Suggest US Southern Command be installed in Haiti
Edmond Mulet recommends two specific actions in Haiti. The first and most urgent is to attend and assist the current humanitarian crisis, mobilizing the necessary forces to guarantee food to Haitians.
The second, which he understands important, is an international conference on Haiti, in which Latin American countries, the European Union, Canada, the United States, France, and Spain participate, to make decisions.
In the humanitarian aspect, it states that the Southern Command of the United States must arrive, by helicopter, with its military forces to settle there, so that it assumes the urgent action required at this time, to give food to all these people.
“Right now there has to be immediate action, I don’t see anyone else with the logistical capacity to be able to do it,” he said.
As for the international conference he suggests, he said that the UN can promote initiatives but at the request of some State. He said there have been 5 United Nations missions in the last 30 years in Haiti, coming and going when the Security Council feels that the country has been stabilized.
“We cannot continue like this, what we need is a new mandate, but an executive mandate, not only for peace and security that lasts only for 20 years,” he said.
André Michel announces an intense resumption of mobilization across the country
The apparent calm observed during the last few days in the country, could be abruptly interrupted by a strong mobilization in the next few days, according to recent statement of the spokesperson for Democratic and Popular Sector, André Michel.
The attorney stated that starting on Wednesday, the public will become aware of the latest measures taken by the political opposition in order to intensely relaunch the mobilization aimed at securing the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse from power.
ARNEL BELIZARE WANTED TO SET FIRE TO THE AMERICAN EMBASSY
Haiti standard, November 30, 2019.
Former MP Arnel Bélizaire was transferred to Port-au-Prince following his arrest in the Southeast Department by law enforcement on the night November 29. A special SWAT Team unit was dispatched on the scene to transport the political activist by helicopter. He was under warrant for bringing "conspiracy against the internal security of the State, threatening to burn down the American embassy in Port-au-Prince as well as the company called Brasserie La Couronne."
Charlot Jeudy is found dead in his house!
Charlot Jeudy, defender of the LGBTI cause in Haiti with his association KOURAJ, was found dead this week at his home under inexplicable circumstances. Jeudy worked on issues affecting the gay community in a deeply homophobic country, perverted by the Catholic and Evangelical churches. In Haiti, to assume one’s homosexuality is to put your life at risk.
Haiti is among the least safe countries for LGBTQ travelers
According to a study on the most and least dangerous countries for LGBTI travelers, Haiti is ranked 66th (out of 150), closer to the least safe countries for gay, lesbian and other travelers. The Dominican Republic, placed better at 81st place.
Nigeria tops the list as the most dangerous country in the world for LGBTI travelers, according to a study by travel journalist Asher Fergusson published on November 12. Norway remains the safest place in the world for gay, lesbian tourists, according to the ranking received by our editorial team on Thursday.
Investigators compiled a list of 150 countries and placed them from the most dangerous to the safest for LGBTI travelers. The danger index for the LGBTI community was created using eight (8) factors: legalization of same-sex marriage, protection of gay and lesbian workers, protection against discrimination, discrimination, recognition of adoption, is it a good place to live, illicit relationships between persons of the same sex, laws on the morality of propaganda.
In Nigeria, the most dangerous country for same-sex lovers, even advocating for gay rights is penalized and a member of the gay community faces up to 14 years in prison. It is the death penalty or the Sharia Laws that are applied, according to the report. Qatar, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Tanzania complete the list of the 5 most dangerous countries.
Barbados is in 8th place in the world rankings, but is ranked #1 among countries in the Caribbean region where LBGTI travelers are less safe. Next came Saint Lucia (12th), Jamaica (18th), Turks and Caicos Islands (45th), Bahamas (46th), Saint Martin (48th), Curaçao (52nd), Cayman Islands (53rd), Belize (55th), Aruba (56th), Cuba (71st), Trinidad and Tobago (72nd), Dominican Republic (81st) and Panama (84th).
