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by Roger Annis and Kevin Edmonds
 The think-tank International Crisis Group (ICG)
issued a 28-page report on the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH)
on Aug. 2, 2012. Entitled “Towards
a Post-MINUSTAH Haiti: Making An Effective Transition,”
the report’s central recommendation is that the military
occupation regime should remain in Haiti for at least another
five years.
This is the sixth report the ICG has produced on Haiti since the January 2010 earthquake. The
organization has shown a capacity for frank and unbiased
opinion. Its study on shelter and housing issued in
June 2011, for example, criticized the Haitian government
and its international sponsors for utterly failing to meet the
desperate housing needs of Haitians.
In this latest report, however,
the group accepts without question the presence of MINUSTAH and
its claim to have the best interests of Haitians at heart. The
report amounts to a political whitewash that misrepresents the
political circumstances that brought the mission to Haiti in
2004 and has kept it there ever since.
MINUSTAH’s origins and achievements
As its name suggests, the ICG studies
countries deemed to be destabilizing the international political
order. It has 130 staff around the world. Its board of trustees
is comprised of establishment political, business, and media
figures, including chairperson Thomas Pickering, former U.S.
Undersecretary of State and Ambassador to the U.N., and
president Louise Arbour, a Canadian and former Chief Prosecutor
for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
On page one, the report says:
“MINUSTAH’s principal mandate was to establish a secure and
stable environment within which Haitian constitutional and
political processes could take place.” Toward this end, it has
supported to the Haitian National Police (PNH), maintained “rule
of law and public safety,” assisted in organizing elections, and
promoted and protected human rights, the report says, concluding
that “MINUSTAH’s contribution to generally improved security
conditions is recognized both in Haiti and abroad.”
Further on, we read: “Political
violence has significantly diminished” since 2004. The mission
has assisted, “two national elections (2006 and 2010/11) which
restored constitutional rule.”
Disaster relief is listed as
one of MINUSTAH’s accomplishments, although the force has come
under intense criticism in Haiti for its relatively feeble
contribution to humanitarian relief. Most of its huge annual
budget of over $800 million is spent on policing and other forms
of “security.”
The report says the economic
outlook is “still encouraging,” with 6% growth foreseen for
2012, though it notes that the “Open for business” policy of the
government of President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister
Laurent Lamothe “will take time and requires a broad political
consensus.” The latter is patently absent.
An opposite view of Haiti’s
economic future was recently published (in French) by Haitian
economist Camille Chalmers. Entitled “The
Economic Balance Sheet of Reconstruction,” his article looks
at the statistical trends in Haiti’s economy and concludes that
the “figures show the impossibility of generating sustained
growth” under Haiti’s current economic and political regime.
The real history
The International Crisis Group’s skewed
interpretation of MINUSTAH’s origin goes right back to its first
report on the subject in
November 2004. There, we read: “In early 2004, after several
years of fruitless diplomatic efforts to bridge political
polarization, Haiti was again convulsed by political violence.
Pressured particularly by France and the U.S., Aristide left the
country on 29 February.”
This is a misleadingly polite
description of a violent coup d’etat against the elected
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and all the other institutions
of elected government of the country. Washington then installed
an illegal and unconstitutional regime (“transitional government
of technocrats” in ICG-speak) which, in the words of a 2004
human rights study by U.S.
attorney Thomas Griffin, unleashed a “whirlwind of violence”
against Haiti’s poor majority attempting to resist the coup,
fully backed by the military violence of the newly-created
MINUSTAH.
The U.S., France, and Canada
provided vital military and political assistance to the coup and
the illegal “technocrat” regime. These three nations then
proposed MINUSTAH to the UN Security Council in order to
disguise as international “peace-keeping” their military
take-over of Haiti.
MINUSTAH has been in the
country ever since. Composed of police and soldiers from over 50
countries around the world, the majority of its foot soldiers
are from Latin America.
The ICG praises MINUSTAH for
its role in facilitating Haiti’s elections. Yet the mission and
the troika that stands behind it have financed and provided
essential technical support to elections that have excluded
Haiti’s most vital political forces, most notably the Lavalas
Family party founded by Aristide in 1996. The party won a
decisive victory in the last truly free election in Haiti, in
2000, but has been excluded from every election since then.
What’s more, the elections of
2009, 2010 and 2011, which the ICG so highly praised, scored
modern history’s lowest participation rates for Haiti and,
indeed, for the entire hemisphere.
The ICG concedes some possible
wrongdoing by MINUSTAH — notably its conduct in recklessly
introducing the cholera bacteria via its Nepalese contingent in
October 2010 — but its overriding concern is for the force’s
reputation. The ICG cites an April 2012 report by UN independent
expert on human rights, Michel Forst, saying that further
stalling on accepting responsibility for cholera’s introduction
“will do nothing to promote a good understanding of the
activities of MINUSTAH.”
