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There is still a Haiti crisis
Hey everybody. Ian Bremmer here, Quick Take to kick off your week and I want to talk about something that we've really spent almost no time talking about. Neither has the media, but it deserves our attention.
And that is the crisis in Haiti. It is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, despite being the wealthiest colony a few centuries ago. Over 50% of the population under the poverty line, and today it is a failed state with no government, no legitimized governance. Instead, the capital city is controlled by criminal gangs, and some of the surrounding countryside as well, has only deteriorated since 2021 when the president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated. Still with all sorts of questions as to exactly who was behind that and how violence has escalated since then. Overwhelming the underfunded police force while the security forces that remain are corrupt and ineffective and largely tied to the gangs themselves.
The United Nations reports that this situation has descended into what they call a catastrophic spiral of violence. Gangs shooting indiscriminately at people on the street, firings into their homes, burning people alive on public transport. Because the Haiti government can't respond, civilians are forming vigilante groups to fight the gangs and lynching of suspected members and the rest, I don't know if you all saw "Escape from New York", it's sort of like that, but not as cinematic. It's only 700 miles away from Florida, which is just far enough away to not pay attention. And of course, the Haitians are not Europeans like Ukraine. And so getting nowhere near the attention from the media, nowhere near the influencers on social media, the care nowhere near the international aid or support. The situation is desperate and there is no path to fixing it. There have been talks to try to resolve Haiti's political crisis, but last week they hit a deadlock.
And absent that, there's no willingness to deploy international forces that would help to combat criminal gangs who continue to terrorize the country. My friend, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, has called for the Security Council to issue a deployment of peacekeeping forces, but so far that has gone nowhere. The Americans are asking the Canadians to do more. The Canadians are saying, "Well, unless there's support on the ground from a government, we're not going to provide forces." They'll provide some funding for the police. But of course, if there's no government on the ground that there's no legitimacy. This clearly is a case where the G-7 as a whole plus concerned members of the Global South need to come together and actually have a peacekeeping force, need to be providing a level of rule of law and accountability and also need to shine a light on this issue.
And frankly, the only way that's going happen is much more pressure. I know a friend of mine, Richard Engel from NBC, is planning on going over there and starting some coverage soon. I think that will be helpful. The major, mainstream media on the left, on the right in the US and internationally needs to be sending more correspondence. I know it's hardship duty, and I know it's dangerous, but thank God for them. They need to be doing more coverage of Haiti so people understand this. I'm going to do our best to try to make sure that we do more than we have been. GZERO has been on it, but nowhere near frankly, what we should be. And I do hope that we can help to turn the page on what has been an utter catastrophe for the 11 million Haitians that are living in this situation.
Thanks a lot for this, and I hope to talk to you soon. Bye.
Ben Rhodes: the US should build a coalition to help Haiti’s political turmoil
Haiti is not only grappling with political unrest following the president's assassination — the Caribbean nation also needs COVID vaccines, and is eager to curb gang violence. What should the US do? Former National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes wants America to lead a coalition of nations from the Western Hemisphere that'll "address some of the basic needs" in crisis-plagued Haiti. Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on the upcoming episode of GZERO World. Check local listings for US public television.
Is Haiti a failed state?
Long wracked by instability, the Caribbean nation of Haiti has had 15 presidents in 33 years. It will now get — maybe — another head of state after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his home Wednesday by unidentified gunmen. The acting head of state has since declared a "state of siege" and shuttered the international airport.
Haiti's security situation and economy have been deteriorating for decades, but this catastrophe unleashes yet more instability in the crisis-ridden country, which has entered failed state territory.
The backdrop. Dictatorships and military coups have long been the law of the land in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. For almost 30 years until 1986, François and Jean-Claude Duvalier, the autocratic father-son duo known as Papa Doc and Baby Doc, led the country with an iron fist. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, meanwhile, was democratically elected president in 1991, but overthrown in two military coups, and restored to power twice thanks in part to US intervention.
Handpicked by his predecessor President Michael Martelly, Moïse won the 2016 presidential vote in an election many international observers deemed fraudulent. The status of Moïse's leadership was further undermined in 2019, when tens of thousands of protesters flooded the streets to demand his resignation as fuel shortages, food scarcity, and economic stagnation reached breaking point.
Indeed, poverty and corruption have plagued Haiti for years. It got particularly bad after a deadly earthquake in 2010 killed more than 200,000 people and displaced 1.5 million, while international aid intended for the rebuilding effort failed to reach Haitians that needed it most. But a more recent and worrying trend, analysts say, is the surge in gang violence: street gangs now control swaths of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and carry out frequent kidnappings, rapes and massacres in poor towns. In fact, state-aligned gangs have been known to target civilians who have participated in anti-corruption campaigns.
