International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International
On October 2, the UN Security Council endorsed the deployment of a military mission against Haiti. The resolution promoted by U.S. imperialism was adopted with 13 votes in favor and with the complicity of Russia and China, which abstained to allow its approval. The endorsement of the Security Council is intended to give a veneer of legality to this new attack against the right to self-determination of the Haitian people. We call for an international campaign in solidarity with the Haitian people, for the expulsion of the foreign troops, BINUH and the Core Group, and for a working class and popular solution to the crisis.
The mission, which will be headed by the pro-Yankee government of Kenya, will not solve any of the problems Haiti is going through. In fact, imperialist intervention and interference has been one of the main causes of the crisis, endorsing electoral frauds and supporting right-wing and mafia governments. The abstention of China and Russia demonstrated once again their complicity with U.S. imperialism in the aggression against Haiti. Both governments allowed the successive extensions of the mandate of BINUH, the permanent UN office in Haiti, and China also participated directly with hundreds of police officers in MINUSTAH.
U.S. imperialism, after the political and military defeats suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, and frightened by the force of the 2020 social outburst of the African American youth, has decided not to send troops directly to Haiti but to convince other governments to provide them. It failed to get Canada to lead the mission and finally, in exchange for USD$200 million in military aid, it got Kenya to send barely a thousand policemen. Other pro-imperialist governments, such as Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda and the Bahamas, are willing to send much smaller contingents. A much smaller contingent than that of MINUSTAH, which had more than 12,000 troops and police, is being planned.
Drug trafficking to the U.S. largely finances the purchase of arms that flow from the U.S. to Haiti to arm the gangs that control most of the Haitian capital. Many of these weapons pass through the Dominican Republic, whose regime is an unconditional lackey of the U.S. and has also been requesting in the OAS and the UN an invasion against Haiti.
Haiti has suffered the presence of foreign troops and UN missions for most of the last thirty years. This will be the tenth mission approved in this time, including 13 years of occupation by MINUSTAH, which left thousands dead as a result of repression and the generation of a cholera epidemic by Nepalese soldiers. All these missions have consumed billions of dollars, which would be needed for urgent investments in guaranteeing food production and access to water and electricity for millions of people, but have only served to shore up the power of a small oligarchy of mafia capitalists, today represented by the de facto government of Ariel Henry.
The Haitian people reject imperialist intervention, which only has the support of some bourgeois sectors. We believe that the solution to the basic problems of the Haitian people will come from the hand of a government of the Haitian working class and popular organizations.
We support the demands of the Haitian popular and leftist organizations such as the Socialist Movement of Haitian Workers for an end to imperialist interference and the dissolution of BINUH and the Core Group. In this sense, we especially denounce the pro-imperialist hypocrisy of the Lula government in Brazil, which continues to be part of the Core Group, of which it was a founder due to its leading role in the MINUSTAH. We demand that the UN pay compensation for the assassinations, torture, sexual abuse and the spread of cholera by MINUSTAH. We demand that the U.S. and France pay reparations for extortions and military occupations from the 19th century to the present. We support the demand for an end to the de facto government of Ariel Henry and reaffirm that the solutions to the problems of the Haitian people, which are the result of long decades of oligarchic governments and imperialist intervention, are in the hands of the Haitian people themselves with the solidarity of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.
We reiterate our call from the IWU-FI for an international campaign of solidarity with the Haitian people and against the sending of occupation troops to Haiti.