In November 2021, a French military convoy was making its way to Mali while passing through Burkina Faso and Niger. It did not get very far. It was stopped in Téra, Niger, and before that at several points in Burkina Faso (in Bobo-Dioulasso and Kaya as well as in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital). Two civilians were killed as a result of clashes between the French convoy and protestors who were “angry at the failure of French forces to reign in terrorism in the region.” When the convoy crossed into Mali, it was attacked near the city of Gao.

Colonel Pascal Ianni, French Chief of Defense Staff spokesperson, told Julien Fanciulli of France 24 that there was a lot of “false information circulating” about the French convoy. Blame for the attacks was placed on “terrorists,” namely Islamic groups that continue to hold large parts of Mali and Burkina Faso. These groups have been emboldened and hardened by the 2011 war on Libya, prosecuted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and egged on by France. What Colonel Ianni would not admit is that the protests that followed the convoy revealed the depth of anti-French sentiment across North Africa and the Sahel region.

Coups d’états in the region have been taking place for more than two years—from the coup in Mali in August 2020 to the coup in Burkina Faso in September 2022. The coups in the region, including the coup in Guinea in September 2021 as well and the two other coups in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), and another coup in Burkina Faso (January 2022), were driven in large part due to the anti-French sentiment in the Sahel. In May 2022, the military leaders in Mali ejected the French military bases set up in 2014, while France’s political project—G5 Sahel—flounders in this atmosphere of animosity. Protests against the French in Morocco and Algeria have only added weight to the anti-French sentiment spreading across the African continent, with French President Emmanuel Macron showered with insults as he tried to walk the streets of Oran in Algeria in August 2022.

Animosities

“The situation in the former French colonies (Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and Mali) is different from the situation in northern Africa,” Abdallah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way Party of Morocco told me. “The bad relations between the regime in Morocco and France is due to the fact that the Moroccan regime has developed important economic, political, and security relations with the regimes of West Africa at the expense of the French,” he said. About the former French colonies along the Sahel in particular, El Harif said that “many popular insurrections” had taken place against the continued French colonial presence in these countries. With Morocco distancing itself from France, Paris is angered by its growing ties with the United States, while in the Sahel region people want to eject France from their lives.

Morocco’s monarchy has reacted quietly to the coups in the Sahel, not willing to associate itself with the kind of anti-French sentiment in the region. Such an association would call attention to Morocco’s close relationship with the United States. This US-Morocco relationship has provided the monarchy with dividends: military equipment from the United States and permission for Morocco to continue with its occupation of Western Sahara, including the mining of the region’s precious phosphates (in exchange for Morocco opening ties with Israel). Each year, since 2004, Morocco has hosted a US military exercise, the African Lion. In June 2022, 10 African countries participated in the African Lion 2022, with observers from Israel (for the first time) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Morocco, El Harif told me, “has enormously developed its military relations with the United States.” France has been sidelined by these maneuvers, which has annoyed Paris. As he left behind the jeering crowds in Oran, Algeria, President Macron said that he would visit Morocco in late October.

In the Sahel region, unlike in Morocco, there is a growing popular sentiment against the French colonial interference (called Françafrique). Chad’s former President Idriss Déby Itno, who died in 2021, told Jeune Afrique in 2019 that “Françafrique is over. Sovereignty is indisputable, we must stop sticking this label of French backyard to our countries.” “The French control the currency of these states,” El Harif told me. “They have many military bases [in the Sahel region], and their corporations plunder the natural resources of these countries, while pretending to combat terrorism.” When political challenges arise, the French have colluded in assassinating leaders who challenge their authority (such as Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara in 1987) or have had them arrested and jailed (such as Côte d’Ivoire’s Laurent Gbagbo in 2011).

Why is Françafrique over?

In a recent interview with Atalayar, France’s former ambassador to Mali Nicolas Normand blamed the rising anti-French sentiment on “the repeated anti-French accusations of Mali’s prime minister and the virulent media campaign carried out by Russia on social media, accusing France of looting Mali and actually supporting the jihadists by pretending to fight them, with fake videos.” Indeed, Mali’s prime minister before August 22, 2022, Choguel Maïga, made strong statements against French military intervention in his country. In February 2022, Maïga told France 24 that the French government “have tried to divide his country by fueling autonomy claims in the north.” Malian singer Salif Keïta posted a video in which he said, “Aren’t you aware that France is financing our enemies against our children?” accusing France of collaborating with the jihadis.

Meanwhile, about the accusation that the Russian Wagner Group was operating in Mali, Maïga responded in his interview with France 24 and said that “The word Wagner. It’s the French who say that. We don’t know any Wagner.” However, Mali, he said in February, is working “with Russia cooperators.” Following an investigation by Facebook in 2020, it removed several social media accounts that were traced back to France and Russia and were “going head to head in the Central African Republic.”

In an important article in Le Monde in December 2021, senior researcher at Leiden University’s African Studies Center Rahmane Idrissa pointed out three reasons for the rise in anti-French sentiment in the Sahel. First, France, he said, “is paying the bill in the Sahel for half a century of military interventions in sub-Saharan Africa,” including France’s protection of regimes “generally odious to the population.” Second, the failure of the war against the jihadists has disillusioned the public regarding the utility of the French project. Third, and this is key, Idrissa argued that the inability of the military rulers in the region “to mobilize the population against an enemy (jihadist),” against whom they have no real strategy, has led to this anger being turned toward the French. The departure of the French, welcome as it is, “will certainly not resolve the jihadist crisis, ” Idrissa noted. The people will feel “sovereign,” he wrote, “even if part of the territory remains in the hands of terrorist gangs.”

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The second round of the Brazilian elections, on October 30, is probably the most important and bitter electoral confrontation in our America since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998.  This election goes further than just deciding who will govern the South American giant for the next 5 years, the largest and most populated country with the most important economy in our region, eighth in the world in terms of GDP. Nor will it only decide who will rule the country between neoliberalism and anti-neoliberalism, since in Brazil the first thing at stake is the defense and reconquest of basic democratic rights, already greatly diminished social and labor rights by Temer and Bolsonaro, which the former military man threatens to overthrow together with the politicians, in order to satisfy the businessmen who support him. This election is also about – how much – whether the death blow will be dealt to what is left of the Amazon forest, the planet’s oxygen lung, as is the goal of Bolsonaro’s agribusiness capital partners. It is, at the same time, a key episode in the dispute for our America between democratic and progressive forces, which fight for national sovereignty, multipolarity, and the fight against inequality and hunger, and those who advocate surrendering everything to the market and financial capital.

Lula was enabled to compete electorally when the Brazilian Supreme Court acquitted him of the false charges brought against him by the venal judge Sergio Moro and his crony prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol.  But this could not erase the image of a corrupt governmental performance of Lulismo in government installed in wide layers of the population due to the huge campaign of lies unleashed by the Brazilian and international hegemonic media.  Together with the political advance of Bolsonarismo, Lula has had to create a great coalition that includes important sectors of the center-right that previously opposed him, but also his traditional allies of the center-left and the most combative social movements in Brazil, as a formula to ensure a convincing victory in the face of the serious anti-democratic threat of Bolsonarismo.

Sergio Moro and Dallkagnol are trained and part of the program of the US State Department to, under the pretext of fighting corruption, implement in our region the lawfare against candidates or officials who defend proposals contrary to neoliberalism and favorable to popular causes in order to liquidate them politically; a sort of civil death. All this in perfect conjunction with the work of disinformation and defamation of the overwhelming network of hegemonic media and new structures of digital networks at the service of the empire. Lawfare has also been applied against former presidents Manuel Zelaya, Fernando Lugo, Cristina Fernández, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales and several of their followers. In addition, it was the instrument to carry out the coup d’état against Dilma Rousseff and to disqualify Lula as presidential candidate when he was ahead in all polls and thus opened the way for Bolsonaro.

