Six on History: Haiti
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"We may have a new president, but the machinery of government sometimes churns with heartbreaking inertia — as if Joe Biden weren’t in the White House.
Case in point: the deportation of hundreds of Haitians this month, a move straight out of former president Donald Trump’s playbook. For these Haitians, fleeing a country suffering in deep poverty, Trump might as well be in charge. As would-be asylum seekers, the Haitian migrants, most of whom came to the United States recently through Mexico, have been denied the opportunity for due process in an asylum system that’s broken and that the Biden administration is working to fix."
"Haiti National Police officers marched through the streets of Port-au-Prince Wednesday, demanding the corpses of several fallen comrades killed in an ill-fated police operation in one of the city’s most dangerous slums.
The protest turned violent as demonstrators trashed a local police station and released several people from jail, including a handful of officers marchers believe were illegally detained.
The chaotic events come as anger mounts over the botched raid in the Village de Dieu, or Village of God, slum in Port-au-Prince. At least four officers were killed and eight injured Friday during the operation. Another officer remains missing. Video clips shared on social media show gang members dragging and desecrating the corpses of two of the officers. They also posed with an armored vehicle belonging to the officers and weapons that were seized.
Officers fed up with their nation’s mounting crisis pointed their anger at the government and police brass, whom they accused of not doing enough to protect those in uniform. Adding to the heightened tensions were rumors on social media that authorities had paid and negotiated with the armed gangs to recover one of the two armored vehicles seized during the raid.
“Instead of mounting an operation to go recover the bodies of the police, they opted to give their equipment more importance,” said Jean Elder Lundi, coordinator of the Haiti National Police Union. “They gave an armored vehicle more importance than the police officers. It’s the result of all these things that led to what happened today.”
Haiti National Police Director General Léon Charles said late Wednesday officers did not engage in any negotiations with the Village de Dieu gang, but did retrieve the armored vehicle after being informed it had been abandoned. He said the institution is committed to recovering the bodies of the slain officers and urged those protesting to let the inspector general determine how a “well-planned operation” went wrong. A senior officer has been detained as part of the probe.
The protesters included active police officers, recruits and members of a rogue police force known as Fantom 509 demanding the resignation of Charles. Fantom 509, which includes active and former cops, vowed to continue targeting police stations and jails until all imprisoned officers are released — including those detained as part of an alleged coup against Haiti’s unpopular president in February.
The violent demonstration took place as ambassadors at the Organization of American States adopted a draft resolution recognizing that the situation in Haiti is grave and offering the Permanent Council’s assistance in facilitating a dialogue between the government and the opposition and civil society.
The unrest comes amid the country’s deepening political crisis, widening insecurity and an alarming spike in kidnappings. The deadly raid left many officers feeling even more demoralized, said Rony Abelson Gros-Nègre, who pushed for the creation of the police union before leaving the force to head a civil society organization. He said nine officers were recently killed in the span of three days while on the job.
“It’s the entire country that is in battle,” Gros-Nègre said, describing the police protest as an act of civil disobedience. “The message that we launched today is that every Haitian, whether in the country or in the diaspora, needs to come together. We cannot accept what has happened.”
William O’Neill, a human rights lawyer who worked for the U.N. in the mid-’90s when the organization took the lead in rebuilding Haiti’s police, said the ongoing meltdown of the force saddens him, although he isn’t surprised. There has been an overall lack of accountability and leadership in Haiti, he said.
“This bespeaks of the total political crisis, the paralysis,” O’Neill said.
Moïse recently stated on Twitter that he has reached out to both the OAS and the United Nations for help in handling Haiti’s security problems. He also announced a new decree to facilitate cooperation between the army and police. He did not elaborate on what that cooperation would look like, but it has raised concerns in Haiti and in the U.S. because the police force was created in 1994 to be independent from the army. Haiti’s police, which graduated their first class 25 years ago, receives U.S. funding that cannot be used for the military.
O”Neill said fixing Haiti’s security woes alone won’t resolve the broader crisis.