Haiti's Former President Préval Has Credible Charges that UN Tried to Remove Him | Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch | CEPR
Written by CEPR
Published: 13 May 2013
Writing in the Toronto Star, Catherine Porter reports on revelations from former Haitian President René Préval in Raoul Peck’s documentary film Fatal Assistancethat UN head Edmond Mulet tried to remove him from the country on election day in November 2010:
“I got a phone call from Mr. (Edmond) Mulet, who was head of MINUSTAH, saying: ‘Mr. President, this is a political problem. We need to get you on a plane and evacuate you,’” Préval says in the documentary, Fatal Assistance. “I said: ‘Bring your plane, collect me from the palace, handcuff me, everyone will see that it’s a kidnapping.’”
The comments from Préval echo those made at the time by Organization of American States special representative Ricardo Seitenfus, who told BBC Brasil in January 2011 that Mulet and other representatives of the “core group” of donor countries, “suggested that President Rene Préval should leave the country and we should think of an airplane for that. I heard it and was appalled.” The forced departure of Préval wouldn’t have been the first time a Haitian president was spirited out of the country, as former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was flown out of Haiti in 2004 on a U.S. airplane and taken to the Central African Republic in what he described as a “kidnapping” and “coup d’etat.” There is no doubt that it was a coup d’etat – the New York Times, among others, documented the U.S. role in bringing about the coup. And Aristide’s charges that it was a kidnapping are credible and backed up by witnesses.
In response, Edmond Mulet told the Star, “I never said that, he [Préval] never answered that,” adding “I was worried if he didn’t stop the fraud and rioting, a revolution would force him to leave. I didn’t have the capability, the power or the interest of putting him on a plane.”
The first round of voting for president in November 2010 was plagued by irregularities. A CEPR statistical analysis found that some three-quarters of Haitians did not vote, over 12 percent of votes were never even received by the electoral authorities and that more than 8 percent of tally sheets contained irregularities. Perhaps most importantly, Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, was excluded from the election. At the time, 45 Democratic members of Congress wrote to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warning that political party “exclusion[s] will undermine both Haitians' right to vote and the resulting government's ability to govern.” These warnings fell on deaf ears, but diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveal the international community’s thinking at the time. At an early December 2009 meeting, Haiti’s largest donors concluded that “the international community has too much invested in Haiti’s democracy to walk away from the upcoming elections, despite its imperfections.”
These imperfections proved even greater than anticipated. Based on the pervasiveness of the irregularities and the close results, we concluded at the time that “it is impossible to determine who should advance to a second round” and that if “there is a second round, it will be based on arbitrary assumptions and/or exclusions.”
After intense international pressure to exclude the government-backed candidate for the second round and to include now President Martelly, the Haitian government agreed to let a group from the OAS come to the country to review the results and determine who should advance to the second round. As Porter notes in the Star, Préval alleges that the UN and U.S. rigged the results and overturned the first round, leading to Martelly’s inclusion in the second round and eventually winning the Presidency.
In the film, Préval states that after they agreed to let the OAS review the results:
“I summoned him [Mulet] to come: ‘Problem solved?’ He said: ‘No, it isn’t. If the OAS isn’t in line with the American mission’s recommendations we won’t accept the election results,’” Préval says in documentary.
“I told him whatever candidate wins, wins. And he replied that they wouldn’t accept those results. I asked: ‘So why hold elections?’”
Indeed, a CEPR statistical analysis of the OAS decision to replace the government candidate with Martelly in the second round found that the OAS “had no statistical evidence to do so,” and that in fact the “results showed that Célestin [the government-backed candidate], not Martelly, was by far the most likely second place finisher in the first round.”
The director of the documentary in which Préval makes these comments, Raoul Peck, explains to Porter the history and rationale of international meddling in Haiti’s politics:
“You have a bunch of ambassadors who feel they are governors of Haiti…They are the ones crafting politics in Haiti. They are the ones creating government there. We have a long history of this. They’d rather have a dictator, if he’s our man and we can control the country.”
Porter notes in her article that:
Foreign powers, notably the United States, have a long record of meddling with Haitian politics. The country was occupied for 19 years by American marines, ending in 1934. More recently, an American plane whisked away dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier during the popular uprising of 1986 and, 18 years later, president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was facing a coup. Afterward, Aristide called his evacuation a “kidnapping.”
