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Soldiers of Jimmy Cherizier’s Revolutionary Forces of the G9, now part of the larger Viv Ansanm alliance, in lower Delmas in March 2024. Armed groups have emerged in Haiti’s working-class ghettos due to the Haiti’s ruling class’ criminal policies. Photo: Odelyn Joseph/AP.
By Berthony Dupont -Jul 24, 2024
After connivance in the brutal assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse three years ago and then imposing its first feckless de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry and now his equally subservient successor, Garry Conille, U.S. imperialism in cahoots with the Haitian oligarchy is presently working to set in place a Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) with the same actors and sectors from Haiti’s political landscape that it has been using for decades.
The puppet-master’s principal goal is to put in place an “elected” (in fact, selected) politician who will sign the Global Fragility Act (GFA) bilateral agreement (for which Haiti is the test case), which will tighten Washington’s neocolonial grip on Haiti and sharpen the exploitation and economic enslavement of its people. The sell-outs of the Transitional Presidential Council (CPT), in their cowardice and greed for power and money, are too happy to comply.
This electoral process is in no way intended to create a more democratic, peaceful, progressive, humane, or just society. Far from it. Like a magician’s trick, it is merely a way of making us accept the unacceptable: yet another rotten client regime tailor-made to serve the needs of foreign capitalists and their local oligarchy allies, incapable of implementing any truly popular or equitable policies.
The Haitian people, particularly Haitian youth, will not be guaranteed any future, because imperialism never has and never will promote a national development program capable of meeting people’s immediate needs.
Sure, they might bring in a few more sweatshops in which the starving, teeming underclass might find an irregular job in poor conditions sewing clothes or assembling electronics for a slave-labor wage of $5 a day. After all, that is the GFA’s whole raison d’être: to find workers to replace those lost in China, with which the U.S. is preparing to go to war.
But the U.S. client regime in Haiti will not offer any fulfilling or enriching employment, training, or university courses that could uplift our people, so the people’s plight will continue to worsen as it has for years.
In short, the ballyhooed elections will be nothing more than a scam to parachute in new neocolonial overseers and “legalize” their rule while deepening the Haiti masses’ impoverishment and servitude. Worse yet, the foreign and local bourgeoisies will accuse their victims of being responsible for their own pauperization and the ensuing social woes.
Underdevelopment’s barbarity generates violence and terror. We have seen it shred Haiti’s collaborative culture and social fabric by making people do desperate and even criminal acts to survive. If the transnational ruling class and its local subordinates had even a drop of concern for the Haitian people, they would have acted differently. They would have upheld, as the unenforced 1987 Haitian Constitution so piously, hypocritically, and ironically does, the most fundamental human rights to food, shelter, healthcare, education, and a decent life for every human being. They could and should have given our fellow citizens the hospitals, clinics, schools, sanitation, roads, electricity, jobs, and public services – particularly in the ghettos and working-class neighborhoods – to make life bearable, peace obtainable, and dreams possible.
Instead, the ruling classes – owners of banks, factories, land, big commerce, and ports – used the state power that they bought to tax, terrorize, massacre, and oppress the Haitian working class, while embezzling millions from public funds like the $13 billion given to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (CIRH) after the 2010 earthquake, the PetroCaribe fund, the National Education Fund (FNE), and the Social Security fund, leaving the Haitian masses to their own devices. They literally pushed Haiti’s proletariat and peasants into insecurity and desperation.
Haiti’s oligarchy, secure in their high-walled mountain fortresses with swimming pools, tennis courts, shooting ranges, and helicopter pads, will never make a mea culpa, much less a self-criticism, for treating the ghettos’ residents worse than animals and forcing them into (then blaming them for resorting to) self-destructive means of survival that include banditry and kidnapping.
That is why the only recourse of these anti-national bourgeois traitors is to strengthen the police and invite in (for the third time in three decades, again, unconstitutionally) foreign armies, which today are under Kenya’s purported leadership. At the end of August, soldiers from Jamaica will join them, according to U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Dennis Bruce Hankins. Meanwhile, the oligarchs and their politicians, following Washington’s cues, laugh and scoff at the proposal by the armed groups – which were spawned by the ruling classes’ cynical policies – to even have a seat at the table where Haiti’s future is being decided. The ruling class will only accept the armed groups’ complete, unconditional surrender or annihilation.
This unachievable goal will only fuel a further bloody escalation of violence and insecurity which will be fantastically more costly that simply providing services and support to the poor.
Some have been distracted by the latest scandal in the halls of power: a vulgar, verbal altercation – which reportedly almost came to fisticuffs – between current Prime Minister Conille and former Prime Minister Claude Joseph at the private residence of CPT member Louis Gérald Gilles. This was simply a falling out among thieves. It was an argument between the corrupted, on behalf of their corrupters, over who would get what in the plundering of state coffers. None of those present at that meeting, or any of the CPT traitors, give a damn about Haiti or its people, only their own pockets.
It is up to the deprived population of impoverished working-class neighborhoods, hungry to define their priorities, to make their demands prevail, and to organize themselves to change their destiny. It’s a question of survival or death!
To reclaim Haiti’s future, there is an urgent need for workers and young people, supported by the revolutionary intelligentsia in Haiti and its diaspora, to unite in order to sweep away this system, these imperialist agents who create the policies of poverty and austerity, in Haiti… and also Kenya. The people must not give up. They must stay the course against imperialist domination, against the entire political class which has turned its back on the needs of millions of poorly housed, poorly fed, and poorly educated families, citizens unable to meet their daily needs.
If ever there was a chance for a second social revolution in Haiti, it is now. There is not one legitimate, elected Haitian official that the imperialists can pretend to defend. Both North American and European imperialisms are collapsing. Biden, Trudeau, and Macron all have approval ratings at around 30% or below. They are dramatically losing their wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, and the Sahel. Even their proxy, Kenya, is hobbled by debt and mass protests.
Let Haiti’s popular masses join those in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, and increasingly Kenya, Chad, Benin, and Sudan in holding high the torch of rebellion, saying no to imperialism, and reclaiming their self determination, just as our ancestors did.