Echoing recent U.S. and
European Union declarations, the ICG says the next vital step
for Haiti is the formation of a permanent electoral council to
hold national and local elections. Most of Haiti’s
parliamentarians and civil society have denounced this project,
now championed by Martelly. They call for a provisional
electoral council instead, saying a permanent one would be
arrived at unconstitutionally and would reinforce the exclusion
of Haiti’s poor majority from political life.
The MINUSTAH record
It is difficult to square the ICG’s
positive interpretation of MINUSTAH’s record. It’s been more
than eight years since the coup d’etat and more than two years
since an international earthquake relief program promised
billions of dollars of aid to multiple international agencies in
Haiti. Yet a “strategy for the urban poor, including displaced
persons in camps and post-earthquake informal communities, is
still missing,” the report says.
The ICG also flags the “chronic
failure (by successive Haitian governing regimes) to tackle
poverty, inequalities and exclusion, which endanger most of the
population.”
After expressing concern over
how the cholera epidemic will hurt MINUSTAH’s reputation, the
report says that accountability for cholera (including
establishing clean water delivery systems) is now in the hands
of the Pan American Health Organization. It says a decision was
reached during the recent Rio+20 Earth Summit to fund clean
water systems in Haiti with $2 billion. But like so many other
sentiments expressed at Rio+20, this promise will likely fall
short unless decisive international pressure is brought to bear.
The ICG made no other mention
of compensation owed to Haiti’s cholera victims despite a
suit pending against MINUSTAH for its responsibility.
And while the ICG is happy to
reach back into Haitian history to buttress its pro-MINUSTAH
arguments, it conveniently ignores concerns expressed for years
about the threat of waterborne diseases to the Haitian people.
Of note is Partners In Health’s 2008 report that slammed, in
particular, the coup-backing countries of 2004 for having
blocked international loans to Aristide’s second government to
build potable water systems. (See
Wòch nan soley: The denial of
the right to water in Haiti.)
The ICG’s defense of MINUSTAH’s
performance in establishing “security” is not very convincing.
The force’s first tasks, we read, were disarmament,
demobilization, and reintegration of former soldiers of the
Haitian army that was disbanded in 1995 (these were the core of
the paramilitaries that staged the 2004 coup); neutralization of
urban gangs; curbs on crime; and a purge of the PNH. “None of
these goals have been fully achieved,” we read.
Nor has police corruption been
tackled. The report says that 137 cases of police corruption or
misconduct have not been investigated. The body in charge of
such cases, the Higher Council of the National Police,
has been chaired by none other than Haiti’s succession of prime
ministers, that is, the products of the supposedly successful
elections midwifed by MINUSTAH.
The ICG report’s long Part
Three is devoted to MINUSTAH’s “exit strategy”, but on pages
18-19, we read a long litany of failings of the force and the
Haitian government in laying the necessary groundwork. Rule of
law, prison and judicial improvements, legal aid services,
social services — progress on all is deemed absent or lacking.
Concerning MINUSTAH’s
accountability, the ICG notes that MINUSTAH never created a
“Claims Commission” that would allow Haitians to seek redress
for alleged wrongdoings. Yet this was one of the conditions
contained in the Status of Forces Agreement that MINUSTAH signed
with Haiti’s de facto regime in 2004.
“There is no transition or exit
strategy as yet (for MINUSTAH),” the ICG concludes. “The UN will
need to remain in Haiti for a long time.”
Contradictions in the ICG report
The ICG report is full of other
contradictions. For the ICG, Haiti is undergoing five
transitions — from violence to reconciliation and peace;
non-democratic culture to a democratic society; a failed to a
modern national state; poverty and social injustice to a
thriving and equitable economy; and from a country destroyed by
an earthquake to one “not only being rebuilt but ideally
transformed.” (page 4)
“A humanitarian imperative amid
ongoing political instability, sporadic violence and recurring
natural disasters continues to suggest the need for a strong
international presence,” says the report, and MINUSTAH must
“ensure that a phased withdrawal is linked to stronger
institutions and progress toward lasting stability and
development.”
The goal in post-earthquake
Haiti is “support for the holding of elections to put in place a
government and thus speed up reconstruction.”
All of this makes clear that,
in the minds of the report’s writers at least, human development
is required before “security” can be achieved. But the ICG then
incongruously acknowledges that MINUSTAH spurns all
responsibility to assist human development. The report says it
is a “popular misconception” to think that MINUSTAH can shift
from being a policing agency to development agency: “MINUSTAH’s
mandate does not include development as its priority.”
So the MINUSTAH formula,
endorsed by the ICG, turns in circles — policing, and no
development; and no development, but policing.
Another contradiction is the
report’s strong praise for MINUSTAH’s assistance to elections.
On page 6, it says such support is “essential” but, on page 22,
recognizes that it undermines the credibility of electoral
outcomes: “International financing of more than half of the
costs of elections, continuing technical assistance to the CEP
[Provisional Electoral Council] and MINUSTAH’s logistics
involvement made it easy for some Haitians, particularly those
unhappy about Lavalas’ absence from several elections, to
criticize MINUSTAH and the international community for
interference in the country’s politics.”
