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Anyone aware of the crisis in Haiti didn’t expect China and Russia to help end an occupation, foreign meddling and violence on the ground.

Despite China delaying a vote by two days to hold closed-door negotations, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimously agreed Friday to renew the UN’s mandate in Haiti. Since 2004, as many as 13,000 troops from around the world have served as part of the UN’s peacekeeping mission.

For many Haitians, the mandate is a foreign occupation.

“Can anyone tell Haitians what [UN Integrated Office in Haiti] BINUH has put in place since Friday, July 15th? This is DAY THREE,” tweeted Daniella Bien-Aime, a Haitian living in the United States. Bien-Aime, as well as others, have used Twitter to voice their opposition.

‘Elites Use Young People’

Among many things, the mandate renewal terms include a call for all countries to end the transfer of small arms, light weapons and ammunition to anyone involved in gang-related activity.

But Haitian-born Jemima Pierre dismissed its viability, given even poor young people have obtained guns worth thousands of dollars. She also rejected the use of the term “gang violence” to describe the struggle on the ground.

“The elites use young people to settle economic and political scores,” said Pierre, who is Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace and an anthropology and Black studies professor at the University of California Los Angeles.

Pierre added Haiti’s elite families control five major ports.

“Guns come through the boats and customs turns a blind eye,” she said.

UN Missions Brought ‘Misery’

The two UN mandates—the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH, 2004-17) and the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH, 2019-present)—have introduced sexual violence and cholera.

“These missions were supposed to stabilize Haiti,” Dahoud Andre told Black Agenda Radio. He is a member of grassroots group KOMOKODA, the Coalition to End Dictatorship in Haiti. “It’s brought misery. It’s brought terrorism to the people of Haiti.”

Adding to the violence and foreign occupation is the humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by last year’s earthquake. Out of 11.4 million Haitians, 4.9 million will need humanitarian assistance this year, with the majority needing “urgent food assistance,” according to the United Nations.

Between July 8 and July 12, the UN reported at least 234 deaths and injuries. That is due to a recent surge in gang violence, which Pierre questioned having occurred just days before the UNSC vote.

Haitian to UN: ‘China Has Put You On Notice’

Some applauded China’s role in adding grit along the UNSC’s path to renewing the mandate.

“You have one year to get your act together. By this time next year, you won’t be able to tell the world why you are so ineffective,” Bien-Aime tweeted in reply to a UN tweet on Friday. “China has put you on NOTICE. And it’s good for Haiti.”

For now! And this is after a FORCED postponement of the vote. Please do not embellish this. You have one year to get your act together. By this time next year, you won't be able to tell the world why you are so ineffective. China has put you on NOTICE. And it's good for Haiti.

— Daughter of Desalin (@dbienaime) July 16, 2022

Last month and this month, dozens of grassroots Haitian organizations signed onto open letters to China and Russia. Those letters asked for both countries’ representatives to vote against renewing the UN mandate. Mexico’s role as “co-penholder” alongside the United States in drafting the resolution put the Latin American country in the spotlight, with one open letter addressed to the Mexican president.

David Oxygène, a member of MOLEGHAF, a grassroots anti-imperialist organization based in the Fort National neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, told Toward Freedom via a Haitian Kreyol interpreter that China and Russia have had opportunities in the past to show solidarity with Haiti. Yet, they failed, he said, as the mandate was renewed year after year.

‘Tilting At Windmills’

Russia’s UN representative pointed out in a June 16 meeting that international actors must respect Haiti’s sovereignty as a baseline to helping Haiti out of its crisis.

A summary of that meeting paraphrased Dmitry A. Polyanskiy as saying solving security problems in Haiti “might be tilting at windmills” because of chaos in the government.

In January 2021, protests broke out over President Jovenel Moïse refusing to step down once his term ended. He was assassinated about six months later. That brought to power U.S.-supported Prime Minister Ariel Henry of the right-wing Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (“Haitian Bald-Headed Party” in English).

