Human Rights Watch Blesses Foreign Military Intervention into Haiti

(Français)

Just as missionaries preceded and prepared the ground for the sword-wielding conquistadors during Europe’s bloody conquest of the Americas, today“human rights” groups are the imperial forerunners, attempting to politically and ideologically justify the coups, intrigues, and military interventions in rebellious neocolonies carried out by North American and European imperialisms, particularly that of the still hegemonic United States.

Right on schedule, just as the U.S. is making its final bid to ram through a resolution in the UN Security Council deputizing an armed force to invade Haiti to vanquish “gangs,” Human Rights Watch (HRW), the “human rights” arm of the Democratic Party establishment (largely funded by billionaire currency speculator and color-revolution backer George Soros’s Open Society Foundation), has released its long-awaited report “Living a Nightmare.”

This report will be waved about by pro-intervention advocates like the incense canister at a Catholic mass, assuring all the faithful of the sanctity of their goals.

However, HRW is quite patently incoherent and defensive in the six-page presentation of its “Recommendations,” the only ones of the 98-page report worth reading. It brackets its call for foreign intervention with sentence upon sentence of legal gibberish about how the invaders need to be “focused on ensuring accountability,” denoting clear consciousness of the disastrous record of the two previous foreign military interventions over 20 of the past 29 years from 1994-2000 and 2004-2017. HRW piously vows to respect “the need to avoid more harm and abuses now, with adequate safeguards to avoid the serious abuses that resulted from past international interventions.” This is supremely unlikely given that the force Washington is proposing would not even have UN Security Council oversight and control, simply its imprimatur.

As one begins reading the report, the most glaring absurdity is the repeated use of the phrase “consensual deployment of an international force, as requested by Haitian authorities.” At the same time, in the press release presenting the report, HRW admits that “Haitian civil society representatives… said that other countries should stop supporting [de facto] Prime Minister [Ariel] Henry, whom they see as heading an illegitimate and corrupt government with alleged links to criminal groups.” So HRW justifies an armed intervention as “consensual” because it was “requested by Haitian authorities,” only to admit in the next breath that Haitians see these “authorities” as “illegitimate and corrupt” and linked to the very same “gangs” that they’re requesting foreigners to crush. Although asked to “stop supporting” Henry, Washington – and HRW – are rushing to fulfill his request and come to his rescue.

Furthermore, thousands of Haitians have held multiple large demonstrations against foreign military intervention across Haiti and its diaspora, while, in response to a Jul. 12 tweeted request by Russia’s UN Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy, scores of Haitian organizations have written expressing their opposition to the deployment of an “international force.”

Also outrageous was HRW’s chapter entitled “Rise of a Violent ‘Self-Defense Movement’.” The authors are referring to the spontaneous, autonomous, unorganized Bwa Kale movement, which arose from late April to late June, in which crowds of machete-wielding Haitians would capture and execute, after a short makeshift tribunal, criminal gang members. Kidnappings fell to zero during this period, as criminal gangs were on the defensive. Nonetheless, HRW disparages the movement, saying “many residents unaffiliated with Bwa Kale fear violent reprisal attacks by criminal groups.” It also claims that the self-defense brigades are “following the same pattern of formation of the criminal groups” and are “very dangerous” because they threaten and shake-down neighbors for money, so “many innocent people are victims.”

In short, the HRW puts more trust in foreign troops to save the Haitian people from the “gangs” than Haitians themselves, even after two military occupations marred by massacres, corruption, sexual predation, pollution, and the unleashing of a cholera epidemic which killed over 10,000. The Kenyan police force, which would in all likelihood nominally lead the invasion, has a record and reputation as one of the most brutal and corrupt on the African continent, having killed six in recent demonstrations, a crime they were asked to cover-up.

The report also attacks another self-defense movement, the “Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, You Mess with One, You Mess with All,” founded in 2020 by former cop Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier with other leaders of armed neighborhood committees fighting kidnapping, rape, and the extortion of small merchants in their localities.

In a video accompanying the report, HRW states that “G9 is the deadliest criminal group operating in Cité Soleil and other areas of Port-au-Prince.” Ironically, the footage playing under this statement was a rally where the G9 militants were chanting that they were fighting kidnapping, rape, and other crimes.

The G9 gave strong verbal support to the Bwa Kale movement, while the militants of its affiliated Chen Mechan (Bad Dog) armed group even accompanied Bwa Kale crowds in the dechoukaj (uprooting) of criminal gang members.

For much of the past three years, the G9 has been at war with the rival G-Pèp coalition, which comprises all of the criminal gangs avowedly engaged in kidnapping and other crimes, including the Kraze Baryè gang of Vitel’Homme Innocent, the 400 Mawozo gang of Joseph “Lanmò Sanjou” Wilson, the Five Seconds gang of Johnson “Izo” André, the Grande Ravine gang of Destina “Ti Lapli” Renel, and the Canaan gang led by Jeff Larose.

However, in its report, HRW mentions the G-Pèp confederation only 16 times, while focusing its umbrage on the G9 alliance 44 times.

In short, the entire report is rife with disinformation, retreading the tired and discredited charges against the G9 concocted by the Haitian National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (RNDDH), which is also supported by Soros as well as the infamous CIA cut-out agency, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The best example of its disinformation recycling is the report’s exhumation of the so-called “La Saline Massacre,” which Haïti Liberté and Uncaptured Media thoroughly debunk in their recent three-part documentary series “Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising.”

“What we have here is a complex disinformation operation by Human Rights Watch and its miniature clones in Haiti, all with the intent of justifying and sugarcoating a military intervention to keep Haiti subdued to U.S. interests,” journalist Dan Cohen told Redacted on Aug. 15. “You can see all of these interests coming together: the human rights industry, the apparel industry, the U.S. government, all of them coming together as a popular uprising with revolutionary potential coalesces in Haiti.”