Six on History: Haiti
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"Even without a global pandemic, Haiti’s children faced a hunger crisis. Now it’s getting worse.
COVID-19, an economy already in free fall, droughts and intense tropical storms, gang violence and chronic instability are not only raising levels of hunger in Haiti but leading to increased levels of severe child malnutrition, the head of the United Nations’ leading child advocacy group in the Caribbean nation has warned.
The number of children suffering from “severe acute” childhood malnutrition has more than doubled, increasing from 41,000 last year to an estimated 86,000 children this year, said Bruno Maes, UNICEF’s representative in Haiti,
“There are now 217,000 Haitian children ages 6 to 59 months who now suffer from acute malnutrition,” Maes said, citing a U.N. survey.
Malnutrition in Haiti, he said, is related to several factors, including the drought-driven crisis in the 1990s and 2000s, and the 2010 earthquake. All of which have affected nearly 5 million people in Haiti “and caused economic damage,” he said.
Five out of eight children in Haiti, he said, suffered from chronic malnutrition last year.
UNICEF’s estimates come as the agency launches an emergency appeal for $3 million to purchase meals for the next six months, and to support Haiti’s Ministry of Health in protective measures like identifying children who need assistance and getting them help. The funding is urgently needed, UNICEF said, because in the next few weeks it will run out of life-saving, ready-to-use therapeutic food.
“It puts 86,000 children affected by severe acute malnutrition [risking] the worst complications, unless additional funding is provided,” Maes said. “Without these funds, thousands of children will no longer receive this critical and life-saving support.
“It’s a critical investment because investing at the very beginning of a child’s life is the best investment a country can make,” he added. “Well-nourished and healthy children get better grades and become productive adults who can help build Haiti’s future.”
Now those crises have been compounded by COVID-19 — which is seeing a deadly resurgence in Haiti — and gang violence.
Haiti still remains the only country in the Western Hemisphere that has yet to administer vaccines to its population. Meanwhile COVID-19 infections and deaths are spiking. The country has lost in recent days several well-known personalities including a Catholic monsignor and the rector and vice rector of the Episcopal University. As of June 6, the most recent available data from the Ministry of Health, Haiti registered 16,079 confirmed COVID-19 infections and 346 deaths. A month earlier, on May 6, it reported 13,245 COVID-19 cases and 268 deaths coronavirus-related deaths.
Meanwhile, the latest round of violent gang clashes has forced thousands of Haitians, including children, to flee their homes in the Martissant neighborhood. Some have sought refuge in nearby Carrefour in a gymnasium, or in public plazas in other communities. Others have left the capital altogether for the rural countryside. The Martissant neighborhood, which is largely controlled by armed gangs, is located not far from the National Palace.
During a visit Tuesday to the area where some of the displaced have sought refuge, Maes lamented the situation, especially for children who had lost days of schooling and were being exposed to diseases. UNICEF and partners, he said, are providing assistance to the displaced, “but more aid is urgently needed.”
In a visit to South Florida on Thursday, Haitian Bishop Oge Beauvoir, who runs Coconut Creek-based charity Food for the Poor in Haiti, said he’s lived in Haiti 45 years out of his 65 years and “what we are experiencing today, I haven’t seen that before.” The country is “facing very tough challenges,” he added.
Speaking of those who have been displaced, he said, “in the streets of Port-au-Prince, you meet them everywhere, they are like people going nowhere with their children.”
“Many people cannot eat these days,” he said, noting that rising food prices and the devaluation of the local currency are creating added challenges. “People used to be able to feed their families. They cannot afford to do it anymore. And people who are working are coming to us to request food.”
A U.N. humanitarian-needs assessment found that as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenges, some Haiti households saw their income drop by more than 60%. Access to healthcare and water, hygiene and sanitation services have also been affected, leading to a drop in immunizations. That has led to an increase in diarrheal diseases, the main cause of malnutrition among children under age 5.