Although Bolsonaro’s eruption into the political arena after decades of gray and extremely corrupt performance as a congressman is not only due to that, he did remove the formidable obstacle that Lula had placed in his way. Today we know that two years earlier the former captain had received the green light from the then commander-in-chief of the army, General Villas Boas, to run for the presidency. At the same time, it is evident that the crisis of neoliberal policies and the success of the progressive and redistributive policies of the PT had exhausted the hegemony of the Brazilian elite, which needed an “outsider” like Bolsonaro: a sort of political lumpen, barely educated, but with unquestionable charisma, liveliness and the ability to connect with large sectors of Brazilian society characterized by their ignorance, obscurantism and religious fanaticism, or their links to organized crime – such as the famous militiamen -, or with retired military men full of ambitions of power and enrichment. About 6 thousand of these have been dispersed by Bolsonaro throughout the public administration, another problem that Lula would have to deal with.

Lula continues to put up a heroic fight in route to the second round in the face of very difficult forces and obstacles to overcome. One of them is how he would govern with a Bolsonarist and right-wing majority congress, which even has the votes to impeach him. His campaign has been such an outpouring of masses that it would seem to lead him directly to the Alborada Palace. Although after the errors of the polls in the first round, the 5 points of advantage that they assign him now open room for doubt. Again, I prefer to trust in the optimism of will than in the pessimism of reason.

Source: Resumen

At the United Nations General Assembly on 24 September 2022, Haiti’s Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus admitted that his country faces a serious crisis, which he said ‘can only be solved with the effective support of our partners’. To many close observers of the situation unfolding in Haiti, the phrase ‘effective support’ sounded like Geneus was signaling that another military intervention by Western powers was imminent. Indeed, two days prior to Geneus’s comments, The Washington Post published an editorial on the situation in Haiti in which it called for ‘muscular action by outside actors’. On 15 October, the United States and Canada issued a joint statement announcing that they had sent military aircraft to Haiti to deliver weapons to Haitian security services. That same day, the United States submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council calling for the ‘immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force’ into Haiti.

Ever since the Haitian Revolution won independence from France in 1804, Haiti has faced successive waves of invasions, including a two-decade-long US occupation from 1915 to 1934, a US-backed dictatorship from 1957 to 1986, two Western-backed coups against the progressive former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004, and a UN military intervention from 2004 to 2017. These invasions have prevented Haiti from securing its sovereignty and have prevented its people from building dignified lives. Another invasion, whether by US and Canadian troops or by UN peacekeeping forces, will only deepen the crisis. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the International Peoples’ Assembly, ALBA Movements, and the Plateforme Haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif (‘Haitian Advocacy Platform for Alternative Development’ or PAPDA) have produced a red alert on the current situation in Haiti, which can be found below and downloaded as a PDF.

What is happening in Haiti?

A popular insurrection has unfolded in Haiti throughout 2022. These protests are the continuation of a cycle of resistance that began in 2016 in response to a social crisis developed by the coups in 1991 and 2004, the earthquake in 2010, and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. For more than a century, any attempt by the Haitian people to exit the neocolonial system imposed by the US military occupation (1915–34) has been met with military and economic interventions to preserve it. The structures of domination and exploitation established by that system have impoverished the Haitian people, with most of the population having no access to drinking water, health care, education, or decent housing. Of Haiti’s 11.4 million people, 4.6 million are food insecure and 70% are unemployed.

The Haitian Creole word dechoukaj or ‘uprooting’ – which was first used in the pro-democracy movements of 1986 that fought against the US-backed dictatorship – has come to define the current protests. The government of Haiti, led by acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry, raised fuel prices during this crisis, which provoked a protest from the trade unions and deepened the movement. Henry was installed to his post in 2021 by the ‘Core Group’ (made up of six countries and led by the US, the European Union, the UN, and the Organisation of American States) after the murder of the unpopular president Jovenel Moïse. Although still unsolved, it is clear that Moïse was killed by a conspiracy that included the ruling party, drug trafficking gangs, Colombian mercenaries, and US intelligence services. The UN’s Helen La Lime told the Security Council in February that the national investigation into Moïse’s murder had stalled, a situation that has fuelled rumours and exacerbated both suspicion and mistrust within the country.

How have the forces of neocolonialism reacted?

The United States and Canada are now arming Henry’s illegitimate government and planning military intervention in Haiti. On 15 October, the US submitted a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council calling for the ‘immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force’ in the country. This would be the latest chapter in over two centuries of destructive intervention by Western countries in Haiti. Since the 1804 Haitian Revolution, the forces of imperialism (including slave owners) have intervened militarily and economically against people’s movements seeking to end the neocolonial system. Most recently, these forces entered the country under the auspices of the United Nations via the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which was active from 2004 to 2017. A further such intervention in the name of ‘human rights’ would only affirm the neocolonial system now managed by Ariel Henry and would be catastrophic for the Haitian people, whose movement forward is being blocked by gangs created and promoted behind the scenes by the Haitian oligarchy, supported by the Core Group, and armed by weapons from the United States.

How can the world stand in solidarity with Haiti?

Haiti’s crisis can only be solved by the Haitian people, but they must be accompanied by the immense force of international solidarity. The world can look to the examples demonstrated by the Cuban Medical Brigade, which first went to Haiti in 1998; by the Via Campesina/ALBA Movimientos brigade, which has worked with popular movements on reforestation and popular education since 2009; and by the assistance provided by the Venezuelan government, which includes discounted oil. It is imperative for those standing in solidarity with Haiti to demand, at a minimum:

1. that France and the United States provide reparations for the theft of Haitian wealth since 1804, including the return of the gold stolen by the US in 1914. France alone owes Haiti at least $28 billion.
2. that the United States return Navassa Island to Haiti.
3. that the United Nations pay for the crimes committed by MINUSTAH, whose forces killed tens of thousands of Haitians, raped untold numbers of women, and introduced cholera into the country.
4. that the Haitian people be permitted to build their own sovereign, dignified, and just political and economic framework and to create education and health systems that can meet the people’s real needs.
5. that all progressive forces oppose the military invasion of Haiti.

The common sense demands in this red alert do not require much elaboration, but they do need to be amplified.

Western countries will talk about this new military intervention with phrases such as ‘restoring democracy’ and ‘defending human rights’. The terms ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are demeaned in these instances. This was on display at the UN General Assembly in September, when US President Joe Biden said that his government continues ‘to stand with our neighbor in Haiti’. The emptiness of these words is revealed in a new Amnesty International report that documents the racist abuse faced by Haitian asylum seekers in the United States. The US and the Core Group might stand with people like Ariel Henry and the Haitian oligarchy, but they do not stand with the Haitian people, including those who have fled to the United States.

In 1957, the Haitian communist novelist Jacques-Stéphen Alexis published a letter to his country titled La belle amour humaine (‘Beautiful Human Love’). ‘I don’t think that the triumph of morality can happen by itself without the actions of humans’, Alexis wrote. A descendent of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of the revolutionaries that overthrew French rule in 1804, Alexis wrote novels to uplift the human spirit, a profound contribution to the Battle of Emotions in his country. In 1959, Alexis founded the Parti pour l’Entente Nationale (‘People’s Consensus Party’). On 2 June 1960, Alexis wrote to the US-backed dictator François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier to inform him that both he and his country would overcome the violence of the dictatorship. ‘As a man and as a citizen’, Alexis wrote, ‘it is inescapable to feel the inexorable march of the terrible disease, this slow death, which each day leads our people to the cemetery of nations like wounded pachyderms to the necropolis of elephants’. This march can only be halted by the people. Alexis was forced into exile in Moscow, where he participated in a meeting of international communist parties. When he arrived back in Haiti in April 1961, he was abducted in Môle-Saint-Nicolas and killed by the dictatorship shortly thereafter. In his letter to Duvalier, Alexis echoed, ‘we are the children of the future’.

Source: Resumen

More than a hundred people marched through the heart of Brooklyn, New York’s Haitian community, on Oct. 17 to protest plans to invade Haiti. Onlookers in cars honked their horns and raised fists in support.