Tomorrow marks two years since Martelly came to office. Legislative elections, delayed for over a year, have yet to be scheduled. Former President Aristide, who spoke publicly last week for the first time since his return from exile in South Africa in 2011 stated that "if there are free, fair and democratic elections,” then “there is a good chance” that Fanmi Lavalas "can win the majority of posts that are in play." The international community is expected to pick up the tab on the forthcoming elections, as they did in 2010. Though elections have yet to be scheduled, the United States has already awarded over $2 million to the National Democratic Institute and the International Federation for Electoral Systems – U.S. government-linked institutions with a problematic history [PDF] in Haiti and other countries -- to “support” the electoral process
Meanwhile, Fanmi Lavalas supporters have voiced concern that a new attempt to exclude the party from the upcoming elections could be underway, via the renewed investigation into the murder of radio journalist Jean Dominique, who like Aristide was a fierce critic of Haiti’s wealthy elite, the Haitian army, and other powerful interests. Although some have suggested that attempts to link Aristide to the murder are a political smear, Aristide was called before a judge for questioning in the case last week. The AP’s Trenton Daniel wrote:
An open case against Aristide, the official leader of the Lavalas party, could make it difficult for candidates to register under the party in elections that are supposed to be held before year's end.
"We hope this isn't political, that the government isn't using the Jean Dominique case so Lavalas can't qualify for the elections," an Aristide supporter, Jean Cene, said while pressed against a barricade.
Racism in Cuba persists despite government efforts, prominent Afro-Cuban artist says
BY NORA GÁMEZ TORRES
THE MIAMI HERALD
Cuba has a black vice president and a black president of the National Assembly, but that says little about the racial disparities and racist practices that persist in Cuban society and take the central stage in the work of Cuban visual artist Juan Roberto Diago.
“Cuba is a society that has tried to transform constantly, but racism has mutated to other subtle levels and remains in Cuban society,” despite government’s efforts, he said in an interview a few weeks after the opening of his exhibition “Diago: The pasts of this Afro-Cuban present” in late October at the Lowe Art Museum in Miami.
Diago is one of the most successful contemporary Cuban artists, whose work channels a different story of the Cuban nation, one told from the voice and history of the Afro-Cuban population, marked by the heritage of slavery.
Throughout his career, since the 1990s, he has also been an active member of “the anti-racist movement in Cuba,” professor Alejandro de la Fuente said. He is the director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, and the curator of Diago’s exhibition.
“We are still a neglected population, the same in Cuba as in the U.S.,” the artist said, adding that this is very personal to him. “I am the one who gets asked for his ID on the streets, who they look at, and make racist gestures at.”
The artist also mentioned racial slurs used in everyday language in Cuba, such as “he had to be black” and “negro bembón” [roughly translated as a black person with big lips]. “I am the one who suffers all those daily expressions because I am black,” he said.
The faces in many of Diago’s paintings have no mouth, only big eyes that stare at the viewer.
“These are faces that look at you from the front, challenging you, without a mouth since they cannot speak because, over time, the word was taken away from us but not the thought,” he explained. “We express ourselves through music, spiritually, we don’t have the force of political discourse.”
After coming to power, Fidel Castro established policies for equal access to schools, jobs, and other services that led to the social mobility of the island’s black and mixed-race population.
More recently, under his brother, Raúl Castro, the government promoted Afro-Cubans to leadership positions in the National Assembly and the State Council. But Cuban authorities have been reluctant to implement affirmative policies. The government has also tried to limit the development of a grassroots Afro-Cuban movement.
And in the last two decades, the economic crisis and emigration patterns have exacerbated the social disadvantages that affect a large part of the Cuban black population.
“The government does not marginalize children or any population to attend a hospital or a school, but the inequalities continue, and those most affected by them are blacks,” Diago said. “It’s a fight, it is being debated, there are many government commissions to study the problem, but it still exists.”
Racial inequalities have different expressions on the island, the artist said, among them: blacks’ over-representation in the prison population, poor wages, little presence in the private sector, and lower access to remittances, as most Cuban émigrés are white.