The latest United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution on Haiti passed on Monday, October 2, 2023 was pregnant with passwords of diplomatic protocol and protection, seeking to achieve progress where all-else has failed, but also seeking to protect the UN from any responsibility if and when things go wrong, as largely expected.
Thirteen of the 15 UNSC members voted for the Resolution, with only China and Russia abstaining.
But the resolution does not authorize a UN Peacekeeping Force.
Instead, it provides UN blessing for a yet-again-renamed Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, to be entirely funded by un-named member-states and allowing the UN to coordinate with the unaligned entity to be financed mainly by the US.
The resolution, flowered as it is with all the niceties of linguistic diplomatese, fails to recognize several factors that will matter on the ground in Haiti when the MSS gets there, including the patented opposition of the vast majority of Haitians, at home and abroad, to any external intervention.
This automatically means (but is also being ignored) that the civilian and armed MSS personnel will be largely regarded by the feared gangs as a multinational occupying force, like all others before – only, this one will have mainly Black (African, Caribbean and African American) faces.
The resolution says the MSS should be in Haiti by January 2024 and it will also have responsibility to provide security at schools, hospitals and other public institutions the Haitian national police and army have not been able to protect, as well as to ensure safe routes for supplies to rural communities endangered or beleaguered by the gangs.
The resolution transfers to the MSS all the responsibilities that come with an invading and occupying force – and in the usual name of facilitating a ‘Return to Democracy’ that never existed.
The MSS is also to establish a structure and mechanism to ensure Free and Fair Elections that would also be Free from Fair, in less than a year.
These responsibilities include making Caribbean and African citizens sitting targets in Haiti and they’re also expected to transform what’s left of an already-corrupt police force into an honest body – all within only one year.
The resolution also ignores the loud claims that while many ex-police officers have joined the gangs, as many as 40% of what’s left are only part-time with the force, to keep the gangs informed.
The resolution also completely ignores that self-declared Acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry was widely reported as having been fingered and questioned in relation to the murder of his predecessor President Jouvenel Moise – and that some of the armed gangs actively terrorize Henry’s political opponents.
The UNSC’s resolution includes all the jargon necessary to absolve member-states of any responsibility for anything that can go wrong and end-up in the mission failing (like all others) as the UN tries to perfume the external intervention with nice-sounding names that can eventually end-up smelling very-bad.
The UN and the Security Council’s members are all aware that the main reasons Haitians hate UN and other foreign military intervention have to do with the rampant sexual exploitation carried out by representatives of UN peacekeeping forces and international aid bodies, as well as the deadly cholera outbreak cause by UN troops – all following the 2010 earthquake that ravaged the poor country and took thousands of lives.
Tens of thousands died from the subsequent UN-induced national cholera epidemic that affected hundreds of thousands of families, but instead of accepting responsibility and acting as the humanitarian entity it as built to be, instead of mobilizing the World Health Organization (WHO) to Help Haiti and Haitians, the UN invoked ‘diplomatic immunity’ to escape responsibility for paying compensation to dead and affected victims’ families.
The current Secretary General, approaching his end-of-office, has a reputational legacy interest in doing all he can to cleanse the UN’s ugly picture and dirty past in Haiti, so his strong and loud personal support for ensuring UN support for a multinational force it will not be part of but will fully-assist, is quite understandable.
But the UN and the UNSC cannot and should not have been used to build a mechanism, still under construction, to prolong and protect the reign of a self-imposed leader and prolong the already-long agony of Haitians needing and asking, even begging, for genuine support to rid themselves and their nation of the current Status Quo of hopelessness.
Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados and Jamaica are Gung-Ho to dispatch citizens serving in their police and defense forces, armies and public services, to help ‘Restore Democracy’, and ‘Save Lives’.
The MSS is also expected to build a trusted, reliable and sustainable election machinery in a nation where none has been allowed to exist if it yields results unacceptable to the ruling oligarchs, their political supporters, the corrupt army generals and their foreign backers.
This resolution specifically asks the member-states planning participation in the next external intervention to provide regular updates, but also to provide both a Game Plan and an escape or exit strategy, should things go bad…
In this case, the recent example in Afghanistan where thousands of local and regional translators and were sadly left behind last year, running after planes taking-off on military runways as the US, UK and others withdrew their forces and concentrated on extracting their citizens.
Like in Vietnam when the US retreated in the early 1970s and in Grenada in 1983, the Afghan translators and others providing support for the occupying forces were left to beat the heat in retreat.
These are very eye-opening examples and should also result in the member-states getting ready to commit Caribbean citizens to the MSS and possibly returning in body bags or left on their own in any hasty retreat, to also provide life insurance to the families of every police, army or non-military personnel with the MSS, for the duration of their Haiti mission.