US wants to transform MSS into MINUSTAH 2.0 – Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces on Venezuela and beyond

The Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission to Haiti is a complete, sad and humiliating failure.

That is the only conclusion you can draw when you see Washington submitting a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council (UN Security Council) – Haiti Freedom has obtained a copy – so the UN can begin planning to transition the MSS mission to a UN peacekeeping operation, to maintain profits made by the MSS mission.” (Our emphasis.) The proposal comes just one day after US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Haiti on September 5.

This proposal is shocking and likely doomed to failure, for several reasons.

1) The MSS has made absolutely no profit in Haiti. So far, only 380 Kenyan police officers remain out of the 2,500 troops from 10 countries that Washington wanted to assemble. Since arriving in June and July, those police officers have spent most of their time in their U.S.-built base at Port-au-Prince airport, reluctant to go on missions to confront Port-au-Prince’s armed groups, assembled in a coalition called Living Ansanm (Living together).

Haitian National Police (PNH) officers, who are paid seven times less than Kenyans, are bitter and resentful about the risk-averse Kenyans combined with the salary gap.

Moreover, Washington is the MSS’s only real funder, having provided 63% ($369 million) of the force’s $589 million annual budget (the actual total cost is much higher, some sources tell us). The UN has collected another 11% ($68 million) in donations, but the MSS is still $152 million short. Faced with previous disapproval from the UN Security Council, Washington has historically been able to concoct various “Coalitions of the Willing” for operations such as the invasions of the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), and Iraq (2003). But in the new multipolar, declining Western world, the MSS appears to be a “Coalition of the Unwilling.”

2) The The MSS mandate will expire soon on Oct 2On that date in 2023, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2699, which (not sponsored) the MSS “for an initial period of twelve months.” Washington was forced to resort to the MSS – what its UN representative at the time called “a new way to maintain world peace and security” – because the UN Security Council hesitated to send another Chapter 7 “peacekeeping mission” to Haiti. Russia and China abstained from voting on Resolution 2699.

With the authorization deadline just three weeks away, Washington may propose upgrading to a full-fledged UN deployment as a stepping stone to negotiating a new UN Security Council blessing, similar to the 2023 one for the MSS.

Haiti could thwart US plans for Kenya

3) The idea of ​​sending a third UN military mission to Haiti in 30 years is unpopular at the UN Security Councilespecially with veto-wielding Russia and China.

“Russia cannot blindly agree to invoke Chapter 7,” Russian UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said after the vote on October 2, 2023. “Haiti’s history has plenty of experience with irresponsible foreign intervention, and that is precisely what has set in motion a spiral of degradation that the Haitian people have not been able to overcome for years. It is unwise for us to use force in Haiti again without fully understanding the parameters of the mission.”

“Based on the principles of respect for sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs, China has always taken a cautious and responsible approach to the Council’s invocation of Chapter 7 on the authorization of the use of force,” Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun said in explaining his country’s abstention on October 2.

4) Each UN military occupation unpopular with Haitiansgiven the horrific history of the two previous deployments. By far the worst was the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), which was a “brutal, ineffective, and polluting UN force,” according to secret US State Department cables provided by Wikileaks to Haiti Freedom in 2011. It was active in Haiti from 2004 to 2017.

Even some former Foreign Ministry employees agree that a new UN mission would be a big mistake.

Former U.S. special envoy to Haiti Daniel Foote “has also criticized the idea of ​​relaunching a U.N. peacekeeping operation in Haiti, noting that Haitians are fiercely opposed to a new U.N. mission because of past abuses and atrocities by peacekeepers, including massacres, sexual exploitation and the introduction of cholera,” RHI News reported Sept. 6.

“Haitians agree on one thing: They hate the UN and they don’t want another peacekeeping mission,” Foote told RHI.

5) The world is outraged and disgusted by US-sponsored wars around the world, particularly in Ukraine and Gaza. The rekindling of a MINUSTAH 2.0 is alarming for much of the Global South.

6) A UN peacekeeping Mission in Haiti would be a violation of the UN Charter. In its draft resolution, co-authored by Ecuador, the US states that “the situation in Haiti continues to pose a threat to international peace and security and to regional stability.” This is simply absurd. There is no conflict between countries, and that is what a UN peacekeeping operation is supposed to stop, as in Cyprus or on the India-Pakistan border. The conflict in Haiti is today a purely internal political issue.

On December 21, 2022, Haiti Liberté addressed the UN Security Councilin which he explains that: “We at Haiti Freedom strongly believe that the situation in Haiti cannot be resolved by foreign intervention, military force or even sanctions. The Haitian people, acting with full sovereignty, must be given the opportunity to solve their own problems, just as they did 219 years ago when they founded the first nation of Latin America… We call on this Council to respect the principles enshrined in the Charter, particularly Article 2, Paragraph 7, which states that ‘Nothing in the present Charter authorizes the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State.’