Rebloged from the Caribbean Empowerment website. The international news-feed is choked with the ongoing impasse between HAMAS and Israel. What about Haiti? We know the answer, it is a Black country that is of little geopolitical importance located in a region where a one foreign policy remains a pipe dream – Blogmaster
Haiti – CARICOM Deepens its Betrayal
Caribbean Organisation for Peoples Empowerment Americas, Caribbean, World October 6, 2023 4 Minutes
By A.T. Freeman
On 2 October, the US presented to the United Nations Security Council a resolution calling for the authorisation of its long planned military attack on Haiti. The resolution was adopted by 13 votes to 0 with Russia and China abstaining. The states which voted in favour of the resolution were Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Gabon, Ghana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States.
Resolution 2699 that authorises the military attack on Haiti has been passed under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter which allows for the use of violence against an individual state. A number of commentators have pointed out that, in fact, this resolution is illegal and itself violates the UN Charter since Chapter 7 focuses on defending international peace through addressing threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression. Clearly, the activities of criminal gangs in an individual state do not present a threat to international peace and so are not the business of the UN Security Council and definitely not an issue that can be addressed by the use of Chapter 7. Not surprisingly, the drafters of the resolution do not explain how the situation in Haiti presents a threat to international peace. It is ironic that this resolution is being used to facilitate an act of unprovoked aggression against a member state, something that Chapter 7 is supposed to deter.
Given the recent demand from Biden to the UN General Assembly that the Security Council should immediately pass the resolution authorising the aggression against Haiti, it was not surprising that Jeffrey Delaurentis, the representative of the USA, hailed the council’s decision as historic while acknowledging the intense US effort to engineer this new invasion of Haiti with his words, “it took us one full year to get where we are now”. The decision of China and the Russian Federation to abstain rather than veto the resolution recalls the passing of resolution 1973 on 17 March 2011. That resolution, proposed by France, Lebanon, and the United Kingdom, authorised the establishment of a no-fly zone over Libya and on that occasion both China and the Russian Federation abstained rather than veto it. That was the greenlight the US and its allies were waiting for. NATO immediately unleashed what Fidel Castro famously described as a ‘fascist attack’ on Libya. The barbaric destruction of Libya at the hands of NATO has had calamitous effects on the lives of the Libyan people. NATO’s aggression turned their country from being the most developed in Africa to a hell hole of insecurity and violence, where Black people were literally being sold as slaves and recent calamitous flooding has claimed thousands more lives as a result of the destruction of the country’s infrastructure. It should be recalled that Resolution 1973 stated that the establishment of the no-fly zone was intended to ‘protect civilians’, while Susan Rice, then US representative at the UN, hailed the passing of resolution 1973 with the following words, “the Council has responded to the Libyan peoples’ cry for help. The Council’s purpose was clear: to protect Libyan civilians”.
A representative of CARICOM, of which Haiti is a member, also spoke at the UN Security Council Meeting. Jamaica’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, Brian Wallace, was the person chosen for this task. Stressing that he was speaking on behalf of all 14 member states of CARICOM, he delivered a despicable speech hailing the planned US invasion of Haiti. With his speech, he wrote in capital letters that CARICOM’s betrayal of Haiti and her people was complete and unlimited. Gone was the earlier CARICOM talk of opposing a military invasion and of defending Haiti’s sovereignty so that the Haitian people could chart a path for their own country. Instead Wallace mindlessly repeated all the talking points from the US propaganda narratives even going so far as to argue that “…the first step towards Haitian-led and Haitian-owned solutions to the multi-dimensional, multi-faceted crises facing the country…” is a foreign invasion. Wallace represents an Andrew Holness led Jamaica Labour Party government, elected by the votes of 21% of Jamaica’s registered voters, which has distinguished itself as being one of the most subservient in the region to the interests of the US. Holness was one of those Caribbean leaders who in 2019 made his way to Mar-a-Lago, Florida to meet with then president Donald Trump as part of the US efforts to destabilise Venezuela. As such, the disgraceful statement from Ambassador Wallace is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, it is irrational for the Andrew Holness government, which has failed miserably to provide the people of Jamaica with security and to deal with the problem of criminal gangs in Jamaica, to think that his government can contribute in any way to solving such a problem in Haiti. The same can be said of all the region’s governments, which are struggling with the problems of rising crime and criminal gangs and many of which have a far worse murder rate than Haiti.
Unlike Holness, there are those in CARICOM, like Mia Mottley’s government in Barbados and Ralph Gonsalves’ government in St Vincent and the Grenadines who present themselves as different. They sell themselves as progressives, Pan-Africanists, anti-imperialists and so on. CARICOM’s unreserved betrayal of Haiti and her people and their collusion with it exposes their claims as completely fraudulent. They are in bed with Holness and the US in this attack on Haiti. Many wonder if the recent CNN article on Mia Mottley being considered as a possible UN General Secretary in 2026 is her reward for throwing Haiti to the wolves.
The people of Haiti are a heroic and fighting people. They liberated themselves from enslavement and contributed significantly to the end of slavery in the Caribbean and Americas. In this struggle, they defeated the invasions of England and Napoleon’s France. They will certainly know how to deal with this new US organised invasion of their country, which follows in the footsteps of the previous ones.
The blogmaster invites you to join the discussion.