The Catholic Church calls on Ariel Henry to step aside
paptimesnewsFebruary 9, 2024
The Conference of Bishops of Haiti issued an urgent statement today, urging Prime Minister Ariel Henry to take decisive action to halt the spiral of violence gripping the country. In a climate of heightened political and social tensions, the Catholic Church has unequivocally aligned itself with peace and national security.
“Stop the bloodshed and cease the loss of lives!” declared the Haitian bishops in a press release this morning. They demanded an immediate halt to the violence, which has already claimed the lives of numerous innocent individuals and continues to imperil the nation’s stability.
In their declaration, the bishops expressed profound concern regarding the ongoing deterioration of the security and humanitarian situation in Haiti. They underscored the government’s duty to safeguard the lives and rights of all Haitian citizens, as well as to ensure the nation’s security and stability.
“We implore Prime Minister Ariel Henry to act with wisdom and courage in seeking peaceful and enduring solutions to the current crisis,” stated the bishops. Additionally, they called upon all political, social, and economic stakeholders to demonstrate responsibility and restraint in their actions, thereby averting any escalation of violence and chaos.
National Center of Haitian Apostolate <
SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME – YEAR B - February 11, 2024
Leviticus13, 1-2 + 44-46; Psalm 32; 1 Cor. 10, 31-11, 1; Mark 1, 40-45
Msgr. Pierre André Pierre
People were coming to Jesus from everywhere. Mark in his Gospel shows Jesus “moved by pity” and touching the sick to heal them of their physical ailments. This Sunday, February 11 is World Day of the Sick. It is an annual observance started by Pope John Paul II in 1992 as a way for believers to offer prayers for those suffering from illnesses.
From the book of Leviticus to the Gospel of Mark, the word of God today speaks to us of these people who are affected by leprosy. This contagious disease was considered the consequence of sin. It was all the more reason to exclude the lepers from the community and the city. To avoid any contamination, lepers had to be kept away. They lived among themselves hidden along the roadside, in the suffering of exclusion, without a home or income.
What is Jesus’ attitude towards them? He was concerned about all the excluded. They were even his priority. With him, Evil does not have the last word. He is not afraid to defy the prohibitions by touching the leper. The freedom that he takes finds its source in his love for God and for the person who is sick. It is a love without borders that is not afraid to shake up the rules and makes his freedom authentic. Jesus' long-term objective is to set us free from Evil, the real leprosy of the soul, the primary cause of all our deadly woes. He wants to set us free of death itself. His healings are a first step toward that inner healing of the heart from sin, a gift much greater than the temporary cure of a passing ailment.
We can think of all the sick and disabled people who live on the margins of society and who suffer from loneliness and abandonment. This Health Sunday is intended also to make visible all caregivers, researchers, helpers, visitors to the sick, chaplaincies, and all associations that care for sick, elderly, or disabled people.
The service to the most vulnerable, however, is not just the business of a few. It concerns us all. To fulfill this mission let us turn to Jesus. First in Promoting Compassion. It is vital to show compassion and empathy towards individuals who are sick, recognizing their dignity, and providing them with the care and support they need. Second in recognizing the valuable contributions of professional caregivers and volunteers who work tirelessly to alleviate suffering and provide comfort to patients.
Finally, let us join Jesus in caring for everyone through acts of service and prayer. He invites us to recognize the inherent dignity of every person as a child of God, a brother or a sister, and the importance of solidarity in the journey towards healing, well-being, and building together the kingdom of God.
US senators express support for democratic governance in Haiti
Cardin, Durbin, Kaine, Merkley, Booker, Van Hollen, Welch, Murphy express support for democratic governance in Haiti …
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) issued a statement on what should have been Haiti’s Presidential Inauguration Day on February 7, 2024.
“Exactly 38 years ago, the Haitian people succeeded in expelling a dictator from their shores. Five years later, Haiti’s first democratically-elected president assumed office. Today should have marked the presidential inauguration of the first democratically elected Haitian leader since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 following commitments from the de facto government of Ariel Henry to hold elections in 2023 under the December 21 accord. However, rather than today being a celebration of Haitian democracy, continued waves of murders, kidnappings, and sexual assaults by violent gangs – often using U.S. made weapons – have made it impossible for the Haitian people to hold free, fair, and democratic elections.