Fanmi Lavalas New York and Komokoda called the demonstration. “Our people in Haiti are fighting and dying to return to the free & sovereign country our ancestors defeated their white enslavers to create in 1804,” said the call for the demonstration. “We will not let them fight alone.”

Carrying signs with pictures of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who defeated Napoleon’s troops, Haitians and their supporters marched down Nostrand Avenue to Flatbush Avenue, also known as “the Junction.”

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is maneuvering to send troops under the guise of the United Nations.

Such a Pentagon intervention would be in the footsteps of the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. U.S. Marines killed thousands of Haitians.

Among them was Charlemagne Péralte, the Haitian national hero leading the resistance against the occupation. He was assassinated on Nov. 1, 1919, by Marine Sgt. Herman Hanneken, who was wearing Blackface.

Hanneken was given the congressional Medal of Honor for this war crime and was eventually made a brigadier general.

Protesters gathered at Eastern Parkway and Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn, which is named after John van Nostrand, an owner of enslaved Africans. U.S. and European capitalists have never forgiven Haitians for overthrowing their slave masters.

In revenge, the wealthy and powerful have been attacking Haiti for 230 years and making it poor. As one sign read, “France owes Haiti $29 billion plus reparations.”

Wall Street owes billions, too. U.S. hands off Haiti!

The next international climate change conference will start on November 4 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. 

Tens of millions are struggling to recover from extreme weather disasters that spanned the entire world in 2022. Just a little more than a month will have passed by the time the delegates gather since two of the worst-known weather catastrophes in human history happened in Pakistan and China.

Indeed, this will place more importance on the issue of climate finance at Sharm el-Sheikh, and the conference may become a flashpoint for a long-simmering international dispute. In 2009, at the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Denmark, the developed industrialized countries were forced to commit to raising $100 billion per year to assist the Global South in adapting to the effects of climate change. 

They have not met the obligation. The website of the World Resources Institute reports that by October of 2021, “Three major economies — the United States, Australia, and Canada — provided less than half their share of the financial effort.” 

A fraction of the funds handed over to the Pentagon each year would cover the U.S.’s commitment. But solidarity with the Global South is not on the imperialist agenda.

While the Western media was reporting every detail of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral for weeks on end, they woefully neglected news of two of the most destructive climate change-related events in history that occurred in Pakistan and China almost concurrently.

Pakistan floods

Southern Pakistan was hit by rains that lasted for weeks beginning in June, killing 1,500 or more people. More than one-third of the deaths were children. Crops were destroyed; at least a million homes were damaged or washed away completely. 

Farmers usually welcome the monsoon season. However, this year, melting glaciers from rising global temperatures turned it into a super-monsoon catastrophe. Some 33 million people were affected, most of them tenant farmers. It will take six months for the water to recede so agriculture can become viable again. Estimates of recovery costs are now at about $30 billion. 

So far, international aid pledged is paltry compared to the need. The World Bank has pledged $2 billion, and a few governments have pledged $160 million via the United Nations. 

A recent study by economist Utsa Patnaik, published by Columbia University Press, shows that the narrative that British colonization of India was at a cost to the empire turns the truth on its head. Using two centuries of data, Patnaik calculated that Britain robbed India of $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938. Pakistan was part of India until 1947. 

China heatwave

Around the same time as the floods in Pakistan, a heatwave hit China that lasted 70 days. Rivers dried up, hydroelectric power plants stopped working, factories closed, and infrastructure crumbled under the intense heat. As the heatwave continued, water became scarce. 

During what the Chinese people know as the “century of humiliation” between 1839 and 1949 when the country was pillaged by Western and Japanese imperialism, weather statistics were not kept. China’s climate record-keeping system only began in 1961 as socialist planning was getting the country back on its feet. This year’s heatwave was the worst in the six decades since then. Many scientists say it may be the worst ever recorded anywhere on the globe, not just in terms of its intensity but also due to its duration.

China has invested heavily in the mitigation of the effects of climate change. While not always in sync with the goals set at the international conferences where the U.S. and other imperialist delegates tried to obligate countries of the Global South equally with rich imperialist countries, President Xi Jinping has pledged that China would be carbon neutral by 2060. While still forced to rely heavily on coal for power generation and manufacturing, they have made strides in other ways of lowering their “carbon footprint” and are world leaders in impressive innovation. 

China’s focus on producing solar panels and wind power components has driven down the price on the world market, making renewables more viable for the entire world. The world’s largest Pumped-Hydro Facility, built by state-owned State Grid Corporation, supplies energy to Beijing and other areas. This technology uses excess solar energy to pump water to a higher elevation when the sun is out. Then when the power demand exceeds the ability of solar panels to provide enough, water is released to run generators on the way back down. China plans to increase its capacity by four times by 2025. 

Another state-owned company is in the research and development stage of positioning solar panels 22,000 miles above the earth because solar energy on the ground is only 20% efficient compared to 98% in space. They can get the equipment up, and the next challenge is the transportation of the energy back to the ground. The payoff on the project is likely in the distant future, but it speaks volumes about the determination of the Chinese leadership. 

These are examples of working toward mitigation – slowing and then stopping the emissions of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gasses, an important contribution to the global effort. 

Adaptation is the other half of dealing with climate change for every nation in the world. Protecting one’s country from the effects of extreme weather is a more difficult and immediate challenge. Even though China is a world leader in mitigating climate change, rising global temperatures can cause crises in any country. Working hard and investing in mitigation won’t protect China from the inevitable extreme weather from climate change. Conversely, the emissions from the use of coal that China is, to a large extent, still forced to rely on are not what brought about the terrible heatwave of 2022.

To affix blame for every climate change disaster, look to the United States and Britain, which historically contributed most of the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Even today, on a per capita basis, the U.S. and Britain are the first and second greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses. But the crisis for the Global South is the result of colonial subjugation, imperialist warfare and other forms of dominance. 

At the very least, the imperialist countries must be forced to meet the agreed-on obligations to help the Global South with adaptation. As delegates from the Global South prepare to travel to Sharm el-Sheikh in November to make their case, progressive movement activists worldwide, especially in the U.S., should be planning for an all-out campaign of solidarity. The struggle to succeed against climate change is an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle. Capitalism and imperialism must be abolished, root and branch, to save the planet! 

The lede of the Guardian’s Oct. 7 article on Haiti, repeated with slight variations throughout the international mainstream media, was that “Haiti’s government has authorized the prime minister, Ariel Henry, to ask the international community for a ‘specialized armed force’ to address a crisis caused by a blockade of the country’s main fuel port” by “a coalition of gangs” which has “crippled transportation and forced businesses and hospitals to halt operations” as well as causing “a shortage of bottled water, just as the country confirmed a new outbreak of cholera, the spread of which is controlled through hygiene and clean water.”

The weekly Haïti Liberté summed up such reporting in its Oct. 5 editorial: “The recent declarations made by the capitalist system’s representatives want to… make the ‘gangs’ responsible for all the nation’s problems in order to fool national and international public opinion… and justify their military intervention… to defend their interests and allies in Haiti.”

The Guardian’s lede needs some translation for those not familiar with Haiti.

“Haiti’s government” is nothing more than a gaggle of political charlatans and opportunists appointed by Henry, who was in turn anointed by the Core Group, which is led by the U.S. Embassy but includes the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, and Spain, as well as representatives of the United Nations and Organization of American States (OAS). It was formed in 2004 following the U.S.-orchestrated coup against progressive Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Furthermore, the only elected government officials left in Haiti, ten Senators, unanimously passed a resolution on Oct. 9 to demand an “immediate suspension” of Henry’s request to Guterres for foreign military intervention. Henry’s Oct. 9 letter said: “The support we ask for should help us to retake control of the situation, restore state authority, make the rule of law respected, and envisage in the near future a return to the normal functioning of democratic institutions.”

Ariel Henry is a long-time U.S. government agent, who sat on the Washington-concocted “Council of Sages,” which appointed the post-2004-coup de facto government of Gérard Latortue. Henry, like the U.S.,  also appears to be complicit in the Jul. 7, 2021 murder of President Jovenel Moïse. The slain president had named – but not sworn in – Henry to be Prime Minister two days before his assassination, but any shred of legitimacy that Henry may have had ended on Feb. 7, 2022, the undisputed end of Moïse’s term.