Pierre said UNSC mandate renewal resolutions normally have been rubberstamped each year. She saw China playing a positive role in questioning the basis for the 2022 renewal and demanding closed-door negotiations, which delayed the vote by two days.

“But at the same time,” Pierre said, “They’re leaving it up to the UN to work with [regional Caribbean alliance] CARICOM—the UN occupation is the problem.”

Andre told Black Agenda Radio the world should denounce what he referred to as the UN’s “anti-democratic nature.” He pointed out 193 countries are UN members, while only 15 vote on the UNSC.

Representatives for Mexico, China and Russia could not be reached for comment.

‘A Wall Around Haiti’

Haitian-born and U.S.-raised activist Chris Bernadel said Haitians feel isolated from the peoples of the Americas, partly because of the UN occupation’s impact on the economy and communications.

“There has been a feeling of a wall around Haiti,” said Bernadel, who is a member of MOLEGHAF and the Black Alliance for Peace. “The voices of the Haitian people, and the poor and struggling working people, have not been able to be integrated within the wider region. That is something MOLEGHAF has been trying to break through.”

For Oxygène, the support of organizations outside Haiti helps.

“We feel like we are not alone in this fight and we want it to go further, so we can find a solution to occupation,” he said.

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Multipolarista.

Facing a deep economic crisis and bankruptcy, Sri Lanka was rocked by large protests this July, which led to the resignation of the government.

Numerous Western political leaders and media outlets blamed this uprising on a supposed Chinese “debt trap,” echoing a deceptive narrative that has been thoroughly debunked by mainstream academics.

In reality, the vast majority of the South Asian nation’s foreign debt is owed to the West.

Sri Lanka has a history of struggling with Western debt burdens, having gone through 16 “economic stabilization programs” with the Washington-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF).

These structural adjustment programs clearly have not worked, given Sri Lanka’s economy has been managed by the IMF for many of the decades since it achieved independence from British colonialism in 1948.

As of 2021, a staggering 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owned by U.S. and European financial institutions, as well as Western allies Japan and India.

This pales in comparison to the mere 10 percent owed to Beijing.

According to official statistics from Sri Lanka’s Department of External Resources, as of the end of April 2021, the plurality of its foreign debt is owned by Western vulture funds and banks, which have nearly half, at 47 percent.

The top holders of the Sri Lankan government’s debt, in the form of international sovereign bonds (ISBs), are the following firms:

• BlackRock (U.S.)
• Ashmore Group (Britain)
• Allianz (Germany)
• UBS (Switzerland)
• HSBC (Britain)
• JPMorgan Chase (U.S.)
• Prudential (U.S.)

The Asian Development Bank and World Bank, which are thoroughly dominated by the United States, own 13 percent and 9 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, respectively.

Washington’s hegemony over the World Bank is well known, and the U.S. government is the only World Bank Group shareholder with veto power.

Less known is that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is, too, largely a vehicle of U.S. soft power. Neoconservative DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by Western governments, affectionately described the ADB as a “strategic asset for the United States,” and a crucial challenger to the much newer, Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

“The United States, through its membership in the ADB and with its Indo-Pacific Strategy, seeks to compete with China as a security and economic partner of choice in the region,” boasted CSIS.

Another country that has significant influence over the ADB is Japan, which similarly owns 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.

An additional 2 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owed to India as of April 2021, although that number has steadily increased since. In early 2022, India was in fact the top lender to Sri Lanka, with New Delhi disbursing 550 percent more credit than Beijing between January and April.

Both Japan and India are key Western allies, and members of Washington’s anti-China military alliance in the region, the Quad.

Together, these Western firms and their allies Japan and India own 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt – more than three-quarters of its international obligations.

By contrast, China owns just one-tenth of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.

The overwhelming Western role in indebting Sri Lanka is made evident by a graph published by the country’s Department of External Resources, showing the foreign commitments by currency:

As of the end of 2019, less than 5 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was denominated in China’s currency the yuan (CNY). On the other hand, nearly two-thirds, 64.6 percent, was owed in U.S. dollars, along with an additional 14.4 percent in IMF special drawing rights (SDR) and more than 10 percent in the Japanese yen (JPY).