The immunization drops are especially worrying. A UNICEF equity analyzer shows that nearly 10% of Haiti’s children have not been vaccinated, while 58% are not fully vaccinated, meaning they did not complete all of their required vaccines.
Though the data is from 2017, Maes said UNICEF is still “very concerned.” Further disconcerting is that, of those who are not fully vaccinated or haven’t been vaccinated, one out of two live in the metropolitan Port-au-Prince area as well as in Gonaives and St. Marc, just north of the capital, where access to essential services for children is lacking.
“In some of these places, children are also mostly affected by the violence that is ongoing in some [sections] of these metropolitan areas,” he said."
"Throughout modern history, border walls have provided tremendous fodder and cover for authoritarian leaders around the world.
Their existence has only increased in recent years, with USA Today reporting 77 border walls in 2018, compared to just 15 worldwide in 1989 at the time the Berlin Wall was torn down.
In this case, there is no strength in numbers. Whether it’s Hungary’s new high-tech fence along the Serbian border or Northern Ireland’s ironically named Peace Wall, these structures have only created more problems, increasing division, discrimination and disillusionment.
As advocates working to defend and protect the rights of migrants and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican Republic, we offer the United States as the most recent cautionary tale as the Dominican Republic plans to construct a 234-mile border fence to keep out Haitian migrants.
Dominican President Luis Abinader described the move as an attempt to “put an end to the serious problems of illegal immigration, drug trafficking and the movement of stolen vehicles.”
Yet, just like Donald Trump’s campaign promise that the U.S.-Mexico border wall would “put an end to illegal immigration and stop the drugs from pouring into our country,” there is a glossy sheen meant to distract attention from the true purpose of this project. In both cases, political leaders have used overt nationalism as a smoke-and-mirrors tactic to cloak discriminatory practices on the basis of race, economic status and national origin.
Abinader paints the problem as solely about Haitian migrants, but it affects Dominicans of foreign ancestry, too.
Tensions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic have rapidly escalated in the past year because of Haiti’s deteriorating political stability and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated the economic and social situation of Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the country. They are more likely to work in the informal sector, or gray economy, and may be denied access to social programs and health services restricted to Dominican citizens.
The root of the problem, however, has been nearly a century in the making, including the Dominican Republic’s continuous and targeted policy and practice of denying citizenship and identity documents to Dominicans of Haitian descent, who have a constitutional right to citizenship. Government officials mistakenly claim a resolution of these issues. On the contrary, a century of Haitian labor migration to the Dominican Republic, with economic benefits for the host country, are overlooked, in a “needed but unwanted” syndrome.
For more than a decade, our organizations have worked with Dominican human-rights activists, including 2006 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award Laureate Sonia Pierre, to fight against denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent and discriminatory policies against Haitian migrants. These policies not only clearly violate international law, but erect day-to-day obstacles for Dominicans of Haitian descent, including their ability to find stable employment, register their children, access social services, get health insurance and attend university, all of which condemns them, and often their children, to a life of poverty and social exclusion.
The border fence seeks to transform the narrative of the Dominican government’s racist, xenophobic policies against its own citizens and neighbors into one of self-defense.
The international community cannot stand on the sidelines. Instead of watching a proliferation of fences, we must dismantle the discriminatory systems on which they are built, advocating for legal means for migration.
Enacting policies that respect the rights of migrants and their families and provide generations of Dominicans of Haitian descent with their Dominican identity documents will go a long way in alleviating issues of inequity and injustice. The country must aim to address the gaps in its obligations, not cover them up behind walls."
Bridget Wooding is the director of the Observatory Caribbean Migrants. Kacey Mordecai is an international advocacy and litigation attorney at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
" ... No leader is universally scorned, but Jovenel Moïse comes close. Turnout was 18 per cent in the elections that made him president of Haiti in 2016. Since then there have been government-linked massacres, including one that killed at least seventy people, a spike in kidnappings, an uptick in murders, rampant inflation, blatant corruption and pervasive fear. For almost all Haitians life has got much worse. Moïse has ruled by decree since January 2020, when most parliamentarians’ terms expired. He has replaced all the country’s mayors with people who report only to him. He would like to cement his authoritarian grip by forcing constitutional reform with a referendum in June.