The “blockade of the country’s main fuel port,” the Varreux Terminal on the Port-au-Prince bay waterfront, by “a coalition of gangs” refers to the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, Mess with One, You Mess with All. The FRG9 is an alliance of crime-fighting armed neighborhood groups led by former policeman Jimmy Cherizier, nicknamed “Barbecue.”

The FRG9 has wholeheartedly joined in the nationwide mobilization to demand Ariel Henry’s resignation. (The FRG9 almost drove Henry from power with a similar tactic last autumn.) Barricades have been erected throughout the capital and towns across Haiti, not just near the Varreux Terminal, an area the FRG9 controls. Therefore, it is specious to blame Varreux’s “blockade” on the FRG9, because roads are barricaded everywhere, making fuel deliveries impossible. Furthermore, not one popular demonstration or group across Haiti has called on the FRG9 to remove its barricade outside the Varreux terminal.

But Washington has exclusively sanctioned and denounced the FRG9 and Cherizier, not the confederation of kidnapping, criminal gangs known as G-Pèp. The two armed federations – one criminal, one anti-crime – have battled fiercely since the summer, but the U.S. and its allied media consistently conflate the two simply as “the gangs.”

Washington has targeted the FRG9 instead of G-Pèp (which works with Henry’s governing coalition and the police) because Cherizier observed in 2021 that “the country has been controlled by a small group of people who decide everything …They put guns into the poor neighborhoods for us to fight with one another for their benefit.” While denouncing the “stinking, rotten bourgeoisie,” Cherizier has stated that “we have to overturn the whole system, where 12 families have taken the nation hostage.” That system “is not good, stinks, and is corrupt.”

Referring to a mural in his Delmas 6 neighborhood depicting Che Guevara, Cherizier declared, “we made that mural, and we intend to make murals of other figures like … Thomas Sankara and … Fidel Castro, to depict people who have engaged in struggle.”

These words about and aspirations for social revolution have panicked Washington and its Haitian bourgeois allies.

The Haitian masses have protested continuously and countrywide since September, when Henry announced International Monetary Fund (IMF)-dictated fuel price hikes. Shortages of fuel and food have resulted, along with runaway inflation. Banks and stores are shuttered. Students are marching as schools remain closed. Labor unions, including the all important public transportation drivers, have been on strike. The pattern has repeated intermittently for ten years.

Haitians are suffering. Presently, 40% of the people are food insecure. Some 4.9 million of them (43%) need humanitarian assistance. Life expectancy at birth is 63.7 years. Haiti’s poverty rate is 58.5%, with 73.5 % of adult Haitians living on less than $5.50 per day.

Electoral politics are fractured.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton facilitated President Michel Martelly’s presidential victory in 2011. President Moïse in 2017 was the choice of 600,000 voters – out of six million eligible. He illegally extended his presidential term by a year. There have been no presidential elections for six years, no elected mayors or deputies (the equivalent of Congresspeople), and only one-third of the Senate in office for over a year. There are no scheduled elections ahead.

The U.S. Global Fragility Act of 2019 authorizes multi-agency intervention in “fragile” countries like Haiti, the Pentagon being the centerpiece. The U.S. establishment’s Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) wants U.S. soldiers to instruct Haitian police on handling “gangs.” OAS chief Luis Almagro calls for military occupation and is trying to reach the 23 nation threshold (he only has 19 now) that Washington’s “Ministry of Colonial Affairs” needs to invoke for the first time the 2001 “InterAmerican Charter,”which authorizes an OAS military intervention, similar to what Washington undertook in the neighboring Dominican Republic in 1965. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres wants international support for training Haitian police and is now trying to win Security Council approval to deputize “one country” (likely the U.S. or Canada) to militarily intervene in response to Henry’s controversial request.

Former U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti Daniel Foote weighed in with a choice: either “send a company of special forces trainers to teach the police and set up an anti-gang task force, or send 25,000 troops at some undetermined but imminent period in the future.” The Dominican Republic has stationed troops at its border with Haiti and also is calling for foreign military intervention into Haiti.

Henry insists he will eventually carry out presidential elections. The prevailing opinion holds that he won’t be able to any time soon.

The Core Group backs an important coalition announced by the so-called Montana Accord on Aug. 30, 2021. It provides for a National Transition Council that would prepare for national elections in two years and govern the country in the meantime. The Council in January 2022 chose banker Fritz Alphonse Jean as transitional president and former senator Steven Benoit as prime minister. They have not yet assumed those jobs.

The Montana group consists of “civil society organizations and powerful political figures” from traditional political parties. The radical popular organization MOLEGHAF has pulled out, as has Aristide’s Lavalas Family party. The foremost leader of the Montana Accord is Magali Comeau Denis, who was a cheerleader for the U.S.-organized 2004 coup against Aristide and the Culture Minister of Gérard Latortue’s post-coup de facto regime. Ariel Henry also worked with the pro-coup Democratic Convergence, a political party coalition that in 2000 plotted to supplant President Aristide and sabotage his inauguration.

The CFR wants the U.S. government to make a shotgun wedding between Henry and the Montana Accord, or, failing that, switch outright to Montana leadership. The CFR and Daniel Foote support the Montana Accord because it disingenuously calls for a “Haitian-led solution,” an important fig-leaf for U.S. neocolonial rule. The Montana Group has even demagogically denounced Ariel Henry’s request for foreign intervention as “treason,” despite Magali Comeau Denis’ sordid history, a recent article by Montana’s #2, Jacques Ted St. Dic, calling on Washington to provide “security support needed for [Montana’s] transitional government to protect Haitians from gang violence,” and several brown-nosing sessions the Montana Accord leaders held with Washington’s officials, pleading for the approval which they seem to have finally won.

Washington is already in deep with the National Police of Haiti (PNH). The U.S. government provided the PNH with $312 million in weapons and training between 2010 and 2020, and with $20 million in 2021. The State Department contributed $28 million for SWAT training in July. As of 2019, there were illegal arms in Haiti worth half a million dollars, mostly from the United States.

Meanwhile, the FRG9 is preparing to do battle with U.S. invaders, as it has with a PNH/G-Pèp alliance in recent weeks. “We know that U.S. troops are preparing to trample on sovereign Haitian soil,” Cherizier told Haïti Liberté on Oct. 10. “We are devising our strategies and tactics to deal with them.”

It would be the first time such a large organized force has resisted a U.S. intervention since U.S. Marines first invaded Haiti on Jul. 28, 1915. During their 19 year military occupation, the U.S. faced five years of organized guerilla resistance from the Cacos, whom they also called “bandits,” like the “gangs” today. The Cacos’ military defeat was followed however by 14 years of strikes, demonstrations, and other protests.

In 1915, U.S. Marines first invaded and then appointed President Sudre Dartiguenave to invite them to stay. A century later, Washington first appointed their puppet, Ariel Henry, and then had him do the inviting.

Fed up with foreign military interventions, Haitians, both in Haiti and across its diaspora, appear ready to reject Washington’s attempt to trick them into a fourth deployment in a century and to fiercely resist it if it happens, no matter what the international sponsor.

Source: Haïti Liberté

In an era increasingly awash with political instability, the latest protests in Iran are yet another manifestation of the plague of Western imperialism. The sudden death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini and the unclear circumstances surrounding her death have precipitated a remarkable global response condemning the Iranian government as well as purporting to champion the rights of Iranian women in defiance of Islamic fundamentalism.

Contrary to the narrative dominating Western headlines that a democratic and grassroots revolution is underway in Iran following Amini’s death, the author maintains that Amini’s death is being exploited by Western-backed forces to hasten a color revolution and create the conditions for greater destabilization and regime change in the region.

The Iran protests did not achieve worldwide attention because of some spontaneous and organic mobilization of women across the country, nor are they representative of some monolithic goal seeking to liberate all Iranian women from the alleged (and supposedly equally felt) brutal dictates of their Islamic Republic government.

