YouSaid · the spoken record

Ives

lines on the record
20
first
2022-12-21
most recent
2022-12-21
sittings or episodes
1
sources
un-security-council

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “We call on the Council to respect the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, in particular Article 2, paragraph 7, which states that: “[n]othing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  2. “Now foreign nations are debating yet another military invasion, supposedly to save unwilling Haitians from a so-called “humanitarian catastrophe.” We at Haiti Liberté strongly believe that the situation in Haiti cannot be resolved through foreign intervention, military force or even sanctions. The Haitian people, acting with full sovereignty, must be allowed to sort out their own problems, just as they did 219 years ago when they founded Latin America’s first nation. The only thing the United Nations or any other foreign entity might do is provide Haiti with disinterested economic support to rebuild their ravaged economy and political institutions destroyed by three decades of coups d’états, military interventions and neoliberal austerity.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  3. “As in Viet Nam in the early 1960s, that risks simply becoming the thin edge of the wedge. Tellingly, the same Pamela White recommended, in a March 2021 congressional hearing, that President Moïse be “put aside” and that Washington embrace what she called “the Prime Minister option.” That has effectively come to pass. Those power dynamics are what is most alarming about the situation in Haiti today. Foreign actors are deciding what leaders Haitians should have, and a Prime Minister with no legal or popular mandate is running roughshod over the Haitian Constitution.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  4. “We believe this was clearly setting the stage for Ariel Henry’s 9 October request to the Security Council for foreign military intervention, which is in flagrant violation of the Haitian Constitution’s Article 263-1, which forbids foreign troops on Haitian soil. The proponents of foreign intervention in Haiti are well aware of the Haitian people’s opposition and its bad optics before the eyes of the world, especially since it has been tried before, unsuccessfully. Former United States Ambassador to Haiti Pamela White suggested this month that the Biden Administration deploy 2,000 armed law enforcers to Haiti, but to send in a couple of hundred at a time, over six months, with little fanfare. Some officials have also suggested deploying small special forces units to train the Haitian National Police.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  5. “Over a month after the September briefing, in early November, we visited the General Hospital, Haiti’s largest, where the administrator told us that the hospital had never closed down and that it had been harder to obtain fuel since August, when supplies became short due to the Government not paying its gas bills, and even more difficult after the price hike. The Special Representative concluded her briefing by saying that “[a]n economic crisis, a gang crisis and a political crisis have converged into a humanitarian catastrophe” (ibid, p. 3), having just underlined “the very real limits of the national [police] force” (ibid.).”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  6. “What difference does it make if a fuel truck can travel five blocks instead of one block? The many road barricades and demonstrations throughout the city would have curtailed fuel deliveries at that time, but the principal factor disrupting gas distribution was the price hike, which more than doubled the cost of fuel overnight. Council members were told in the briefing that the Varreux barricade was “creating shortages across the country and closing down hospitals” (ibid.). This is another half-truth.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  7. “He has been credibly accused, based on phone records, of many extended phone conversations with Joseph Félix Badio, the man said to have ordered Colombian mercenaries to fatally machine-gun President Jovenel Moïse on 7 July 2021. Henry fired a Haitian judge who sought to question him about the calls, which occurred both before and just hours after the murder. Secondly, the alliance of so-called criminal gangs La Lime refers to is the G9, the crime-fighting federation headed by Jimmy Cherizier. The barricades they erected outside the Varreux fuel terminal, which is one of three fuel depots in the capital, were in solidarity with the nationwide lockdown and the entire population’s demands. Thirdly, with barricades established throughout the country, why did she focus on just the barricades near the fuel terminal?”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  8. “The last sustained United Nations military mission to Haiti — the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti — lasted 13 years, from 2004 to 2017, at a cost of about $7 billion, or on average approximately $538.5 million a year. Leaving aside moral and political principles, would it not be more cost effective to underwrite the Haitian State with fuel subsidies for $400 million annually than deploy troops at a much higher cost? Council members were also told that “one of the largest alliances of criminal gangs in the capital blocked the nation’s main fuel terminal in Varreux, in Port-au-Prince” (ibid.). First, why does Ms. La Lime refer in this context to “criminal gangs” but then does not characterize Ariel Henry as a “criminal”?”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  9. “On the contrary, the fuel subsidies, which allow Haitian public transport, open air markets and tens of thousands of small peasants and enterprises to function, were not “regressive”. They were one of the few measures that helped to ease the burden of crushing poverty on Haiti’s masses, and there are no social programmes in Haiti to speak of. It was therefore predictable that Henry’s move, which Brian Nichols, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said were “actions that we [ha]ve wanted to see in Haiti for quite some time”, precipitated, as Ms. La Lime reported, “roadblocks [that were] set up throughout the country, generating a countrywide lockdown” (S/PV.9136, p. 2). Ironically, the response being proposed to such uprisings is yet another foreign military intervention.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  10. “In the 17 months that he has held power, thanks to his appointment by the so- called Core Group of ambassadors led by La Lime and Washington, Henry has made absolutely no progress establishing dialogue or in creating the groundwork for elections. On the contrary, he disbanded the sitting Provisional Electoral Council two months after taking power and has not reconstituted it. Most observers agree that the likelihood of free and fair elections taking place in the coming year is practically nil. She also told the Council that Henry decided “to reduce regressive subsidies on fuel which costs the State some $400 million a year, as a means of increasing revenue for social programmes” (ibid.).”