Haiti Has a Long History of Being Assaulted by Its Latin American Neighbors
OCTOBER 26, 2020
BY LAUTARO RIVARA
Thirteen United Nations peacekeeping missions are underway in various countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Haiti has been the epicenter of the UN peacekeeping missions in Latin America and the Caribbean; there have been eight UN missions since the International Civilian Mission in Haiti (MICIVIH) was deployed in Haiti in 1993. On October 15, 2019, the UN finally ended its 15-year-long peacekeeping mission in Haiti that began in 2004, leaving behind a “mixed legacy.”
The most dramatic intervention took place in 2004, after the coup d’état against the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Camille Chalmers, executive director of the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development, a civil society organization network, said in 2019 that a domestic political conflict was used as the pretext. The coup was carried out by ex-military personnel whose forces had been dissolved by Aristide in 1995. Backed by the United States, Canada and France, the army of the coup entered from the Dominican Republic and marched to Port-au-Prince.
After Aristide’s forced exile, interim President Boniface Alexandre requested the first deployment of a Multinational Interim Force. Composed of Canadian, French, U.S. and Chilean soldiers, this force would be the seed of the future United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Both the request and the occupation itself contravened Haiti’s 1987 Constitution; only the National Assembly has the power to make these decisions, but it was circumvented by Alexandre.
The UN’s Arguments: ‘Stabilization’ and ‘Humanitarian Interventionism’
Since the creation of MINUSTAH, a series of euphemisms have emerged to justify the occupation, such as ‘suspension of sovereignty,’ ‘humanitarian interventionism,’ and ‘pacification.’ In practice, pacification implied an exercise of selective political repression, the perpetration of various sexual crimes, and the propagation of a cholera epidemic from a MINUSTAH base that claimed 10,000 lives and infected more than 800,000 people. This was belatedly acknowledged by the then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who also apologized for the UN’s response to the cholera outbreak.
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https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/26/haiti-has-a-long-history-of-being-assaulted-by-its-latin-american-neighbors/