked that Embassies report back to her, “citing specific
examples of irresponsible journalism in your host countries, and
what action you have taken in response.”
In countries all over the world, from Luxembourg to Chile,
diplomatic officials scrutinized the media and hit back against
criticism of the U.S. military’s build-up in Haiti, sending back
dozens of detailed reports.
For
example,
a Jan. 20 cable from Doha describes an Al Jazeera English report on the relief effort’s
militarization which compared the US-run airport to a “mini-Green
zone.” This report resulted in a phone call “during the
early morning hours of January 18" from the U.S. Embassy in
Doha to Tony Burman, managing
director of Al Jazeera English.
But
the airport story was accurate. “They had taken over the
place,” said Jeremy Dupin, 26, about the U.S. “joint
coordination” of the airport. After his home had collapsed,
Dupin, a Haitian journalist, had wandered the streets for a day
until linking up with an Al Jazeera English crew to work as a
producer.
“There
were 20,000 soldiers so this was a big move,” Dupin said. “We
pointed out there were serious problems, and that's why the
U.S. didn't like the news,
but we told the truth. And if we had to say it again, we would
say it again... This wasn't something we just said, it's
something we showed with images and footage. I mean, this was
the truth.”
Many
cables reported generally positive coverage in their countries.
But any instance of negativity towards the United States, no
matter how small, was flagged and dealt with. In Colombia, for
example, “the only negative coverage” was from a
newspaper cartoonist who drew “a colonial soldier planting a
U.S. flag on the island
of Haiti,” the
Bogota
Embassy reported on Jan. 26. “Post will meet with the
cartoonist this week to discuss this cartoon with him and
provide information refuting its inference, as well as engage
with El Espectador's editor to express our strong concerns.”
The
Buenos Aires Embassy reported on Jan. 26 that the “pro-government,
left-of-center Pagina 12 protests the excessive U.S. troop
deployment, noting that ALBA (Bolivarian Partnership for the
Americas) voiced its ‘concern over the excessive presence of
foreign troops without any reason, purpose, venues or time of
permanence,’ in veiled reference to the U.S. troops.”
Factory Owners
Demand “Security at All Levels”
Back in Haiti,
Embassy officials worried that only 30-40% of the police were
showing up for duty, while some 4,000 prisoners had escaped from
the National Penitentiary. There were “numerous gang
member/leaders” among the escapees,
a Feb. 16 cable noted,
but “many were not hardened criminals and were being held in
lengthy pre-trial detention, never having been sentenced.”
“The
security situation is worsening,” said
a Jan. 18 cable
issued just after midnight. “[E]scaped inmates have formed
gangs to kidnap and perpetuate [sic] other crimes.”
Only
nine hours later, however,
another dispatch: “Embassy
Port-au-Prince reports security is ‘pretty good,’ with ‘sporadic
outbreaks’ of violence, despite news stories of a growing number
of looters roaming the streets of Port-au-Prince and of gunfire
and police using tear gas to disperse crowds.”
A
Jan. 23 cable shows the situation unchanged: “Embassy
Port-au-Prince reports the
security situation on the ground remains relatively calm.”
Many
news stories dishonestly described a sensational and imaginary
eruption of violence in Haiti. “Gangs Rule Streets of
Haiti,”
CBS reported the day after the quake. On Jan. 19, CNN.com’s lead
headline was “Security fears grow in
Haiti’s tent cities,”
and the caption below, “with 4,000 convicted criminals on the
loose, nothing and no one is safe.”
But
the U.S. Embassy was reporting the opposite. One
Jan. 19 cable
said that the “security situation in
Haiti remains calm overall with no
indications of mass migration towards North America.”
Another Jan. 19 cable said: “Despite hardships in devastated
neighborhoods, residents appear to be calm and civil, though
isolated reports of roving armed gangs continue.” It
continued: “Residents were residing in made-shift [sic] camps
in available open areas, and they had not yet received any
humanitarian supplies from relief organization. Nonetheless, the
residents were civil, calm, polite, solemn and seemed to be
well-organized while they were searching for belongings in the
ruins of their homes. However, isolated reports continue of
roving armed gangs engaged in looting and robbery.”
The
U.S. moved aggressively to beef up the Haitian police (PNH),
giving police chief Mario Andrésol “command and control
advice and mentoring” from Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and
FBI agents while trying to ensure that Haitian police officers
were paid and well-equipped. The DEA advisor was Darrel Paskett,
whose first post-quake priority was directing his “well-armed”
bulletproof-vested DEA agents to guard the U.S. Embassy from “huge
crowds” of desperate Haitians that might overrun it,
FOX
News reported. The crowds never materialized.
