‘I am alarmed,’ U.N. Secretary General says about 2018 Haiti massacre
The secretary general of the United Nations said Wednesday he is “alarmed” by the findings of his human-rights investigators on a 2018 massacre in a Haiti slum, as well as the lack of any judicial action against the accused, including two former Haiti National Police officers and a current government official.
“The allegations of complicity by at least two police officers and a representative of the State call for authorities to act swiftly to bring to justice those who are responsible for the crimes,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in his first public comments about a U.N.-issued report on the November 2018 massacre in Port-au-Prince’s La Saline neighborhood.
Haiti-based human rights organizations have put the death toll in La Saline as high as 71. U.N. investigators , who acknowledged that their probe was not exhaustive, say at least 26 people, including a 10-month-old and 72-year-old, were killed. The killings took place over two days and were “a well-planned operation” carried out by five different gangs, the U.N. said.
Witnesses reported that a Haitian government official, the appointed delegate for the West region, was seen in the company of police officers and gang members during the attack. One of those police officers had previously been implicated in another massacre in the Grande Ravine slum of Port-au-Prince a year earlier. As in La Saline, no legal proceedings have been initiated to date in relation to the Grande Ravine killings.
‘If Haiti gives me a government, we can work together toward a better future’ | Opinion
BY JOVENEL MOISE
JULY 12, 2019 08:11 PM, UPDATED JULY 12, 2019 08:11 PM
The past few weeks have been some of the most difficult of my presidency. Haitians are no strangers to political instability. Politics is etched into daily life in Haiti — debated in the street and daubed on walls across the country. Political differences are healthy and inherently Haitian. But the current instability comes with a cost we cannot afford to pay.
It has plunged Haiti into a state of gridlock. With a minority in Parliament refusing to vote on the appointment of a government, last year’s budget sat gathering dust, and no easy solution is in sight. So many people require urgent attention: According to the National Council for Food Security, there are approximately 7 million living in poverty, 3 million of whom live in extreme poverty; 350,000 Haitian children do not attend school; and 100,000 children under 5 are malnourished. Haitians have understandably taken to the street demanding answers to pressing questions — and demanding action.
It’s right for the public to hold me, as president, accountable for this country’s governance. I hold myself accountable as well. I was elected by the people with a mandate to improve Haitians’ lives. Each day that our politicians spend fighting among themselves at the expense of the issues that matter to the people — opportunity, safety, rule of law and good governance — is one day too many. I accept my responsibility for that. It is time others do, too.
I am working day and night to fix the current crisis. That has meant trying everything possible to bring together groups for dialogue to find a path forward, no matter how acrimonious the disagreements. It has also meant answering questions that the Haitian people have for me.
The PetroCaribe corruption crisis has plagued our country. Anger is palpable and entirely understandable. For my part, I took to the airwaves to directly answer allegations made against me in a report about PetroCaribe funds. Before running for office, I was a banana farmer and then a successful agricultural entrepreneur in northern Haiti. In 2014, my company was contracted to renovate a road that had fallen into disrepair. The report incorrectly alleges that the work was not done, and that the funds were therefore stolen. That is patently untrue — Agritrans renovated three kilometres of unmetalled road, 85 percent of the total, despite being paid just 35 percent of the total due, or 15 million gourdes. I invite any interested observers to travel to the road and drive along it today.
I have addressed this subject directly and on several occasions. I hope Haitians will see the accusations for what they are: a tool to further the cynical political and financial interests of a small group of people who have been abusing weaknesses in our system for a long time. The PetroCaribe wrongdoing is a decade-old problem, and genuine justice is long overdue. In this hyper-partisan, fractious environment, honesty and justice are distant goals. That is why I am working with the Organization of American States to assemble a team of independent international financial experts for a commission that will work around our broken politics to deliver a fair, credible, objective audit so that Haitian judges can pursue accountability for anyone found to have committed crimes and stolen from the Haitian people.
Appointing this commission is the only way for Haiti’s political system to return to the business of governing. And our first order of business must be to appoint a new government. I have certainly done my part, making compromises in the formation of my own cabinet. Numerous members of the opposition will receive cabinet posts under my proposals. I am ready to go, we need to get moving. There are no excuses left.
The appointment of a government will unlock billions of dollars in development funding that currently sits waiting for our empty parliament to act, earmarked for our electrical grid, agricultural projects and the health and education of the Haitian people. These monies form part of a Citizen’s Development Plan secured from our allies in the United States, Taiwan, Europe, and international financial institutions — it must not be sacrificed on the altar of politics. This is the cost of political gridlock.
While this development plan is crucial and stands to affect Haitians across the country, gaining access to those funds is not the end of the road. We need to think farther ahead. We need to break the cycle of political chaos, thinking past the upcoming parliamentary elections in October and past the end of my administration.
