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"what’s going on in Haiti is actually very important, because it’s — I don’t think it’s a plan that the U.S. wanted, which is why they rushed Henry to Kenya to sign this bilateral agreement, after the Kenyan courts said that it was unconstitutional for Kenya to send its police to Haiti. But I think things changed faster than they anticipated, and so now they’re scrambling for a new plan in Haiti. And in the meantime, what’s happening is our people, that are the people — the poor people on the ground, are the ones suffering."
~Jemima Pierre
""Guy Philippe was around in 2004. In fact, Guy Philippe was trained by the U.S. in Ecuador and spent a lot of time training in — living and training in the Dominican Republic. So, in the lead-up to coup d’état against Aristide in 2004, what you had is — all the fall of 2003, what you had, Guy Philippe and his armed groups would ransack — would cross into the border and ransack and attack police stations and so on and so forth. Back then, which is fascinating, if you look up in the news, the Western media portrayed him as a freedom fighter. He was the hero standing up against the evil Aristide, according to the West. And so they supported him. And he would say later that he was actually being funded by the CIA and so on.
[...]
Guy Philippe was arrested by the U.S. and put in prison for drug trafficking. And we have to understand this, because even during his trial, there are certain things that were kept secret because it implicated the U.S. government. And so, he served six years in prison as a criminal in the U.S., and now the U.S. dumped him in Haiti in November 2023, after serving six years of a nine-year term.
[...]
everyone pretends that Haiti — you know, are saying that Haiti is at war, and so on and so forth, but the reality is, Guy Philippe is giving interviews to all the mainstream press. Guy Philippe gives more interviews than the local people who are organizing against repression. We don’t hear them in The Washington Post, but we hear Guy Philippe. But I wonder what the U.S. role is for Guy Philippe right now. And as far as I’m concerned, he should be tried for treason, because he was behind — he worked with the U.S. to actually remove our elected president. And so, we have to be very careful about what the U.S. is bringing, what the mainstream media is bringing to us as real and as the situation, when we know the situation is actually very much controlled by the U.S. and the Core Group when it comes to Haiti."
~Jemima Pierre
"And so, the problem is, if this goes on and if they don’t take into account other solutions that Haitians have been putting together — you know, in early 2021, you had La Fanmi Lavalas come up with Sali Piblik, which means that we need to start over and change the system. We had the Montana Accords. We have local groups that actually had a solution before the Moïse assassination. The U.S. government was trying to protect Moïse and basically ignored all these local solutions. And so, now they cannot say that they’re here to help Haiti, as much as trying to figure out how to put in place another unpopular and illegal government, and so then we’ll have the same problem a few years down the line.
The other thing I want to quickly say — I know, in a hurry — is that the people funding these armed groups are part of the oligarchy. And most of the guns and ammunition are coming from the U.S. People must remember that in the late 2022, in early 2023, the Canadian government sanctioned three of the richest oligarchs in Haiti. That’s Gilbert Bigio, Reynold Deeb and Sherif Abdallah. The Canadian government also sanctioned former President Michel Martelly and other — and Laurent Lamothe, his prime minister, all of them because they — for drug trafficking, but also for funding these armed groups. And so, in the news we get, you get these guys that look, you know, like raggedy — ragged and poor, but then the people really funding them, because Haiti does not manufacture guns, are these elites that are behind all the violence. And so I also want to put that into very clear context so that we know that this is a very complex problem that’s very much set up by the 2004 coup, but also perpetuated by the oligarchy and the U.S., which work together to keep Haiti unstable, so that we can say Haiti is ungovernable and we need to come in and save it."
~Jemima Pierre
"You know, we say the crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism. In 2004, as has been revealed and admitted to, the U.S., France and Canada got together and backed a coup d’état against the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And the U.S. Marines flew into his home, put him on a plane with his security officials, his wife and aide, and flew them to the Central African Republic. And people can actually go to the Democracy Now! archives, which covered this live. And I remember listening to this happening live.
And the point of this was that this coup d’état, which was led by two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, was then sanctioned by the U.N. when these same two members of the U.N. Security Council — and that’s the U.S. and France — basically pushed the U.N. Security Council into sending a multinational military force to Haiti armed under Chapter VII deployment. And that itself was illegal, because the original coup d’état was illegal. The U.S. ambassador to Haiti and the deputy ambassador were in the process — they’re the ones that named who the interim president would be, put together a Council of Sages, and basically restructured Haiti’s elected president. And back then we had 7,000 elected officials; today we have zero. And over time, I say Haiti has been under occupation, because it is this military occupation, the MINUSTAH occupation, that went from 2004 to 2007, that established the Core Group, that — it’s an unelected group of Western officials, including Brazil, which led the military arm of the occupation in 2004 under Lula, which led then — which has been controlling all the actions in Haiti, down to naming who the prime minister would be, Ariel Henry, after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse.
I have to quickly say, though, one of the key things that happened is, in 2010, after the earthquake in Haiti that killed hundreds of thousands, when the U.S. pushed the sitting president, René Préval, to have elections — and the WikiLeaks papers revealed to us later that Hillary Clinton actually flew to Haiti and changed the election results, where Michel Martelly of the PHTK political party did not make the first round, but the U.S. forced the Haitian election council to actually make him — put him in the second round. And so, establishing the PHTK, Michel Martelly, a neo-Duvalierist, as Haiti’s president with under 20% of the people voting, with the largest political party in Haiti, Lavalas, not being able to participate, we set the stage for what we see today. "
~Jemima Pierre
"Haiti is under a state of emergency, with tens of thousands displaced amid the fighting, and United Nations officials warn the country’s health system is nearing collapse. Ariel Henry was appointed prime minister after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, but he is currently stranded outside the country after a trip to Kenya, where he was seeking a U.N.-backed security force to help him maintain power. For more, we speak with Haitian American scholar Jemima Pierre, who says the unrest in Haiti today can be traced to decisions made two decades ago by the United States and other outside powers. “The root of this crisis is not last week, it’s not this week, it’s not even Ariel Henry. But we have to go back to 2004 with the coup-d’état,” says Pierre. She adds that because successive security plans have been sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council, “the whole world is participating in the occupation of Haiti unwittingly.”"
~Amy Goodman and Jemima Pierre, The World Is Participating in the Occupation of Haiti Unwittingly, Scholar Says
The World Is Participating in the Occupation of Haiti Unwittingly, Scholar Says
Jemima Pierre says negotiations are happening outside of Haiti today with no real participation from the Haitian masses.Amy Goodman (Truthout)
via Black for Palestine
Radical Resistances: Haiti, Palestine and the Fight Against Empire
youtube.com/watch?v=L4TGjp61-k…
Radical Resistances: Haiti, Palestine and the Fight Against Empire
On Thursday Feb 29, 2024 Black for Palestine hosted a panel discussion about the connections between the Haitian and Palestinian freedom struggles and shared...YouTube