September 09, 2024
The Washington Post talked to Jake Johnston about Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Haiti last week, as Blinken attempted to bolster international support for the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) amid ongoing violence by armed groups. “For me, there’s really little chance of a security force providing lasting stability in Haiti absent significant political changes in the country,” Johnston told the Post. “And so far we haven’t seen those latter things happening.”
Following Blinken’s visit, Reuters reported: “The United States and Ecuador circulated a draft text – seen by Reuters – that would renew the [MSS’s] mandate for another 12 months and ask ‘the U.N. to begin planning to transition the MSS mission to a U.N. peacekeeping operation, in order to sustain the gains made by the MSS mission.”
Reuters noted a major reason why “Many Haitians are wary of an armed U.N. presence. The Caribbean country was free of cholera until 2010, when U.N. peacekeepers dumped infected sewage into a river. More than 9,000 people died of the disease, and some 800,000 fell ill.”
Many Haitians were opposed to the previous UN mission to Haiti, MINUSTAH, that lasted from 2004, when it was launched following the coup against democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to 2017; foreign police remained for another two years as part of a smaller successor UN mission. In addition to causing the cholera epidemic, MINUSTAH’s record was marked by rapes, sexual abuse of children, involvement in massacres of civilians, and a legacy of “MINUSTAH babies” fathered by UN troops who largely left their children behind — scandals that CEPR helped to bring to the attention of the media and policymakers.
CEPR also reported on classified US State Department documents published by WikiLeaks that showed the US leadership role in the mission behind the scenes: “[MINUSTAH] is an indispensable tool in realizing core USG policy interests in Haiti,” a 2008 cable by then US ambassador Janet Sanderson stated, noting that it “is a financial and regional security bargain.” Sanderson also described MINUSTAH’s role as a proxy force in place of US troops.
Johnston also discussed the legacy of the previous UN mission, Haiti’s current security crisis, and the role of the international community in weakening the Haitian government — all themes of his book Aid State — in a sit-down interview with CGTN.