Western media reporting on the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, however, ignores these facts, giving the strong, and deeply misleading, impression that the chaos is in large part because of Beijing.

Sri Lankan Economic Crisis Driven by Neoliberal Policies, Inflation, Corruption, Covid-19 Pandemic

This July, Sri Lanka’s government was forced to resign, after hundreds of thousands of protesters stormed public buildings, setting some on fire, while also occupying the homes of the country’s leaders.

The protests were driven by skyrocketing rates of inflation, as well as rampant corruption and widespread shortages of fuel, food, and medicine – a product of the country’s inability to pay for imports.

In May, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt. In June, it tried to negotiate another structural adjustment program with the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF). This would have been Sri Lanka’s 17th IMF bailout, but the talks ended without a deal.

By July, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe publicly admitted that his government was “bankrupt.”

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who spent a significant part of his life working in the United States, entered office in 2019 and immediately imposed a series of neoliberal economic policies, which included cutting taxes on corporations.

These neoliberal policies decreased government revenue. And the precarious economic situation was only exacerbated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Facing an out-of-control 39.1 percent inflation rate in May, the Sri Lankan government did a 180 and suddenly raised taxes again, further contributing to popular discontent, which broke out in a social explosion in July.

Media Falsely Blames China for Sri Lankan Debt Default

While 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt is owned by Western financial institutions, Japan, and India, major corporate media outlets sought to blame China for the country’s bankruptcy and subsequent protests.

The Wall Street Journal pointed the finger at Beijing in a deeply misleading article titled “China’s Lending Comes Under Fire as Sri Lankan Debt Crisis Deepens.” The newspaper noted that the crisis “opens a window for India to push back against Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean region.”

U.S. media giant the Associated Press also tried to scapegoat China, and its deceptive news wire was republished by outlets across the world, from ABC News to Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya.

Many corporate media outlets in India, including the New Indian Express, Business Standard, India Today, The Print, as well as Japan’s media conglomerate Nikkei published similarly fallacious reports.

U.S. government propaganda outlet Voice of America, which is closely linked to the CIA, employed the same spurious tactics in an article in April titled “China’s Global Image Under Strain as Sri Lanka Faces Debt Trap.”

VOA accused Beijing of “pursuing a kind of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ meant to bring economically weak countries to their knees, dependent on China for support.”

China's Global Image Under Strain as Sri Lanka Faces Debt Traphttps://t.co/gqWbe5PGdz

— Voice of America (@VOANews) April 26, 2022

On social media, the Western propaganda narrative surrounding the July protests in Sri Lanka was even more detached from reality.

A veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA), Derek J. Grossman, portrayed the unrest as an anti-China uprising.

“China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed,” he tweeted on July 9, as the government announced it was resigning.

After working for U.S. spy agencies, Grossman is today an analyst at the Pentagon’s main think tank, the RAND Corporation, where he has pushed a hawkish line against Beijing.

China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed. pic.twitter.com/WOLIb3SUTf

— Derek J. Grossman (@DerekJGrossman) July 9, 2022

BBC Reluctantly Admits the ‘Chinese Debt Trap’ Narrative in Sri Lanka Is False

China has funded several large infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka, building an international airport, hospitals, a convention center, a sports stadium, and most controversially a port in the southern coastal town of Hambantota.

The UK government’s BBC sent a reporter to Sri Lanka to investigate these accusations of supposed “Chinese debt traps.” But after speaking to locals, he reluctantly came to the conclusion that the narrative is false.

“The truth is that many independent experts say that we should be wary of the Chinese debt trap narrative, and we’ve found quite a lot of evidence here in Sri Lanka which contradicts it,” BBC host Ben Chu acknowledged.

He explained, “The Hambantota port, well, that was instigated by the Sri Lankans, not by the Chinese. And it can’t currently be used by Chinese military naval vessels, and actually there’s some pretty formidable barriers to that happening.”