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  11. “That an error of this magnitude can happen also shows how easily misguided, counterproductive and blunt an instrument the Security Council’s Chapter VII power can be, especially when it is receiving inaccurate and skewed information. Sanctions should be evidence-based, not the result of political machinations. For example, on 26 September 2022, Ms. La Lime informed the Security Council that Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry wanted “dialogue as a means to create the necessary security, constitutional and political conditions for elections by the end of 2023” (S/PV.9136, p. 2). She should have noted that Ariel Henry is a de facto Head of Government with virtually no popular support or legal mandate. What little legitimacy he might have had expired on 7 February 2022, with the definitive end of the late Jovenel Moïse’s term.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  12. “The mere observation of this statistical fact so alarmed the Haitian oligarchy that it began to spin the fiction through its radio stations, paid pundits and political formations on both the left and right that the BINUH and its chief Helen La Lime had federated the G9 and were controlling it. This rumour spread widely despite the fact that the report, only a paragraph earlier, had characterized the G9 as “notorious,” stating that “[i]ts creation raised concerns among political and civil society actors about the detrimental impact partisan gangs can have on State institutions” (ibid., para. 16). This case illustrates how quickly fiction, through mere repetition, can become accepted as fact in the popular discourse, leading the United Nations to target a crime-fighting, truce-promoting leader in Haiti’s slums.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  13. “Cherizier got his start as a stellar cop fighting criminal gangs. Furthermore, Cherizier’s G9 coalition sought to decrease violence and succeeded in establishing a truce in July 2020 between its neighbourhoods and those controlled by the criminal gangs. The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) stated in a report dated 25 September 2020 that “[i]ntentional homicides reported to the police decreased by 12 per cent” (S/2020/944, para. 17) during the three months from June to August 2020, a period coinciding with the start of the G9’s truce.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  14. “It was not Renel Destina, alias “Ti Lapli,” another proud kidnapper, whose criminal gang controls the area of Grand Ravine and with “Izo” has cut off the highway leading to Haiti’s southern peninsula — 40 per cent of the country — for almost two years. It was not Kempes Sanon, the leader of the Bel-Air gang, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping but escaped in February 2021, killing the civilian director of the Croix-des-Bouquets prison during his getaway. The man whom the Security Council sanctioned was Jimmy Cherizier, known as “Barbecue,” who is the spokesman for a federation of neighbourhoods known as the “Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, Mess with One, You Mess with All”, which is dedicated to keeping kidnapping, extortion, rape and other crimes out of their midst.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  15. “Indeed, in its resolution 2653 (2022) of 21 October 2022, the Security Council chose to sanction one and only one person, accusing him of threatening “the peace, security and stability of Haiti” (resolution 2653 (2022), annex) and charging, on the grounds of contested allegations, that he has “planned, directed or committed acts that constitute serious human rights abuses” (ibid.). The sanctioned man was not Joseph Wilson, alias “Lamò Sanjou”, the leader of the 400 Mawozo gang, who admittedly and publicly kidnapped 17 North American missionaries, five French priests and two nuns last year. It was not the self-professed kidnapper known as “Izo,” leader of Village de Dieu’s Five Seconds gang, which killed four Haitian cops and wounded seven others in March 2021.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  16. “However, today we see some analysts, who report to the Security Council and even publish their accounts on authoritative media networks, conflating the criminal gangs, which openly and unabashedly commit kidnapping, extortion, rape, and other crimes, with the autonomously formed civilian self-defence committees combating criminality. These self-constituted defence committees are the very embodiment of self- determination and organic community action and response. In short, the Council is lumping together the “good guys” with the “bad guys” in one basket called “the gangs”. The irony is that the Security Council is now threatening to uproot this germinating sprout of Haitian self-defence.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  17. “The other half of the truth that members have not been told is that the previous two United Nations military interventions, together with the coups d’état, have so weakened the Haitian State that it has opened the void for the growth of such criminality. As a result, the Haitian people have been left to fend for themselves, forming what Haitians dubbed in the 1980s “vigilance brigades” to combat the criminals. Through this means, they have effectively created neighbourhoods that are not plagued by criminals, where the citizens are able to go about their daily affairs in peace and security.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  18. “That is why the 16 million Haitian people— 12 million living in Haiti and some four million living abroad — are patently and almost universally opposed to any more United Nations interventions, with the exception of Haiti’s tiny bourgeoisie. Haiti is the only country in the Western Hemisphere to endure a United Nations military occupation, and not once, but twice. What is the situation today? The members of the Security Council have been given half-truths, but as the Indian writer Anurag Shourie notes, a half-truth is even more dangerous than a lie, because half a truth is sure to mislead you for long. Council members have been told that Haiti is under the rule of gangs and that the power of this world body is needed to punish and crush them.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  19. “Those precedents spawned the current crisis. In the past three decades, Haiti has been the victim of three coups d’états: in 1991, 2004 and, most recently, 2021. After each of those crimes, which involved international actors, the Security Council was asked, as it is being asked today, to militarily intervene in Haiti. The Council agreed to do so in the first two cases, thereby essentially cementing in place an unjust and illegal status quo. The victims of those coups — the Haitian masses — were the ones policed, repressed, terrorized, demonized, sexually violated, politically bullied and economically sanctioned.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source

  20. “Mr. Ives: I thank the members of the Security Council for this opportunity to present our analysis of the situation in Haiti. I have been reporting on and in Haiti for the past 48 years, most recently last month when I travelled there with my colleague, journalist Dan Cohen, to investigate the fuel crisis stand-off. Using a drone, we assessed barricades, police movements, shipping traffic and open-air markets. Despite the gas shortage and insecurity, we visited hospitals, clinics, an internally displaced persons camp, an industrial park, wealthy quarters and sewage-choked slums. I have been asked to present the facts. But the facts themselves are not neutral. They speak to a history in which international law has been violated and the principles of peace and self-determination, on which the Council was founded, have been trampled.”

    2022-12-21 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9233 (2022) · source