The ICG calls President
Martelly’s plan to revive the human rights-violating Haitian
army “questionable” but then asserts that “many Haitians”
support the plan. Its cited source for this assertion is one,
unnamed Haitian government official. But Robert Muggah, former
director of the Small Arms Survey, found overwhelming opposition
to resurrecting the army during extensive surveys he and other
researchers conducted and published in an
October 2011 report.
Finally, the ICG report makes a
deeply biased assessment of the Lavalas Family party which it
calls one of three key “dangers” to “reconciliation” in Haiti.
The other two dangers are “the Martelly presidency’s Duvalierist
imprints”(!) and “the reappearance of former members of a once
brutal army” (whose restitution was previously termed only
“questionable”).
Furthermore, actions by Lavalas-inspired
political representatives in Haiti’s Parliament are described as
having “slowed government progress” in the first year of
Martelly’s presidency.
Conclusion
In 2011, an international group of
scholars, doctors, and activists published through the Harvard
School of Public Health a comprehensive review of the deeply
troubling, post-earthquake human rights record of MINUSTAH,
entitled
“MINUSTAH: Keeping the Peace or
Conspiring Against It?”
A writer of this article was a
co-author of that White Paper, which was a response to the
premise that if MINUSTAH leaves Haiti, the country will collapse
into a spiral of violence from which it will never escape.
Edmond Mulet, MINUSTAH’s former chief, said the country would
“just fall apart” if MINUSTAH were to leave. He described Haiti
as “a society, community, a nation that has committed collective
suicide” due its alleged political infighting. (Mulet is
Guatemalan.)
The Harvard report notes that
there are higher levels of “insecurity” and violence in
neighboring Caribbean states such as Jamaica, Trinidad and the
Virgin Islands, as well as many U.S. cities, than in Haiti. This
nullifies MINUSTAH’s principal justification.
In fact, much of Haiti’s
instability is the direct result of MINUSTAH’s ongoing human
rights abuses, the White Paper contends. “MINUSTAH’s continued
presence is justified by the levels of unrest, or potential for
unrest, in Haiti,” the paper notes. “Since the earthquake, the
only significant civil discord in the country has targeted
MINUSTAH for introducing cholera or failing to respond to IDP
[internally displaced persons] camp conditions, or expressed
anger over fraudulent elections. MINUSTAH responded to these
peaceful protests with violence, including tear gassing students
and IDPs, assaulting international journalists, shooting at
children, and even killing peaceful protestors.”
Thanks to WikiLeaked revelations published last year in
the weekly Haiti Liberté newspaper and The Nation
magazine, we have learned from former U.S. ambassador to Haiti
Janet Sanderson that “the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti is
an indispensable tool in realizing core USG [U.S. Government]
policy interests in Haiti.” MINUSTAH is, she said, “a financial
and regional security bargain for the USG.”
Furthermore, MINUSTAH’s definition of developing an
environment of political stability is highly exclusionary and
indeed helps destabilize the country. In that revealing Oct. 1,
2008
secret cable, Sanderson said that a “premature departure of
MINUSTAH would leave the [Haitian] government… vulnerable to…
resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces —
reversing gains of the last two years”.
MINUSTAH has carried out a series of human rights
violations resulting in a loss of Haitian sovereignty,
stability, dignity, and life. Its record of engaging in acts of
extrajudicial murder, sexual assault, suppressing peaceful
political protests, undermining democracy, and introducing
cholera into Haiti are more than enough grounds for revoking its
mandate. Yet for geopolitical and economic reasons, this does
not happen.
“At such a crucial point in
Haiti’s history, and with years of failures, inaction,
repression, and human rights violations documented, it is time
that MINUSTAH respect the Haitian people’s wishes, and the
wishes of many of its members’ citizens, and withdraw from
Haiti,” the Harvard report states. “Arguments of greater
instability cannot justify the current abuse and violence
against Haitians.”
In short, the Harvard White
Paper stands in sharp counterpoint to the ICG report and arrives
at an opposite conclusion: “Just as concern of post-MINUSTAH
instability cannot justify a single violation of a Haitian’s
rights by an occupying force, no solution to Haiti’s problems
can include foreign, armed military on its soil. If the UN and
its members want to support Haiti, MINUSTAH’s nearly one billion
USD yearly budget should be put toward sanitation, shelter,
health, infrastructure, and education, not arms and soldiers
that result in death, sexual assault, and the subversion of
democracy.”
Roger Annis is a coordinator of the
Canada Haiti Action Network in Vancouver BC and publishes on
Rabble.ca. Kevin Edmonds is
a graduate student at the University of Toronto and an author of
the 2011 MINUSTAH: Keeping the Peace or Conspiring Against It?
He writes a blog,
The Other Side of Paradise
on the NACLA website. |