“We stand in solidarity with the Haitian people who bravely and resiliently continue to aspire to create a safer, more economically prosperous, and democratic society. We urge the de facto government of Ariel Henry to take serious and concrete steps, alongside major opposition actors, to lay the groundwork for the creation of a transition consensus government capable of holding free and fair elections. We also urge the U.S. government and our partners in the international community to redouble efforts to support the Haitian people in sustainably addressing the country's ongoing security, governance, and humanitarian challenges. Only by doing so can we find a path forward to bring back peace and prosperity for all Haitians.”
Myrtha Désulmé | The hypocrisy over Haiti
January, 1, 2024, ushered in the momentous 220th anniversary of Haiti’s independence, an unprecedented feat never again repeated anywhere. But while the world owes a debt of gratitude to Haiti for freeing humanity by pioneering the cycle of abolition, Haiti was instead condemned to perpetual persecution because that magnificent victory shattered the world economic order based on the heinous scourge of slavery.
The 220 years of ostracism, plunder, isolation, persecution, demonisation, repression, and destabilisation by France and the US, to ensure that Haiti would never emerge as a nation, have now resulted in utter chaos where gangs are in effect running the country, committing the most heinous crimes all day every day with total impunity, under the complicit eye of an illegitimate criminal government, which is being imposed by the US to preside over a literal genocide against the Haitian people.
To make matters worse, the same imperialist powers, which, based on reports by the US Department of Homeland Security’s investigations unit and the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes, have flooded Haiti with guns, and engineered the violence, massacres, and mayhem, are using that as a pretext, to once more trample on Haiti’s Constitution and sovereignty by planning another disastrous military occupation to entrench the illegitimate government, and thwart, yet again, the Haitian people’s struggle to regain their sovereignty. The coup de grace is being administered by Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, led by Jamaica, and Kenya, who are all jumping up to volunteer to be used as pawns to carry out this transgression.
BRAINWASHED
And lest anyone should think that all of the above is just conspiracy theory, as many have been brainwashed to believe, we suggest that they listen to Minister Horace Chang’s “Beyond the Headlines” interview, on December 5, in which Dionne Jackson Miller valiantly sought to take the Government to task for the cruel and illegal summary deportations of Haitian refugees. Chang tried to drown out Dionne with loud denials and strident protestations about all of the wonderful assistance that Jamaica is supposedly providing for Haiti. In the heat of this verbal torrent, Minister Chang forgot himself and said the quiet part out loud: “The world has victimised Haiti,” he asserted, “and Jamaica is not going to take on that responsibility.”
Bam! The Truth will out! Truly a jaw-dropping moment! After decades of pretence that the centuries-old international plot to oppress and destroy the Haitian people was nothing more than a conspiracy theory, finally a stunning admission from a high-level Caribbean official on national radio that not only is it common knowledge, but what’s more, it’s none of our business!
So why all the hypocrisy on the part of CARICOM in jumping to take part in a supposed “Security support mission”, due to its deep concern for “the welfare of our Haitian brothers and sisters”, when Minister Chang’s inadvertent admission and the egregious inhumanity meted out to the refugees have proved time and again that the welfare of the Haitian people is the furthest thing from their minds? Simple. There’s money in it. Haiti is once again being sold on the auction block.
ABYSMAL
The US and UN’s track record in Haiti is so abysmal that in order to maintain the moral high ground on Ukraine, their lips dripping with spurious platitudes advocating for the “democracy and self-determination” in Ukraine which they are blatantly crushing in Haiti, they have been forced to tour the world searching for fronts to hide behind to continue perpetrating their extermination plan against the Haitian people. All self-respecting nations turned down the dirty job. So in a vulgar show of yard fowl politics, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken started bandying about the ever-escalating hundreds of millions of dollars that have brought the CARICOM and Kenyan “volunteers” running to “rescue Haiti”. US Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary Blinken also made unprecedented trips to The Bahamas and Trinidad to meet with CARICOM Heads and promise myriad initiatives that will yield hundreds of millions more in economic benefits.