This will be a primary goal of the government I form. I will serve until the end of my term in 2022, then leave office. But without serious, sober reform and commitment to changing who we are truly working for and how we are working for it, the next president — and the president thereafter — will be condemned to face the same challenges that I and those who preceded me have faced. And the people and our country will wind up with nothing.
Working closely with international partners, we will need to design and legislate effective reforms for transparency that have real teeth and give Haitians a sense of accountability and trust in elected officials. We will need to de-politicize and strengthen our electoral commission — to inspire genuine confidence ahead of October’s parliamentary elections. To pass these and other measures, we will need to work together across party lines. Nothing meaningful can be done alone, and I pledge to work with all sectors and parties in Haiti.
We all must be willing. This is difficult and important work that needs to begin immediately. Our country and our people deserve to have hope. They deserve a democratic system that works and a government that gets things done.
The people are waiting.
Jovenel Moise is the president of Haiti.
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article232622617.html#storylink=cpy
Few Signs of Immigration Raids Outside of New York City | Newsmax.com
The head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said efforts to deport families with orders to leave the country will continue after an upcoming national sweep that President Donald Trump said would start Sunday.
But just after noon on Sunday, there were few reports or signs that the raids were being conducted.
Immigration attorneys and advocates around the country said they had not heard any reports of ICE activity.
"We've not heard anything," Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on MSNBC on Sunday morning.
Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, would not confirm that the raids had even started.
"I can't speak to operational specifics and won't," he said on CNN's 'State of the Union.'
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was getting reports that a nationwide crackdown on immigrants facing deportation is already underway in his city.
The sweeps were expected to start Sunday, but de Blasio tweeted on Saturday that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had already taken action in New York.
The mayor said ICE agents did not succeed in rounding up any residents of Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood and Harlem.
Immigrants who've been given orders to leave the country are government targets in at least 10 cities.
Advocates are coaching them on their rights, including instructions not to respond if agents knock on the door unless shown a warrant signed by a judge.
De Blasio has said his city would not cooperate with ICE.
A group of Chicago aldermen and activists were patrolling the city on bike to look for immigration authorities detaining people as part of broader federal immigration sweeps.
Roughly 65 people were taking part in Sunday's bike patrol, which is focusing on the immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Albany Park on the city's northwest side.
Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez said the idea is to keep people informed. She said bikers would ride in shifts, possibly for several days.
She said an attorney is also available to help people who do get detained.
The Wall Street Journal reported that ICE agents went to residences in the Harlem section of Manhattan and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. The agents were rejected by people at the residences because they didn’t have warrants, but plan to return to Sunset Park tomorrow, the Journal reported.
Elsewhere, however, immigration experts said they were seeing few if any signs of a massive dragnet.
The Miami Herald reported that South Florida advocacy groups redirected their efforts from helping detainees to spreading information and awareness of immigrant rights.
"At the ICE central processing facility in Miramar, all was quiet. No agents were seen entering or leaving the building before sunrise, and only a single RV was stationed inside the fenced-in center," the Herald reported.
"Also quiet were hot lines set up by attorneys and others who had been anticipating the removal of thousands of immigrants with deportation orders. They had not received any calls from immigrants or their families seeking help Sunday morning."
Immigration sources told the Herald that it’s possible that ICE agents had not acquired the warrants necessary to carry out the removals.
Matthew Albence, the agency's acting director, said targets were on an "accelerated docket" of immigration court cases for predominantly Central Americans who recently arrived at the U.S. border in unprecedented numbers. Similar operations occurred in 2016 under President Barack Obama and in 2017 under Trump.
"This family operation is nothing new," Albence told The Associated Press. "It's part of our day-to-day operations. We're trying to surge some additional resources to deal with this glut of cases that came out of the accelerated docket, but after this operation is over, these cases are still going to be viable cases that we'll be out there investigating and pursuing."
The operation will target people with final deportation orders on 10 major court dockets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Miami. Albence said that doesn't mean arrests will be limited to certain areas. Authorities will go where their investigations lead, even if it's five states away from where the case is filed.
Trump said authorities were "focused on criminals as much as we can before we do anything else."
"It starts on Sunday and they're going to take people out and they're going to bring them back to their countries or they're going to take criminals out, put them in prison, or put them in prison in the countries they came from."
The operation further inflamed the political debate over immigration as Trump appeals to his base with a pledge to crack down on migrants and Democrats cast the president and his administration as inhumane for going after families.
The Obama-era family operation in 2016 resulted in about 10% of those targeted being arrested, and the 2017 effort had a lower arrest rate, Albence said. Other operations that have targeted people with criminal arrest records have yielded arrests rates of about 30%, aided by access to law enforcement databases.