“A lot of the projects we’ve been seeing, well, they feel more like white elephants than they do Chinese global strategic assets,” Chu added.

In our latest film from Sri Lanka, which faces financial collapse as the global Big Squeeze bites, Ben Chu examines the effect that Chinese loans and investment are having on the country:#Newsnight https://t.co/GBFZ1ItP0G

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) June 22, 2022

The British state media outlet interviewed the director of Port City Colombo’s economic commission, Saliya Wickramasuriya, who emphasized, “The Chinese government is not involved in setting the rules and regulations, so from that standpoint the government of Sri Lanka is in control, and it’s up to the government of Sri Lanka’s wish to flavor the city, the development of the city, in the way it wants to.”

“It is accurate to say that infrastructure development has boomed under Chinese investment, Chinese debt sometimes, but those are things that we’ve actually needed for a long, long time,” Wickramasuriya added.

Chu clarified that, “Importantly, it’s not debt but equity the Chinese own here.”

“So is the debt trap not all it seems?” he asked.

Mainstream U.S. Academics Debunk the ‘Chinese Debt Trap’ Myth

Mainstream Western academics have similarly investigated the claims of “Chinese debt traps,” and come to the conclusion that they do not exist.

Even a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, which is notorious for its revolving door with the U.S. government and close links to spy agencies, acknowledged that “the Chinese ‘debt trap’ is a myth.”

Writing in 2021 in the de facto mouthpiece of the DC political establishment, The Atlantic magazine, scholar Deborah Brautigam stated clearly that the debt-trap narrative is “a lie, and a powerful one.”

“Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota,” Brautigam said in the article, which was co-authored by Meg Rithmire, a professor at the stridently anti-socialist Harvard Business School.

The Chinese "debt-trap" narrative is a false one which wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with, Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire write: https://t.co/FagExsdeNT

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) February 7, 2021

Brautigam published her findings in a 2020 article for Johns Hopkins’ China Africa Research Initiative, titled “Debt Relief with Chinese Characteristics,” along with fellow researchers Kevin Acker and Yufan Huang.

They investigated Chinese loans in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola, and the Republic of Congo, and “found no ‘asset seizures’ and, despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates.”

They discovered that Beijing cancelled more than $3.4 billion and restructured or refinanced roughly $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. At least 26 individual loans to African nations were renegotiated.

Western critics have attacked Beijing, claiming there is a lack of transparency surrounding its loans. Brautigam explained that “Chinese lenders prefer to address restructuring quietly, on a bilateral basis, tailoring programs to each situation.”

The researchers noted that China puts an “emphasis on ‘development sustainability’ (looking at the future contribution of the project) rather than ‘debt sustainability’ (looking at the current state of the economy) as the basis of project lending decisions.”

“Moreover, despite critics’ worries that China could seize its borrower’s assets, we do not see China attempting to take advantage of countries in debt distress,” they added.

“There were no ‘asset seizures’ in the 16 restructuring cases that we found,” the scholars continued. “We have not yet seen cases in Africa where Chinese banks or companies have sued sovereign governments or exercised the option for international arbitration standard in Chinese loan contracts.”

Benjamin Norton is founder and editor of Multipolarista.

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis.

November is a month of pleasant weather and festivities in India. But during the final week of this month last year, several hundred thousand farmers gathered on the borders of the National Capital Territory of Delhi—which contains the capital of New Delhi—to confront a huge police force.

They settled down at several points on the border, creating new townships and organizing huge langars, a Sikh concept that involves free meals cooked and eaten together as a community.

This protest sparked a general strike of 250 million Indian farmers as well as workers from other sectors, making it the largest known strike in the world.

Over 11 months have passed since then and farmers have maintained their protest sites, although at a smaller level, using this to inspire protests in other areas of India. The movement is the strongest in parts of northern India (states such as Punjab and Haryana, and the western portion of the state of Uttar Pradesh). But it has spread to other areas as well, thereby strengthening the overall opposition to India’s right-wing, sectarian ruling regime. While this movement has raised several demands, the most persistent one has been for the repeal of three highly controversial farm laws, which were passed in 2020, bypassing normal parliamentary procedures.