One need not dig too far back into United States history to see a repeated pattern of allegations of human rights abuses being levied against adversarial governments as the raison d’être for Western intervention.

One of the most infamous in recent memory post-9/11 was George W. Bush’s disingenuous embrace of the cause of women’s rights to further justify his administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan in the disastrous War on Terror. In the first Gulf War, the false testimony of “Nurse Nayirah” al-Sabah to the Congressional Human Rights caucus—during which she accused Iraqi troops of invading a Kuwait City hospital and removing 312 babies from incubators to perish on the cold floor—was instrumental in tipping the scale for the U.S. Senate and the American public to overwhelmingly support military force in Iraq in its quest to “save Kuwait.”

And who can forget the disturbing accusation by Western leaders of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad supposedly “gassing his own people” via a chemical attack on civilians in Douma in 2017. That the U.S. government had covertly backed rebel groups (including al-Nusra and ISIS) in the region against the Syrian government is as troubling as it is inconvenient.

Nevertheless, the chemical attack narrative struck an emotional chord with concerned Westerners who across the board (save for a few anti-imperialist voices) insisted that “Assad must go” to save the Syrian people!

A sobering analysis of U.S. Empire and its legacy of defectors, color revolutions, and flat-out lies to justify militarism and war efforts begs the question: Are the Iran protests a legitimate call to action for women’s rights, or are they largely smoke and mirrors — a familiar yet questionable narrative of human rights violations once again being deployed to advance U.S. regime-change efforts in Iran?

Let’s first consider what prompted the latest (fleeting?) global moral outrage against Iran and supposed pursuit for the rights of women in the country. The unexpected death of a civilian woman, Mahsa Amini, on September 16, 2022, sparked sharp disdain for the Iranian government and their state apparatuses, most notably of their “morality police.”

The circumstances of her death have not yet been conclusively determined; all the while rage continues to fester within parts of Iran and in the international community. When alleged eyewitnesses and other “trusted voices” (like Iranian expatriate Masih Alinejad—a CIA asset who has worked alongside Mike Pompeo, Madeleine Albright, and other warmongers) claimed that Amini was beaten by Iranian police for incorrectly wearing her hijab, the Iranian government was quick to release CCTV footage that—contrary to what was being echoed at the time—showed Amini unexpectedly collapsing on her own inside Tehran’s police station.

Refuting the claim of the Iranian government that she had a previous medical condition propelling a heart attack and subsequent coma, Amini’s family maintains that their daughter was beaten to death.

Of course, the death of this young woman is undeniably upsetting, and if evidence comes forward suggesting the morality police are to blame, then the reasonable demand is to put those officers on trial for policy brutality and demand accountability of the country’s state officials.

But one ought to cast a critical lens on how this singular event amidst a sea of human rights catastrophes so shamefully rampant in our current global milieu has caused a global uprising while the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, Yemenis at the hands of Saudi Arabia, and Armenians under Azerbaijan forces have gone largely ignored in the eyes of supposed justice-oriented Westerners.

It is also peculiar how U.S.-imposed sanctions against Iran for decades (principally and deleteriously felt by Iranian civilians including women and children) have managed to slip under the radar of demands by the masses for justice and democracy for Iranian women, conveniently eschewing any moral outrage for the myriad ways the imperial core has directly caused the suffering and deaths of Iranian civilians.

It also seems odd how quickly narrative management and new demands have been achieved as this story swept across the mainstream Western press and Meta’s social media. While Amini’s death initially sparked liberal demands to remove the mandatory hijab laws, it appears to have seamlessly shifted into manufacturing consent for regime change of the Iranian government.

It is all too convenient how the demands advanced by concerned Westerners and a specific faction of Iranian protesters for “justice and democracy” seem to fall perfectly in line with the imperialist ambitions of Iran’s principal adversaries, namely the United States and Israel. It makes you wonder if people’s moral outrage over Mahsa Amini’s death and disdain for Iran’s Islamic Republic comes from a genuine and lasting concern for Iranians, or because the latest war propaganda told them to.

Casting suspicion on the demands of these protests and expressing concern for its possible future outcomes are reasonable given the myriad angles on why these protests do not really make a lot of sense upon closer inspection.

First, protests of this size and sustained duration do not commonly erupt suddenly and organically. The success of these ongoing protests to capture the undivided attention of international audiences with such gusto involves very skilled organization with a history of strategic planning, resources, and sustained leadership—without which the protest(s) would inevitably lose steam.

While boots-on-the-ground military operations and coup d’états were once the primary strategy by which imperialist nations destabilized their enemies, embracing more covert strategies including astroturfing organic social movements or outright creating the conditions for political unrest within a country has become more normative and arguably more successful.

Under the deceptive exterior of functioning as a neutral non-profit organization, the primary function of CIA cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is to foist regime-change operations in countries adversarial to U.S. interests by arming and training rebel groups, defectors, agent provocateurs, and/or separatists to infiltrate protests and social movements in order to swiftly advance the imperialist ambitions of the United States.

While Westerners were seemingly out-of-nowhere captured by the call to support democracy for citizens in Hong Kong 2019/20 under the alleged brutal dictates of the Chinese government, critical investigative journalism has since revealed these uprisings were but the latest covert escalation in the United States’s cold war with China.

Anyone who does not think Iran’s political adversaries are somehow involved tacitly or directly with these mass protests is certainly naïve to the sly tactics of these color revolutions. It is also no accident that certain so-called movements for “social justice,” “democracy,” or “women’s rights” are embraced and promoted by the U.S. Empire, while truly revolutionary movements such as the Sandinistas, the Bolivarian Revolution, and the Palestinian Resistance Movement do not get anywhere near the same global attention and are actively repressed in the Western press.

The fact that these protests in Iran have received wall-to-wall coverage should raise a few eyebrows.

The moral condemnation people express over the practices embedded in certain Islamic republics but not others is also quite curious. Why, for instance, do Westerners (in the last two weeks especially) deem the Iranian Islamic Republic so morally aghast for women’s rights, but the same disdain (as demonstrated in global uprisings for example) is not reserved for the Saudi government and its strict adherence to extremist Wahhabism?

While it can certainly be argued that Iran ought to modernize some of its laws pertaining to the rights of women, Saudi Arabian authorities have enacted far harsher repressive tactics upon the women in their own country, all the while directly engaging in the ethnic cleansing of the citizens of Yemen. I have yet to see a call to action from Western liberals to demand justice for Saudi (and Yemeni) women living under the dictates of this repressive regime.

Finally, make no mistake, we are living in a time of grossly hostile geopolitics led predominantly by the United States and its junior partners, and causing numerous political quagmires worldwide—so many that we can’t keep up. Masses of people are swallowing war propaganda like it is kool-aid, and sadly it is only become more sophisticated and covert through the advancement of private and corporate-run social media companies.

It is no coincidence that, within this milieu of disastrous geopolitical conflicts, the imperial core continuously sows disdain for Iran (of varying degrees depending on the current political climate) in its quest to manufacture consent for eventual war with them. Just two years ago, we were caught in the throes of a possible war with Iran after the Trump administration ordered the assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani on January 3, 2020.

The U.S. Empire does not care about Mahsa Amini, but they do care about exploiting her death to achieve their own political ends. These ends of course are to successfully reinstall a Western puppet to lead Iran (like the West did in 1953, overthrowing Mohammad Mosaddegh and installing the Shah in its place until the 1979 Islamic Revolution) and have it become a subservient neo-colony of the United States.

As one of the members of the Axis of Resistance against Western-led imperialism, however, Iran continues to be a thorn in the side of the United States and makes their intended goals very difficult to achieve.

The Iran Nuclear Deal is at a standstill since Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA in 2018. More recently, Iran supported Russia’s military operation in Ukraine with the assistance of combat drones and also joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) supplying oil to China in exchange for China’s investments in Iran’s infrastructure.