So, why couldn’t those hundreds of millions have been used over the last three years to stem the flow of guns, rendering the gangs inoperative; to train, equip, and pay the Haitian police and army; and to organise a disarmament and reinsertion campaign? Instead a special passport office was set up to facilitate at least 1,800 Haitian policemen to migrate to the US while they seek to impose 1,000 Kenyan policemen from a force that several human rights organisations and the US itself have condemned for shocking human-rights abuses, including the murder of 33 marchers last July. Now that the High Court of Kenya has ruled the deployment unconstitutional, it might not be too late to finally do the right thing vis-à-vis the Haitian police, rather than appealing the decision or trying to bulldoze the illegal deployment through anyway.
Those who were pretending not to know that Haiti was victimised are now pretending to believe that the oppressors who have reduced Haiti to blood and ashes have hired them for the very noble mission of stabilising Haiti and not as plantation overseers to enforce in their stead its continued victimisation.
In the statement I delivered on behalf of the Haitian People to the Eminent Persons Group mandated by CARICOM to mediate the negotiations between the Haitian Stakeholders, I gave them a single guideline for their endeavour: to not show contempt for Haiti by trying to impose on her what they would not accept for their own countries. But that is precisely what CARICOM has done. They have even gone as far as to insult the Haitian People by thinking of the possibility of inviting gang leaders into the negotiations!
WHAT MANNER OF MEN?
Once upon a time, CARICOM leaders were intellectual giants with moral authority and a deep sense of history from which they derived their principles, backbone, character, pride, and ensuing self-respect. In 2004, weathering threats and pressure from the State Department, CARICOM refused to sanction the coup d’état against democratically elected President Aristide by the US and France, opting instead to suspend Haiti from the Community for two years until a new president was democratically elected.
It is hard to comprehend the vertiginous devolution of this new crop of CARICOM Heads, who for the most part, seem to have no other ambition than to ingratiate themselves to empire for economic gain. They have not been honest brokers. They have accepted to traffick in their own legitimacy to legitimise a criminal and illegal dictator, officially implicated in the assassination of his predecessor, who is presiding over the genocide of his own people. They have shielded Haiti’s tormentors by providing them with a black face for the outsourced repression of the Haitian people.
The late great journalist John Maxwell famously declared that what the Caribbean needs is a CARICOM of the people. The lionised sage had long ago recognised that the gallant People of the Caribbean were not to be confused with their leaders, who are mostly pursuing self-serving interests. The Haitian people do not want the occupation. The Caribbean people are against the occupation. The Kenyan people have rejected the occupation. They have all marched against it. But their so-called leaders are charging headlong with tunnel vision towards the lure of profit.
It is a cruel irony that the Haitian people, who literally invented human rights and ultimately broke the chains of slavery off their neighbours’ feet are the ones being denied the right to live as human beings and being subjected to this day to a relentless struggle against re-enslavement. We call on all well-thinking persons, particularly the people of the Caribbean and Africa, to rise up for the liberation of Haiti on this her 220th anniversary of independence in this Decade for People of African Descent and to stand against the continued trampling of her sovereignty and constitution, which by the way, the would-be occupiers plan to unilaterally rewrite.
History is not only written by the victors. It is also written by the survivors. Let us not allow our past to be a rebuke to our present, but rather to illuminate it. A generation that ignores history has no past and no future and will not be absolved by history.
Myrtha Désulmé is an advocate for Haiti. She is the founder and president of the Haiti-Jamaica Society and represents the Haitian Diaspora in the Montana Group, a civil society movement working to resolve the ongoing Haitian crisis. Send feedback to
Several BSAP agents killed in La Boule
paptimesnewsFebruary 7, 2024
In the La Boule neighborhood located in the heights of Petion-ville, agents of the Brigade for Protected Areas Security (BSAP) fell into a brutal ambush by police members. The incident, which occurred this Wednesday, led to the death of several BSAP agents, despite no direct threat from them towards the police.
What makes this incident even more tragic is that the BSAP agents posed no direct threat to the police members.