Before the end of the month,
three separate State Department
cables relayed that “Canadian Embassy contacts in
Port-au-Prince report verbal orders
were allegedly given by police leadership to shoot escaped
prisoners on sight. UN Civilian Police officers close to prison
authorities also heard unconfirmed reports of extra-judicial
killings by police.”
The
cables do not identify what action, if any, the PNH’s U.S.
advisors took to investigate or stop the unlawful killings. Nor
is there any mention of the numerous so-called “looters”
in downtown Port-au-Prince’s rubble-filled commercial district
who were shot on sight by the Haitian police, like 15-year-old
Fabienne Cherisma, who grabbed some paintings from a collapsed
structure.
Not
surprisingly, Haitian business owners were the most worried
about security, especially for their factories. Five days after
the quake, Ambassador Merten
met with representatives of Haiti’s
business sector, who said “their major concern is security at
all levels, to include security of goods, at marketplaces, and
for ports of entry.”
Later, they asked the UN occupation
troops “to provide security for reopened factories, and
pledged to re-open in weeks.” Embassy officers met again
with Haitian business leaders one week later.
In
a
Jan. 26 cable, Merten commented that “apparel manufacturers
in Haiti operate on a
high volume, thin margin, low capitalization basis where cash
flow is extremely important for the business to survive.”
He relayed a factory owner’s suggestion for a $20 million loan
to the sector. Days later, he applauded the introduction of
legislation in the U.S. Senate “intended to provide
short-term relief to
Haiti's apparel sector” by
extending trade preferences.
Militarization
of Humanitarian Aid
There is no doubt
that the U.S. soldiers deployed to Haiti helped many earthquake
victims. The 82nd Airborne Division helped set up one of the
capital’s largest and best equipped IDP camps of over 35,000
with actor Sean Penn at the Pétionville Country Club, which was
their operational base.
The
Pentagon’s earthquake response also included one of the largest
medical outreach efforts in history. Service men and women
treated and evaluated thousands of Haitian patients, including
more than 8,600 on the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort. Surgeons
aboard the ship completed nearly 1,000 surgeries.
However, even more impressive results were obtained by Cuba’s
800 doctors in Haiti and the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade, a
1,500 member contingent of doctors from Cuba and many other
nations who graduated from Cuba’s medical school. In the six
months after the quake, according the Cuban Embassy in Haiti,
the Brigade treated over 70,300 patients, performing over 2,500
operations, all without deploying soldiers or bringing in
weapons. (Cuba’s medical missions are still in Haiti and remain
a bulwark against cholera’s spread.)
In
fact, there is a growing movement among aid groups worldwide,
and even in the UN, against the militarization of humanitarian
aid. The report entitled "Quick Impact, Quick Collapse: The
Dangers of Militarized Aid in Afghanistan" by Actionaid,
Oxfam International, and other NGOs could have been as easily
written about Haiti, where the Pentagon’s “government in a
box” strategy was being applied in late January 2010, when
the study was released.
“As
political pressures to ‘show results’ in troop contributing
countries intensify, more and more assistance is being
channelled through military actors to ‘win hearts and minds’
while efforts to address the underlying causes of poverty... are
being sidelined,” the report’s introduction reads. “Development
projects implemented with military money or through
military-dominated structures aim to achieve fast results but
are often poorly executed, inappropriate and do not have
sufficient community involvement to make them sustainable. There
is little evidence this approach is generating stability...”
But no matter where one comes down on the question of the U.S.
military’s role and contribution in post-quake Haiti, one thing
is for sure. The massive troop deployment was set in motion
before President Préval had given any green-light, putting him
before a fait accompli which he had little choice but to go
along with.
“It
is certain that one important reason for the U.S. troop
deployment to Haiti after the quake was to bar any revolutionary
uprising that might have emerged due to the Haitian government’s
near collapse,” said Haitian political activist Ray Laforest,
a member of the International Support Haiti Network. “Also
the perception of Haitians in
Washington, since the time of its 1915
occupation, is that they are savage, undisciplined and violent.
In fact, the 2010 earthquake proved the opposite: Haitians came
together in an exemplary display of heroism, resilience and
solidarity. Washington’s military response to the earthquake
indicates how deeply it misunderstands, mistrusts and mistreats
Haiti.” |