Iran also has a history of supporting other U.S. adversaries and fellow members of the Axis of Resistance, including Hezbollah; the Houthi movement; Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation and Zionism; and the Assad government in Syria. A nuanced understanding of this context certainly illuminates why global outrage against Iran was never only about the death of a single civilian but, instead, was a global reaction to a cleverly orchestrated destabilization effort by the imperial West.

The question then lingers: What is an appropriate response by concerned citizens globally (but especially those residing in the imperial core) as a show of true solidarity with the women of Iran during these contentious times?

As a concerned observer in Canada, I have been sorely disappointed by several factions of the so-called socialist Left which have failed to support one obvious measure that would alleviate women’s suffering and death in Iran: the lifting of crippling economic sanctions by Western nations.

Decades of sanctions in Iran have prevented the regular flow of food, medicine and other essential supplies into the country, the negative effects of which are predominantly felt by the most vulnerable people in society.

Somehow though, at the height of the trending concern for Mahsa Amini, the United States deemed it necessary to temporarily adjust just one type of sanction—the country’s access to the internet—allegedly in order for civilians to evade surveillance and censorship by the Iranian government in the wake of the Amini protests.

The United States swiftly activated Elon Musk’s Starlink internet services to assist in this effort.

Any claim by the United States to suddenly embrace the noble pursuit of Iranians’ fight against censorship is laughably hypocritical as the U.S. Empire engages in the slow assassination of Julian Assange and the complete annihilation of press freedoms.

Further, if the U.S. can lift internet sanctions with the snap of the finger (to “help Iranian women”), what is stopping them from lifting sanctions on food, medicine, and life-saving medical devices? This is precisely because sanctions are a covert act of war designed to destabilize the living conditions of citizens in hopes that they will eventually seek to overturn their own government.

While the Western left has been quite eager to organize symbolic rallies of supposed solidarity for #MahsaAmini, and to publicly condemn the “repressive and reactionary” Iranian government, most of these groups subtly maintain that their calls for justice do not advocate for Western intervention in Iran or regime change. From an outsider looking in though, it is difficult to distinguish how the messaging relayed in these left-leaning protests differ meaningfully from those echoing State Department talking points.

Vulnerable groups of people, oftentimes women in Middle-Eastern countries, are routinely used as pawns to advance the imperial ambitions of the West. The blowback of foreign governments inserting themselves into the internal politics of other sovereign countries, mostly for nefarious reasons, cannot be ignored.

If Western observers of these protests truly want to help, the most meaningful thing they can do is to challenge the dictates of their own imperialist governments and demand an end to the brutalizing sanctions that have directly caused immeasurable suffering and death of Iranians. It is, indeed, the most meaningful show of solidarity one can do in pursuit of Iranian prosperity.

Source: CovertAction Magazine

Hundreds rallied outside the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 8 to protest the incarceration and extradition of Julian Assange. Assange is currently in the middle of his third year of confinement in London’s Belmarsh prison, serving most of that time in solitary isolation.

Protests supporting freedom for Assange were held around the world. In London, 7,000 protesters linked hands to surround the Parliament building, demanding that Britain not extradite Assange to the United States. Protests also occurred in several other U.S. cities.

Supporters of Assange in Washington marched around the DOJ complex. They symbolically encircled the complex with a large yellow ribbon with “Free Assange” written on it. Chants of “Free Assange,” “No extradition,” and “Jail John Bolton” could be heard for two city blocks as the marchers slowly made their way around the DOJ, escorted by D.C. police and accompanied by multiple musicians playing drums and guitars.

Many members of the independent media attended to cover the march and the subsequent rally that featured independent political activists from across the political spectrum.

People’s Power Assembly founding member Rev. Annie Chambers was a featured speaker at the rally. Chambers brought up the many other political prisoners of the United States, including her Black Panther brothers and sisters, and how this sort of isolation is used as a form of torture. 

At first, the British Magistrate blocked Assange’s extradition from Britain in January 2021. However, the British High Court later overturned that decision when the U.S. government appealed.

Assange will face espionage charges if he is extradited to the U.S. Assange is being sought by the U.S. for publishing documents that revealed U.S. war crimes and human rights atrocities.

According to Assange’s defense, “The politically motivated charges represent an unprecedented attack on press freedom and the public’s right to know – seeking to criminalize basic journalistic activity.”

If convicted, Julian Assange faces a sentence of 175 years, likely to be spent in extreme isolation.

Recently Assange has tested positive for COVID-19. While in Belmarsh prison, Assange’s mental and physical health has greatly deteriorated. With this new diagnosis of COVID-19 and Assange’s chronic lung disease, supporters and his family are again urging the courts to release him immediately.

Setareh Sadeghi, an Esfahan, Iran-based scholar and teacher, provides Max Blumenthal with a complex view of Iran’s protests against the country’s morality police and the death of Mahsa Amini never heard in U.S. mainstream media.

A full transcript of Sadeghi’s conversation with Blumenthal is below.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Welcome to The Grayzone.  It’s Max Blumenthal.

Protests inside Iran triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was picked up by Iran’s morality police on the grounds of supposed indecent exposure, have drawn massive international attention.  Media around the world are following these protests, and on social media, the hashtag surrounding Mahsa Amini’s name has generated more attention and retweets than almost any hashtag in Twitter history.

So how much of this international response is authentic?  And how much of it is related to genuine concern for Iranian women—and not long-standing Western desire for regime change in Tehran?  To better understand this issue, I spoke to a woman inside Iran.  Her name is Setareh Sadeghi.  She is an independent researcher, a translator, a teacher, and a Ph.D.  She lives in the city of Esfahan.

Setareh Sadeghi, let’s talk about you and your own political views before we get into some of the details of these protests and the campaign behind them.

You studied the U.S. Civil Rights Movement as part of your Ph.D., and you’re also a student of propaganda [analysis].  Where do you situate yourself within the Iranian political spectrum, and specifically do you support women protesting the morality police and issues like the hijab?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, yes, as you mentioned, I finished my Ph.D. in American Studies, and I studied propaganda analysis as part of my Ph.D. dissertation, and the rhetoric of social movements as well.  So, I have always been supportive of the Iranian government as a whole—the notion of an Islamic republic—but I have also been critical towards a lot of the things that happen in my country, like many of the other people who live here.

So, for the issue of hijab, as someone who believes in hijab and has always practiced it, I am totally against the morality police.  By the way, in Farsi, the word that we use for it is the “Guidance Patrol,” but in English, it’s usually referred to as the morality police, and I’m totally against it.  I have been a part of the people, especially women, who took it online and used hashtags to talk about how they do not believe in the morality police even though they believe in hijab.  And this is not something new.  It has been in place from many years ago, but it’s become more significant this year.

So, even before these protests and before the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, people were talking about it online and I was also one of them because I saw this was totally unacceptable.  And even in my personal life—because I have friends who do not believe in the hijab and they don’t want to practice it, or they practiced it in a way that did not fit the standards of the Islamic Republic’s law of the dress code, and they were stopped by the morality police.  In at least three cases that I remember, I would just go talk to the morality police and tell them, as someone who believes in hijab, I am totally against what they’re doing, and this is not the way they should enforce the law.  Because it’s not always that they…the morality police don’t always arrest people.  Their main job was to go and tell people.  But even that, I’m totally against it and I don’t think that’s something that works, mainly because a lot of people who live here believe in some sort of dress code.  I think as a woman, I think that’s not something that people should tell us.  Like, I believe in law and order, but also, I don’t like being told those details, like how to dress and how to appear in public.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  So, what is the role of the morality police, and how much public opposition is there to this unit of the security services?  And are they known for being as brutal as they’re currently being portrayed?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Well, yes, they are known as being brutal because Iranian women don’t find it acceptable—not necessarily because everything that they do is brutal, but some harsh treatments are an integral part of the way they enforce the hijab law.  But it’s also that, while I think a lot of people are against the morality police, it’s not that everyone is against the mandatory hijab law.  So, these are two things that should be studied differently.  A lot of people, I mean, there are different surveys, and different surveys in different provinces show a different percentage of people believing in obligatory or mandatory hijab, and I think that’s something that has to be dealt with based on the local culture of each province.