As a general rule, life in Haiti is safer and calmer than the headlines in rich countries allow, but for almost three years, Haitians have been warning relatives and friends abroad not to visit. They have orchestrated strikes and mass protests, most of them peaceful, to demand Moïse’s resignation or at least to hold his regime to account. Others have fled, often to the United States, which has made it gratuitously clear they are not welcome: in its first two months, the Biden administration has sent some twenty deportation flights to Haiti. Some Haitians hoped that Moïse would step down at the end of his term on 7 February. Instead, before dawn that day, officers raided the homes of some twenty people, including the chief justice of the supreme court, Yvickel Dabresil, and locked them up on accusations of plotting a coup. Moïse announced the arrests on the airport tarmac, then flew off with his wife to the seaside town of Jacmel to celebrate carnival.
Moïse says he is entitled to another year in office. Legal experts agree that his interpretation of the law requires twisting it beyond recognition, but there’s an old Haitian saying that the constitution is paper and guns are steel, and Moïse has the backing he needs from the OAS and the USA. At a press conference on 5 February, the State Department took Moïse’s side in the end-of-term argument. Perhaps this was mere expediency from the White House – Haiti is a small country and the Biden administration has inherited a myriad messes – but Moïse saw a green light. The arrests took place 36 hours later.
Dabresil was released on 11 February after Moïse sacked him from the supreme court along with two of his colleagues. The other supposed conspirators are still in prison. Among the detainees are Marie Antoinette Gauthier, a 66-year-old surgeon, and her 71-year-old husband, Louis Buteau, an agronomist. Though critical of the regime, it seems unlikely they were planning to overthrow it or stockpiling the weapons the government claims it found in their house. They were taken in their pyjamas, defenceless and in shock, according to their eldest daughter, Catherine Buteau, a 33-year-old Haitian citizen who lives in Montréal. ‘If they were plotting a coup,’ she notes, ‘they would not have been sleeping.’
The detainees have not been officially charged with anything. But official charges and the other trappings of due process are not the point. The purpose of the arrests is to show anyone who might speak up what could happen to them or their family. It’s a useful, brutal trick, and a terrible touchstone of national memory. When I lived in Port-au-Prince from 2007 to 2011, I came to know a handful of people who had been political prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s. Some had spoken out against Duvalierism, but others, such as Claude Rosier, who spent eleven years in jail, never learned how they’d offended the regime.
Moïse is also pushing his limits with Haiti’s overweening neighbour to the north. Haitian politics can’t escape the shadow of the United States. Rosier and others were released during the Carter administration, but within a month of Reagan’s election in 1980, Jean-Claude Duvalier went on another round-up spree. Under the first President Bush, the CIA sabotaged Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Clinton reinstalled Aristide with twenty thousand marines, and the second President Bush removed him again. ... "
CNN) "Turmoil in Haiti could soon test democratic leaders' support for embattled president Jovenel Moise, a former banana exporter whose claim to another year in office has sparked protests in the capital, arrests and the abrupt dismissal of several Supreme Court judges.
"Dessalines succeeded Louverture as the primary leader of the revolution and defeated French forces to free Haiti once and for all. Dessalines’s commitment to destroying slavery, racism, and colonialism was uncompromising, but the violence attributed to him was exaggerated and some of it entirely fictionalized. Because Dessalines represented a more bold and unapologetic demand for full Black liberation, foreigners wanted to undercut his success by describing him as “uncivilized.” Dessalines has been wrongfully accused of “massacring” thousands of white people on the island after he declared independence.
“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” he claimed in the January 1, 1804 Declaration of Independence. “Despots and tyrants never utter it unless to curse the day that I was born.”
