I read the news from Haiti and I am appalled, scared. In April, Agence France-Presse (AFP) summed up the situation with words that hurt. According to María Isabel Salvador, the new UN envoy to the country, “the terrifying violence” is everywhere and the “police presence [est] limited or non-existent.
Schoolchildren are being shot at or kidnapped, women are being gang-raped and almost half the population, that is to say five million inhabitants, is in need of humanitarian aid. On May 12, AFP quoted a UNICEF statement that “gang violence ravaging Haiti has caused a 30% increase in one year of severe acute malnutrition among children.” Ordinary people, like you and me, who wish to live an ordinary life, like you and me, are caught in this hell. It upsets me. What to do in the face of such an intolerable situation?
The urgency to act
On February 17, 2023, in The duty, the Quebec political scientist Henry Milner was afflicted by “the horror that is going on in this country”, left at the mercy of the gangs who fill the political vacuum. According to Milner, urgent action is needed by deploying a specialized international armed force, as this is the only realistic solution to restore some normality in the country. In January, António Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, said the same thing.
The problem is that the UN’s hands are tied because, according to Milner, its desire for direct action in Haiti “is blocked by Russian and Chinese vetoes”. Hence the call for a non-UN mission led by Canada, which would have the support of France, the United States and Mexico.
However, Canada, for the moment, refuses to engage in such a military mission. Claiming to want to “keep the Haitian people at the center of the solutions to resolve the crisis”, Justin Trudeau and his government choose instead to offer 100 million dollars for the strengthening of the Haitian police and to impose economic sanctions on certain members of the country’s elite suspected of profiting from the chaos.
According to the Chief of the Defense Staff, General Wayne Eyre, the Canadian Armed Forces, already committed on the ground in Latvia with 700 soldiers and financially in Ukraine, “do not have the capacity to carry out a possible security mission in Haiti”, especially since they would be short of 16,000 soldiers, according to Major General Lise Bourgon, quoted in the same Radio-Canada article. For Milner, Canada’s refusal to engage directly in Haiti is irresponsible.
The dangers of a mission
Guy Taillefer, editorial writer for Duty for international affairs, also testified on 1er May 2023, of the horror inspired by the Haitian hell, but does not adhere to the solution proposed by Milner. The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), deployed from 2004 to 2017, “has left bad memories”, being tainted by accusations of political bias and sexual crimes. The American desire to outsource responsibility for a new mission in Haiti to Canada does not bode well. The Trudeau government, therefore, is right to resist this commitment “whose success […] would be uncertain to say the least,” writes the editorialist.
What to do in these conditions? Taillefer, like Gilles Rivard, former Canadian ambassador to Haiti, supports the idea of ”massively strengthening the National Police of Haiti”, capable, “if given the means, of stemming the violence and restoring its credibility “. It remains, concludes Taillefer, that it will be necessary to go further to break the Haitian impasse, maintained for years, according to him, by the members of the Core Group, an informal international organization composed in particular of the ambassadors of Canada, the United States States, Brazil, Germany, Spain, France and the European Union in Haiti, too often deaf “to the wise voices of civil society” in the country.
Bourgault’s Prayer
So, should we intervene or not? My dismay joins that which Pierre Bourgault, one of my mentors, expressed in The duty 30 years ago, specifically October 18, 1993. In a gently titled column Haiti, my lovereproduced in the collection Anger (Petite collection Lanctôt, 2003), Bourgault was already sorry for the suffering of the Haitian people and confided that he was in despair “at not finding the means or the way to make them share a part of [son] quiet happiness”. He added however, assuming his contradiction, not to lose hope, to remain faithful to the Haitian spirit.
“What do you do when you don’t know what to do anymore? he asked, formulating the question that torments me. He appealed to the minimum requirement of respect. “When one is a foreigner, he wrote, one must have the decency not to give lessons in order to better show the feeling of respect one feels for the indomitable character and the always reinvented courage of the Haitian people. When you no longer know what to do, you can still at least “offer your friendship, your solidarity and your brotherhood”. And to pray, he concluded, “even if we haven’t prayed for a long time.”
Thirty years later, I still pray, asking for pity for Haiti.
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