Indigenous-Led Occupation in United States Demands City of Minneapolis Call Off Demolition

 

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 opinion was published as “Left-Right White Solidarity?” in Common Dreams in 2014, shortly after the U.S.-backed neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine, in response to solidarity emerging between left-wing and right-wing people of European descent in the United States and in Europe. However, this does not refer to the “horseshoe theory,” a concept that suggests the left and the right have much in common and pose a threat to a so-called “center.” The horseshoe theory leaves out the colonial question: What happens to people who have been colonized by Europeans in the United States and around the world? And what impact does white supremacy have not just on those who have been colonized, but on people of European descent? This version has been edited with the author’s permission.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” -George Santayana

Some years ago, Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri suggested that while not always visible in the social practices of everyday European life, the racist foundation for European fascism was still present, safely confined to a space in the European psyche, but always ready to explode in what he called a “racist delirium.”

Today, white workers and the middle classes in Europe and in the United States, traumatized by the new realities imposed on them by the decline of the Western imperialist project and the turn to neoliberalism, are increasingly embracing a retrograde form of white supremacist politics.

This dangerous political phenomenon is developing in countries throughout the European Union and in the United States. Just recently, the National Front, a racist, authoritarian party that labored on the fringes of French politics for years, has emerged as one of the dominant forces. The Tea Party in the United States, Golden Dawn in Greece, the People’s Party in Spain, the Partij Voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands—in these and other countries, a transatlantic, radical racist movement is emerging and gaining respectability.

The hard turn to the right is not a surprise for those of us who have a clear-eyed view of Euro-American history and politics. In all of the 20th century fascist movements in Europe, two elements combined to express the fascist project: 1) The rise of far-right parties and movements as the political expression of an alliance of authoritarian, pro-capitalist class forces bankrolled by sections of the capitalist class and constructed in the midst of capitalist crisis; and 2) racism grounded in white supremacist ideology.

The neo-fascism that is now emerging within the context of the current capitalist crisis on both sides of the Atlantic has similar characteristics to the movements of the 1930s, but with one distinguishing feature. The targets for racist scapegoating are different. The targets today are immigrants: Arab, Muslim and African in Europe; and Latinos as well as the never-ending target of poor and working-class African Americans in the United States.

What makes the rise of the racist radical right even more dangerous today is that it is taking place in a political environment in which traditional anti-racist oppositional forces have not recognized the danger of this phenomenon or—for strategic reasons—have decided to downplay the issue. That strategy has been tragically played out in the “immigrant rights” movement in the United States.

The brutal repression and dehumanization witnessed across Europe in the 1930s has not found generalized expression in the United States and Europe, at least not yet. Nevertheless, large sectors of the U.S. and European left appear to be unable to recognize that the U.S./NATO/EU axis that is committed to maintaining the hegemony of Western capital is resulting in dangerous collaborations with rightist forces both inside and outside of governments.

The manufactured crisis with Russia over the issue of Ukraine is a case in point. The incredible recklessness and outrageous opportunism of the U.S./NATO/EU axis in destabilizing Ukraine—knowing that the driving forces on the ground were racist, neo-Nazi elements from the Right Sector and the Svoboda party—demonstrated once again the lengths this axis is prepare to go to achieve its geo-strategic objective of full-spectrum economic and political global domination.

Yet, strangely, not only did many radicals in the United States and Europe not see the potential threat this situation represented—they seemed unable to penetrate the simplistic cold-war propaganda that suddenly re-emerged to frame events in Ukraine.

Instead of being concerned that—as a direct consequence of U.S. actions—a government came to power in Europe that, for the first time since the 1930s, included ultra-nationalist, racist neo-Nazis in key positions, the left along with the general population allowed the corporate media and U.S. propagandists to turn the narrative away from U.S./EU destabilization of Ukraine to Putin’s supposed expansionist aspirations.

The ease in which the corporate media was able to flip that script and make Putin the new face of evil has been truly astonishing. And the fact that that narrative was embraced by most liberals and large sectors of the white left in the United States only affirmed that—having abandoned class analysis and anti-imperialism, and never really having understood the insidious nature of white supremacist ideology—the U.S. left has no theoretical framework for apprehending the complexities of the current period.

The inability to extricate itself from the influences of white supremacist ideology has to be considered one explanation for the strange positions taken by large sectors of the white liberal/left over the last few years. How else can one explain the bizarre incorporation of the discourse of “humanitarian intervention” and the obscenely obvious racism of the “responsibility to protect”?

Could it be that many white radicals have fallen prey to the subtle and not-so-subtle racial appeal to a form of cross-class white solidarity in defense of “Western values,” civilization and the prerogative to determine who has the right to national sovereignty, all of which are at the base of the rationalization of the “responsibility to protect” asserted by the white West?

The apparent incapacity of white leftists to penetrate and understand the cultural and ideological impact of white supremacy and its powerful effect on their own consciousness has weakened and deformed left analysis of U.S. and European foreign policy initiatives. It has also resulted in the U.S. and European left taking political positions that either objectively championed U.S./NATO imperialist aggression or provided tacit support for that aggression though silence.

As a consequence of the abandonment of anti-imperialism and an active class-racial collaboration with the Western bourgeoisie, an almost insurmountable chasm has been created separating the Western left from its counterparts in much of the global South.

Instead of more resolute anti-imperialist solidarity, broad elements of the white left in the United States and Europe have consistently aligned themselves with the policies of the U.S/NATO/EU axis that supports right-wing forces from Ukraine to Venezuela.

Exaggeration, racial paranoia, and an overly simplistic and divisive—even “racist”—assessment of the liberal/left will be the charge. We accept those charges. We accept them because we know they will come. For those of us living outside the walls of privilege who must nevertheless accept the realities of the colonialist/imperialist-created global South, we don’t have the luxury of comforting illusions. Our lived experiences negate the false history of Europe’s benevolent civilization. We see developing in Europe and in the United States the very real possibility of a left-right racial convergence fueled by crisis, leftist ideological confusion and what appears to be a mutual commitment to maintaining the global structures of white supremacy.

Understanding the violent history of the Western project and the pathological nature of white supremacy, we are forced to see with crystal clarity that within the context of the volatile economic and social conditions in Europe, giving legitimacy to neo-fascist forces like the ones in Ukraine might just be the fuel needed to ignite that racist, fascist delirium Berneri referred to.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.