And that is also reflective of how the protests are going on, for example, in my hometown, because it’s considered more conservative and more traditional.  The protests there are very much smaller than what you could see in other cities, for example, in Tehran or Rasht or other cities where the protests were significant compared to what is going on in my town.  So, yeah, there are also people who believe that the morality police should be in place but the methods that they’re using should be different.

So, I think if you want to categorize women and people who live inside Iran, we have people who are totally against the mandatory hijab.  They don’t believe in hijab at all and, obviously, they don’t believe in morality police.  We have people who believe in hijab, but they don’t believe in the morality police or the mandatory hijab.  We have people who believe in hijab, and they believe in the morality police, but they don’t believe in the methods that they are using.  And that also creates a collective of people who are against the morality police but, again, based on how they feel towards it, their participation in these protests is different.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  So, let’s talk about the issue of Mahsa Amini.  What do we know about her death?  Most people in the West who are following this believe she was beaten to death by the morality police in police custody.  Has that been established as the case, and is that the understanding even of the protesters in Iran?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Not really.  I mean, even a lot of those Western media outlets corrected their headlines or started using different terms, referring to the case when the CCTV footage of the moment when Mahsa Amini fell and went into a coma was published.  So, a lot of people believed that footage, about how some people said that she had bruises on her legs when she was taken to hospital, which shows that there was a beating.  But the footage clearly shows that she was in good health conditions when she was there, based on what we see.

An investigation has been ordered.  The files all are not yet published.  There are talks about it, but there’s not a final statement by the state.  The last thing that they have said is that the probe shows that there was no beating involved.  They even released the CT scans of her brain and, as I said, there was CCTV footage.  So, while there are protesters who believe that the beating happened, there are also a lot of protesters who think that it did not happen.  But the fact that a young woman died in police custody only because of violating the dress code is something unacceptable, no matter what exactly happened in police custody.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  You’re in Esfahan, which is a large city in Iran, outside of Tehran.  Most of the protests, as far as we know, have been centered in the capital of Tehran, and you have been receiving a wave of death threats for reporting that the protests in your city were very small and that the protests have not spread to key Iranian cities.  Is that still the case?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Well, because I have already blocked a lot of people, and because the person who started those threats, as someone who knew me in person, at this point I can say that I haven’t received any new threats.  But it was because I appear on different media and I have talked about Iran as a political analyst, I’ve always received insulting or sometimes death threats.  But this time it was really unprecedented, as it was started by someone who knew me in person and had my personal information, and even the number of the people who attacked me was really huge.

And it started with the Independence Farsi account on Instagram, publishing a snippet of my interview and disregarding all the criticism that I had against the morality police, the crackdown on everything, and just saying that I lied about the number of the people participating in the protests, or the fact that these protests are much smaller than the ones that we witnessed, for example, in Esfahan in 2019.  But at the same time there were a lot of people who were totally against even the Islamic Republic.  But I mentioned that, and they verified it and they said that they were part of the protests, and that’s true.  It was not significant because, as I said, Esfahan is a conservative and more traditional city, and people take to the streets on different issues.  The morality police are, I guess, not the number one issue for people who live here.  And I talked to my friends who don’t observe the hijab completely or according to the law, and they said that this is really not their number one issue, and so they don’t want to be part of the protests.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Right.  We’ve seen large protests over the price of food or economic issues in Iran that were totally ignored in Western media.  So, what do you make of the response in Western media, not just Western broadcast media but social media as well?  The Mahsa Amini hashtag is one of the most popular hashtags in history, as you tweeted.  It’s as if there are no other issues in the entire world.  Do you think the outrage that we’ve seen on social media is authentic, or something that is being encouraged or pushed by Western—specifically NATO—states, the same way that there was a massive social media amplification campaign around the so-called Arab Spring?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Yeah, that’s true.  I mean, social media has never been a true reflection of what’s happening in different societies, especially not Iranian society, because Twitter is blocked here, and a lot of people do not have access to it.  So, the number of Iranian users on Twitter is not significant because they use other [platforms].  For example, Instagram.  Before these protests Instagram was not blocked, and a very large proportion of the population had Instagram accounts, especially because they also used it for selling products and they had their businesses on it; especially a lot of women run their own business on Instagram.  But Twitter is very different and it’s something that is known by Iranians.  Even those who are on Twitter, they know that it’s very different from the realities on the ground.  And it’s surprising how when there was, especially in those towns where the protests were met, the crackdown on it was really severe and a lot of people couldn’t even use the hashtags, [but then] broke a record, which tells us that there is something that doesn’t come from Iran.

And there is a history of fake hashtags and fake accounts and trolls on Twitter, trying to portray Iran in a different way, and it’s not only about a protest.  There are other cases.  For example, there was a time when, if you posted anything positive about your life in Iran, you would be attacked by these trolls, because they said that you are normalizing Iranian people’s misery as if there is no normal life in Iran and the only thing that you are allowed to post online about Iran is just all the problems and the grievances.  They attacked a university professor for only posting pictures of him[self] inside a cafe in Tehran, for example.

So, we also have the case of Heshmat Alavi, who apparently is a Twitter user who posts against the Islamic Republic on Twitter.  And it’s interesting that when Trump withdrew from the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action known commonly as the Iran nuclear deal], he mentioned that the JCPOA is facilitating Iran’s crackdown on its people or on certain issues, and two Washington Post journalists asked for a source.  And the source that Trump offered was an article written by Heshmat Alavi.  And an MEK defector later also talked about how the camp in Albania, the MEK camp in Albania, uses its members to start hashtags and make them a trend, and they’re paid to post about it.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Just quickly, for those who don’t know, the MEK is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is a U.S.- and Saudi-backed opposition movement, dedicated explicitly to regime change in Iran and replacing it with its cult-like leader, Maryam Rajavi.  They have been based in Albania under the watch of the U.S. military and U.S. intelligence, and it’s there that they maintain a troll farm, as you said, to spin out hashtags against the government in Iran.  And this account, Heshmat Alavi, apparently was a sock puppet run out of this troll farm.

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Yeah, that’s what the investigation shows.  And even for the recent hashtag, the historical hashtag trends about Mahsa Amini, a few Iranian users track them and try to find out where those hashtags come from.  And then you see a lot of users just posting nonsense, like alphabets and then using the hashtags, and right now I think it surpassed a hundred million times the hashtag words in Farsi and in English, and they come from a limited number of users.  I think it’s less than 300,000 users that have been using the hashtags, but it already has the historical trend on Twitter.

And it’s interesting how, as you said, the protests in 2019, because at that time they were also really huge in my neighborhood.  And in Esfahan I did not see any reflection of it online, because usually, like that protest was more by the working class and the middle class because it had economic causes, and it affected a larger proportion of the population.  So naturally it was bigger, but you wouldn’t hear about it 24/7 on mainstream media or on social media.  But this time, it’s a social issue, and it’s a very important issue for women, but at the same time it’s not really as big as the previous protests that we had.  But we already have a historical record of hashtags for it, so it totally shows that it’s not reflective of what is actually going on in Iran.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Well, The New York Times is also reporting that the U.S. State Department and its allies are trying to get communication gear into Iran.  However, much of the noise about these protests appears to be coming from the outside.  Because of an issue that Westerners can relate to, we’re deluged with identity politics here and we don’t have large economic protests here in the United States anymore, outside of maybe some union activity, some strikes.  This is a case of the weaponization of identity, and obviously, a real issue, as you point out, a real issue with the morality police maybe not at the top of the agenda but something that upsets a section of the population in Iran.