What happens next? Clearly, the assassination of a head of state leaves a massive power vacuum. Haiti's situation is made even worse by the fact that Moïse dissolved parliament in 2019 after it failed to hold fresh elections, and had been "ruling by decree" ever since. Political power in the chronically unstable state has been concentrated in Moïse's hands, while trigger-happy (and corrupt) police and the army have controlled the tumultuous security situation.
It's unclear who will fill the void. Prime Minister Claude Joseph, technically head of the government, says that he is running the country for now. But it's unclear whether the interim PM, who has been in that role for just three months and was supposed to be replaced this week, will command the legitimacy needed to keep the lid on an explosive situation.
What's more, during his tenure, Moïse reinstated the army, which had been disbanded since 1995 following a military coup, putting several soldiers in top positions who had been sanctioned by the US government for human rights violations. Some observers fear that history could soon repeat itself if the once-dominant military (including the notorious Tonton Macoute goon squad under the Duvaliers) again comes to quash all dissent.
What do the Americans say? For decades, the US has played a dominant role in Haiti's internal affairs, with successive US administrations having backed various coup d'états, and spent billions of dollars on "nation-building," though things have remained stagnant.
The Biden administration, for its part, has called for fresh elections in Haiti in the near term, but it's unclear what "free and fair elections" would actually look like in a state dominated by brutal gangs and corrupt politicians — and where voter turnout is always low. (Moïse was elected with fewer than 600,000 votes in a country of 11 million people.) Indeed, Biden had mostly continued the Trump administration's policy of supporting Moïse, even after legal scholars said that his term should have expired in February 2021.
Looking ahead. Instability begets instability, and Haiti now appears to be in the midst of a complete social unravelling. It remains unclear who will — or can — step in to stop the bleeding.
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Haitian president's killing reflects unprecedented rise in violence
Ian Bremmer shares his perspective on global politics this week:
What do we know about the assassination of Haiti's president?
Well, we know it's not making an awful lot of news the assassination of the leader of a country, because Haiti's a tiny economy. It's incredibly poor, it's been devastated by natural disasters and also by general lawlessness in the country. And over the last month, gang violence has become historically unprecedented. The police have been unable to maintain law and order in the streets, in most of the cities or sort of, major towns in Haiti. You've had thousands of Haitians displaced. You've had dozens of civilians killed and then overnight a gang entered the personal residence of the president. Again, police and presidential guard unable to stop them and he's dead. And his wife, the First Lady is in the hospital. It's a pretty staggering situation and obviously, some international support, some peacekeepers could be useful on the ground. Aid by itself is not going to do it right now.
What's the deal with US troops leaving Bagram airbase in the middle of the night?
This is the most important military airfield in Afghanistan. The US has been using it for staging operations over the last 20 years. The US as you know is pulling out of Afghanistan. Trump tried to get it done, didn't quite finish the job. Biden now saying that he will by 9/11. There's only about a thousand US troops left in Afghanistan with the civilian airport and guarding the US embassy. The Taliban is increasingly taking over all the territory. Afghan troops are fleeing. About a thousand deserted for Tajikistan in the past couple of weeks because they know the country is about to fall to the Taliban. And as the United States left Bagram in the middle of the evening, they apparently shut off the electricity. Apparently didn't tell the Afghan national commander that they were leaving. There was no handover. And so as a consequence, the place got thoroughly looted that night. That is an apocryphal story for what is about to come to the entire country as the Americans leave. Whether or not that means the US leaving now is the right thing is a very different story. I generally am sympathetic to getting the Americans out after 20 years, but we're clearly not handling this the way we should be either with our allies or with the Afghans.
Is this latest COVID 19 vaccine corruption scandal going to be the one that sinks Brazil's Bolsonaro?
Not in the near-term in the sense that in order for impeachment to actually succeed in Brazil you'd really need to see approval ratings down in the low teens consistently. That's not the case in Brazil. Bolsonaro is still in the thirties. You just don't have the support to get it done. But he would get crushed in presidential elections if they happened right now against Lula from the PT, the Workers' Party, who will be opposing him. Elections are next year. Increasingly, it is an uphill struggle for Bolsonaro. Interesting that the Brazilian president saying that these may be fake elections. He won't recognize the outcome of a stolen election. Sounds a lot like somebody we know here in the United States from just last year. And Brazil is indeed setting itself up for a very similar type of contested outcome from what we had in the United States.
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