The farmers say—and several experts back these claims—that these new farm laws greatly increase the possibility of corporate control over the Indian farming and food system. One law strengthens the contract farming system in favor of corporate interests and against farmers. The second law increases possibilities for big corporations to hoard huge quantities of important crops and hence manipulate and dominate their market. The third law weakens the existing procurement farming system while facilitating a new, unregulated tax-free purchase system, which big business can easily dominate. Both local crony capitalists and big multinational agribusiness companies are likely to use these new opportunities to increase their domination, while also entering into collaboration to corner small farmers.

Allowing big business to dominate India’s food and farm system would be a culmination of trends witnessed in recent decades. The advent of Green Revolution seeds promoted by Western—particularly U.S.—pressure opened up Indian farming to big business, but led to an increase in pollution and soil degradation caused by chemical fertilizers and pesticides, escalated costs to farmers, lowered food quality, and the loss of biodiversity as local seeds and mixed farming systems were uprooted. Objections voiced by the most senior farm scientist, Dr. R.H. Richharia, director of the Central Rice Research Institute, were brushed aside with a heavy hand and he was rudely removed from his job.

The next stage of corporate domination came with the ushering in of the World Trade Organization regime, with its rules for international trade and patents. This could not be stopped, but resistance efforts helped save some safeguards for farmers.

The third stage came with the advent of genetically modified (GMO) crops, including the Bt Cotton crop. Next, efforts were taken to introduce GMO technology to grow several food crops, starting with brinjal (eggplant or aubergine) and mustard. A Monsanto partner mounted an aggressive campaign for spreading GMO brinjal, which would have paved the way for GMO technology to produce other food crops. However, a strong resistance movement opposed this and, so far, GMO food crops have been resisted more or less successfully. Professor Pushpa Bhargava, an acclaimed scientist to whom the Indian Supreme Court offered a special advisory role on this issue, warned, “The ultimate aim of this attempt of which the leader is Monsanto, is to obtain control over Indian agriculture and thus food production.”

The longer term trend has been for big agribusiness to try to dominate the Indian farming scene, although this has been resisted with varying success by farmers and activists at different stages. Building on this previous strength, many farmer organizations have shown greater unity and resilience this time for a more determined resistance.

This growing resistance may be one reason why the open announcement of the India-United States free trade agreement (FTA) has been postponed. Earlier prolonged negotiations for India’s proposed FTA with the European Union had to be called off due to strong objections raised by farmers, particularly dairy farmers.

Such fears are even more pronounced in the context of negotiations for FTA with the United States, which have been even less transparent than the European negotiations.

Sections of Indian bourgeois media have been speculating the FTA with the United States will be introduced in stages. Meanwhile, farmers’ concerns have been confirmed by other recent government decisions as well. Recent moves for mandatory protection of staple foods have been opposed in favor of facilitating the growing big-business domination of food processing and a setback to existing systems, which protect farmers and small processors from the pressures of a less regulated market. The Indian government also recently advocated for palm fruit trees to increase edible oil production, which has been criticized for harming the interests of millions of traditional oilseed farmers and disrupting the biodiversity and ecology of areas where palm-oil plantations are planning to be introduced on a mass scale.

Nearly two-thirds of India’s 1.38 billion people remain linked to rural livelihoods. Approximately 115 million farmer households can be counted in India, most of them small family farms. The growing big-business intrusion has led to an ever-escalating rise in farming costs and debt, in turn leading to ordinary farmers losing their land. According to census data, farmers have been turning into landless households at the rate of 100 per hour. From a global perspective, this is part of the worldwide struggle to save small farmer communities. The movement can gain traction if protesting farmers include the concerns of landless rural households, who now comprise almost half of households in the Indian countryside. Another widely felt need is for this movement to move toward ecologically protective farming, the importance of which has increased as the global climate changes.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener of the Campaign to Save Earth Now. He has been involved with several social movements in India. Dogra’s most recent books include Man Over Machine and Planet in Peril.