“Every corner of rule of law in Haiti, police, courts and prisons, is in a disastrous state,” he said. “You are not going to fix this just by bringing in some experts on how to deal with policing and kidnapping.”
In February of last year, members of the army and police got into a deadly clash when heavily armed officers marched into Port-au-Prince’s main public square on Carnival Sunday to protest their low pay and lack of government spending on the police. The two sides engaged in a six-hour gun battle that left a soldier and a protester dead and more than a dozen others injured.
Lundi, the union leader, said Wednesday’s protest was the culmination of years of frustration in which officers have been unable to access such basic services as health insurance and are forced to travel on the same public buses as gang members to get to work, putting them at risk.
“What you saw today is 25 years of frustration being unleashed,” he said.
Concerns about the Haiti National Police were recently raised during a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, in which several civic leaders testified about officers being outgunned by armed gangs and reports from kidnapping victims that their abductors were dressed in police uniforms.
“The politicization of the police, the militarization of the police, is preventing the police from functioning,” Lundi said. “This is why we are asking the United States, and all of the countries in the international community that participated in the creation of the police to help, and we are asking them: Is this the force they envisioned for Haiti?"
There’s a reason why Haiti is such a disaster right now—and has been for quite some time. Martelly and Moïse’s criminal political behavior has been supported and even encouraged and mentored by the United States and other foreign actors: France, Canada, the UN, and the OAS. While Haitians have plunged further and further into extreme poverty and insecurity, the corrupt and increasingly lawless governments of Martelly and Moïse have been financially sustained by three successive American presidents: Obama, Trump, and now Biden. During the trauma of the 2010 earthquake there, then–UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon named Bill Clinton as the UN’s special envoy for Haiti; Bill and Hillary Clinton, at the time US secretary of state, both gave media and electoral credibility to Martelly, which set the stage for Moïse’s election five years later.
Since 2010, Haiti has received five times more international aid than all other Caribbean countries combined, in part because the earthquake virtually annihilated Port-au-Prince. But as Warren Everson Alarick Hull, the permanent representative of St. Kitts and Nevis to the OAS, told a meeting of that organization recently, “As these requests [for funding] are renewed, we ask ourselves what Haiti has done with this considerable aid?” As in the case of Hugo Chavez’s PetroCaribe, a discounted-oil-based social program for Haiti (and other Caribbean nations), precious few Haitians have reaped the fruits of foreign aid. Indeed, no one really knows where all the money has gone, though some of the Martelly regime’s and its cohorts’ thievery of PetroCaribe funds has been documented. No doubt some international aid has gone from the pockets of the state toward funding the gangs, which Jacques Leon Emile, the president of the Haitian Association for Memory and Culture, recently called “the armed wing of the political authorities.”
While the Moise regime has further impoverished the Haitian people, and caused the usual exodus of those who have the means to leave, the gangs have been favored with all kinds of advancement, and huge caches of heavy arms—supposedly banned under a US arms embargo—as well as military-grade armored vehicles. After the killing of the police officers in Village de Dieu, the gangs divided the clothing, arms, and protective gear of the men they’d just killed.
To read the Biden administration’s State Department homepage on Haiti-US relations, however, is to have an Orwellian encounter with the absolutely unreal. The more the Martelly and Moise governments failed, the more generous the United States has become. The page lists all the money given in the wake of the earthquake, then goes on to say that nonetheless Haiti is failing. Here’s a typical quote: “In response to the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Haiti and requests for international assistance from the Government of Haiti and United Nations partners, the US Ambassador to Haiti declared a disaster due to the complex emergency in Haiti. In response, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance is providing one million dollars through the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to support the transportation of humanitarian commodities and staff for immediate relief efforts.” Translated into what Haitians understand this to mean: While the politicians and their flunkies steal international aid targeted to the Haitian population, and fail the country at every turn, USAID picks up the tab for the thievery and failure, sending just enough to keep Haitians from an outright explosive revolt."
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.
