Weekly Report - 09 March 2023 (WR-23-10) |
HAITI: Caricom special mission to Haiti ducks key request |
Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness recently headed up a one-day Caribbean Community (Caricom) special mission to Haiti. The mission had been hotly anticipated amid ongoing discussions as to how the international community should respond to Haiti’s multifaceted security and political crisis which has intensified since the July 2021 assassination of president Jovenel Moïse (2017-2021). The Caricom mission produced pledges of support for Haiti’s national police (PNd’H) but no mention of deploying a foreign security mission which Prime Minister Ariel Henry has requested and for which United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly declared his backing. A Caricom statement released on 6 March, following the mission’s deployment to Port-au-Prince on 27 February, said that it met with “a broad range of Haitian stakeholders to hear their views on the way forward to a Haitian-led solution” and highlighted that the Caricom heads of government agreed to support the PNd’H to address the security situation. It added that the focus will be the “provision of training” for PNd’H and “humanitarian assistance to [PNd’H] and the wider Haitian society”. As with a 15-17 February Caricom meeting which took place in the Bahamian capital, Nassau, in which Haiti featured high on the agenda, there was no mention of sending a foreign military deployment, serving to once again illustrate the controversial nature of the proposal. Indeed, while Prime Minister Holness previously suggested his government would support a united international effort in Haiti, to which Jamaica’s military and police had “been alerted”, there appears little appetite for this elsewhere. A 27 February report by Latin America Advisor, a daily publication of the US think tank Inter-American Dialogue, suggests “some attention may have been paid to Ralph Gonsalves, the Prime Minister of St Vincent & the Grenadines, who said in November that his country won’t send troops to Haiti”. It cites Gonsalves as saying that “such a move by any country…could be seen by the Haitian people as propping up a government that the majority of Haitians see as illegitimate”. With Caricom appearing to tout the 21 December 2022 political agreement launched by Henry, which involves the establishment of a high transition council [WR-23-01], albeit while calling for it to be “more inclusive”, the international community continues to respond to the crisis in Haiti with more equipment for the PNd’H and sanctions targeting gangs and their backers. The latter is in line with an October 2022 UN Security Council resolution [WR-22-41] and continues to be applied by the US and Canada. More sanctions Last month the Canadian government announced that it had imposed sanctions relating to the financing of armed gangs on Haiti’s former interim president (2016-2017) Jocelerme Privert and lawyer Salim Succar, the former chief of staff of former prime minister Laurent Lamothe (2012-2014), who himself has also been sanctioned by Canada. The media notes that Canadian sanctions now affect 17 Haitians from political and economic elites.
Also last month the US Department of State announced visa restrictions on five individuals and seven of their relatives in relation to the sanctions regime targeting gangs and their backers. This brings the total number of individuals on which the US has slapped visa restrictions to 44. Meanwhile, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – who has resisted a push for his country to lead an international military force – discussed the Caricom mission with Holness on 1 March, having attended the Nassau summit. Both the US and Canada have delivered equipment such as armoured vehicles to strengthen the PNd’H, while last month Trudeau, who announced back in January that Canada had airlifted Haitian-purchased vehicles to Haiti to support the PNd’H, highlighted the recent deployment of a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) CP-140 Aurora long-range patrol aircraft to disrupt gang activity in Haiti. He also noted the delivery of three additional Haitian-purchased Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles and plans to deploy two Royal Canadian Navy Kingston-Class ships to Haiti in the coming weeks.
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