"If you have an individual that's been arrested for a criminal violation, you're going to have much more of an investigative footprint," Albence said.
Administration officials have said they are targeting about 2,000 people, which would yield about 200 arrests based on previous crackdowns. Trump has said on Twitter that his agents plan to arrest millions of immigrants in the country illegally.
It is highly unusual to announce an enforcement sting before it begins. The president postponed the effort once before after a phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but immigration officials said it was also due in part to law enforcement concerns over officer safety because details had leaked.
But they're pressing ahead with this one, even though the president and other administration officials have discussed the long-planned family operation for months.
"Nothing to be secret about," Trump said. "If the word gets out, it gets out because hundreds of people know about it."
The operation will target entire families that have been ordered removed, but some family may be separated if some members are in the country legally. Albence gave a hypothetical example of a father and child in the U.S. illegally but a mother who isn't
"If the mother wants to return voluntarily on her own with the family, she'll have an opportunity to do so," he said.
Families may be temporarily housed in hotels until they can be transferred to a detention center or deported. Marriott said it would not allow ICE to use its hotels for holding immigrants.
If ICE runs out of space, it may be forced to separate some family members, Albence said. The government has limited space in its family detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania.
"If hotels or other places do not want to allow us to utilize that, it's almost forcing us into a situation where we're going to have to take one of the parents and put them in custody and separate them from the rest of their families," he said.
Meanwhile, activists ramped up efforts to prepare by circulating information about hotlines and planning public demonstrations. Vigils outside of detention centers and hundreds of other locations nationwide were set for Friday evening, to be followed by protests Saturday.
Haiti’s government is hurting for cash. It just hired yet another lobbyist in D.C.
“Haiti should be focused on domestic problems to provide medicines to hospitals, potable water to its population and education to its youth,” said Gary Bodeau, the president of the Lower Chamber of Deputies. “That amount of money could be used in a more efficient way, not to satisfy lobbyists to promote a political agenda.”
The country’s designated prime minister still can’t get confirmed. Civil servants and diplomats in its foreign embassies aren’t getting paid. And hospital staffs are dealing with rolling blackouts and a dire shortage of blood .
Despite the ongoing turmoil, however, Haitian officials appear to once again be more concerned about their image in Washington.
According to forms filed with the U.S. Justice Department, the international law firm Dentons US LLP is now working for Haiti, the third lobbying shop on the cash-strapped government’s payroll. The global public relations firm Mercury, hired back in February 2018 to soften Haiti’s image after President Donald Trump reportedly derided the country as a “shithole” during a White House meeting, remains active. So does Johanna LeBlanc, a consultant hired by the country’s Washington embassy in March.
Mercury, which has helped Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and other government ministers land opinion pieces in major U.S. dailies including the Miami Herald, said it was to be paid $4,690 a month in a 2018 filing until December, and then continue on a month-to-month basis thereafter.
In her March 2019 filing, LeBlanc said she was being paid $5,000 a month until September to interact with “U.S. government officials and public entities in order to promote the interests of the State of Haiti and its citizens in the United States.”
Dentons, meanwhile, is charging a flat rate of $25,000 per month for 12 months, for what it describes as legal advice on various matters and lobbying. The firm’s principal contact, David Tafuri, did not respond to a Miami Herald inquiry about the scope of its work on behalf of the Haitian government.
Haiti Foreign Minister Bocchit Edmond, who is listed as Dentons’ contact in the June 28 filing, would not provide specifics on what the international firm will be tasked with, and why the country needs a third firm to lobby for its interests. (A fourth firm is also registered, but it has been contracted by the Association of Haiti Industries to set up meetings for government ministers in order to push for extension of the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act.)
“A state has the right to contract the service of a firm at the same time identifying the kind of service it is seeking,” said Edmond, referring to the ongoing contract with Mercury, which he said the government is currently “reconsidering.”
“We are not dissatisfied [with] Mercury. I must admit they have been very helpful. But we wanted to assess Dentons’ work. We just contracted them so we are on [a] trial period,” added the minister, who in a June letter to Haiti’s diplomatic missions abroad acknowledged that the country was having financial difficulties and “it has been some time since you have received your pay.”
While it is not unusual for countries to hire lobbyists, the latest decision raises questions about Haiti’s priorities at a time when hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid are stalled because there is no functioning government to vote on a budget, and the Parliament has refused to even vote on an accord to receive a $150 million low-interest loan from the Republic of Taiwan to revamp the capital’s electrical grid.
Recently, the finance minister announced that tax revenues had fallen by more than 35 percent due to the ongoing protests and instability, and the World Bank predicted a 0.4 percent annual growth rate for Haiti — far less than the 2.8 percent forecast.