But outside much of the noise is being made by Iranian exiles or ex-pats, and one of the key voices who’s emerged in U.S. media, cable news media, is a figure named Masih Alinejad, who I’m sure you know.  She’s been backed by the U.S. government, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts with the Voice of America, which is the U.S. government’s global broadcasting system.  She’s met with former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.  Recently she cooked up a phony plot in coordination with the U.S. government and the FBI, claiming that the Venezuelan security services were going to kidnap her and take her on speed boats to Iran.  It was one of the most ridiculous plots I’ve ever heard, and it was widely reported in U.S. media.  Now she’s back.  So, what do you make of Iranian ex-pats kind of taking the mic and becoming the voice of the Iranian public?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Well, I wouldn’t mind.  Obviously, Iranian women would be very happy if those in exile really wanted to be a voice for women inside, but the thing is they are just echoing the voice of, I would say, a minority and just a section of the population in Iran that they agree with.

I think they also believe in the Western liberal notion of freedom for women, and not the notion—they don’t really care.  I’m not talking about everyone, obviously, but some of these people who are given a voice and whose voices are amplified over the voices of women inside Iran, they’re just repeating the Western notion of freedom for women.  And they do not understand that women in Iran can have a different notion of freedom, and [that] they have other priorities when it comes to women’s rights and women’s activism.

And a lot of women here are working towards that.  They are organizing, they are using online campaigns to pursue Iranian women’s rights.  But these voices from outside really make our struggle more difficult.  Instead of, for example, calling for the U.S. government or the EU to lift sanctions on Iran that are hurting ordinary Iranian people and making it more difficult for women to find, for example, job opportunities or to just be an active part of the society, they are calling for their own notion.  They’re calling for something that they believe would be liberating for Iranian women, but that’s not necessarily the case for the majority of Iranian women.  And I personally find it kind of insulting, because it is like you are disregarding and discrediting Iranian women.

Iranian women inside Iran are very powerful.  A large proportion of Iranian women—or the majority of Iranian women, actually it’s a high percentage—go to colleges and they’re highly educated.  We have women in business, we have women in medicine and universities, and women are a very active part of the society, so they know how to pursue reforms.  For example, there is this case.  You can see online that there is civil disobedience happening inside Iran without any hashtags or calls from outside, and it is helping women here.  For example, in my town, riding a bicycle for women was not by law forbidden, but culturally there were a group of extra-conservative religious people in Esfahan who were against riding bicycles for women, and they were calling for that to happen, they were saying that we’re not going to allow that.  Women did not take to Twitter to talk about it.  They did not make a fuss about it and start running a protest.  What they did instead was, a lot of women, many of them in full hijab and full covering, started riding their bicycles through the city.  And now it has become an absolute normal scene in my city, and those conservative groups cannot oppose it anymore.  This is how civil disobedience and pursuing reform works.  Because a lot of the things we see, for example, that the government is actually imposing or implementing comes from the fact that there is a large proportion of the population that believes in those things.

So, we need education; it’s a progress, it’s a process of reforming and educating women and educating men about women’s rights.  It doesn’t happen by a hashtag revolution and just taking to the streets.  And then it’s very easy for these protests to get violent, and there are people who abuse it.  It starts with slogans for women’s rights, but it ends up with slogans against establishment and calling for the overthrowing of the establishment.  So, a lot of women don’t want to be a part of that simply because they see how this is hijacked, how this is exaggerated by Western media and social media as well.  And so, they see the realities, and they see those reflections, and they don’t want to be a part of it.  But they do their job for seeking reform and educating their family members and being an active part of this process of bringing change to their society.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  So, aside from the Iranian ex-pats who were getting a lot of attention and speaking out on behalf of all Iranians, you have major celebrities sharing the Mahsa Amini hashtag.  What do you make of the participation of celebrities, Hollywood stars, and recording artists?  And how much do they really know about the situation inside Iran?  Are they getting anything wrong?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Well, while I hope a lot of them have the good intention of supporting Iranian women—and it’s only out of ignorance, not that they have been paid or supported by the U.S. government to do that—I think it’s very hypocritical because they didn’t talk about how sanctions have been hurting Iranian people and Iranian women and taking opportunities away from them.  For example, as an academic, like a lot of my colleagues have experienced that their papers, their academic publications are not even considered, only because they come from Iran.  That’s also a form of injustice.  I mean, that affects only the academia in Iran, but sanctions affect ordinary people.  They are really affecting ordinary Iranians and making it impossible, for example, people with cancer to provide their medicines, to find their medicines.  A lot of medical companies refuse to sell Iran medicine, citing U.S. sanctions, because there are a lot of European companies who just do not want to stand against the U.S. pressure to abide by these sanctions, so they just refuse to sell medicine.  It’s not always directly from those companies; it’s also because of the international sanctions on Iranian banks that make it impossible for Iran to buy those medicines.  So, there are a lot of factors involved that are making it impossible.  So, I personally—and I’m sure a lot of people—find it really hypocritical.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Well, you mentioned some violence taking place.  We’ve seen police officers be killed and a number of deaths, as well as what appears to be armed clashes on the Iranian-Iraqi border.  Are these protests turning violent, and are they being infiltrated by violent elements who actually have very little interest in women’s rights?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Yes, that’s, unfortunately, the case.  Iranian women rightfully wanted to protest and take to the streets and make a statement to the state, which I think they have already made, but there were elements who infiltrated it and started violence, like attacks on public property, even on people’s property.  They burned people’s cars, there were shootings, and a lot of people have died in these protests, many of them who were women.  And it’s not everyone died because of police shootings or police crackdowns. A lot of those people died because of the thugs and mobs that were involved in these protests.  And obviously, like you said, they don’t care about women’s rights.  They have another agenda to follow.

And this is also another reason a lot of women who maybe initially were protesting took a line to talk about that, that this is absolutely not what women want, and it’s not supporting women’s rights.  But there were also, like I said, peaceful protests going on, and they didn’t receive crackdowns, obviously, because they weren’t as violent.  In universities and on different streets where people just were peacefully protesting without burning things down.  But with those infiltrations, it became very difficult to keep them peaceful.

And, also, you asked me about the Kurdish environment, right?

MAX BLUMENTHAL:   Yeah, Mahsa Amini was Kurdish, and many of the protests have taken place in Kurdish areas, if I’m not incorrect.  So, how is the Kurdish issue influencing these protests?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Yeah, well, it appears that one of Mahsa Amini’s cousins was a member of one of these Kurdish separatist movements which have also carried out terrorist acts, but obviously she had nothing to do with these people.  But this cousin abused or exploited his relation[ship] with Mahsa Amini, to say that this was to [be] portrayed as an ethnic issue.  But Mahsa’s family, including her uncle, spoke out and said that ‘This has nothing to do with our ethnicity.  We are Kurdish, but this is about Iran and women’s rights.  It has nothing to do with our ethnicity.  This involves everyone.’

But different leaders of Kurdish movements inside Iran and outside, like the ones in Iraqi Kurdistan as well, started saying that they were planning for the protests, and they called for people to take to the streets.  And even the slogan that has become popular for this movement, which is translated into “Women, Life, Liberty,” that’s a popular Kurdish slogan.  And it’s beautiful and people relate to it, but even the slogan came from these Kurdish ethnic groups that were involved, and by now one of the cities at the border witnessed attacks on police stations by some of these Kurdish elements.  And Iran started—because they were funded and armed from outside Iran, from Iraqi Kurdistan—Iran also started attacking their bases in Iraq.  And just recently, just yesterday, a lot of people, at least, I think about eleven people died in these attacks.  But the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] has made it clear that they won’t stop until they just back down.

And I think it’s also important to know that I have Kurdish family members and they do not see themselves a part of it at all.  So, it’s not about the ethnicity.  It’s about a group funded by outside sources wanting to exploit these protests and break a rock on Iran and the society.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Well, those Kurdish separatists on the Iraqi side of the border are part of the Barzani clan, right?  Which has been historically backed by the U.S. and armed by the U.S..

SETAREH SADEGHI:   Yeah, and Mossad at some time. Yeah, that’s true.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:   And the Israeli Mossad.

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Yeah, that’s why.  And Iranian people have a really bitter memory of their activities in Iran.  They have killed a lot of people within the Kurdish region.  And they have been given a platform by, for example, BBC Persian and other propaganda by the British government and the U.S. government, which, again, doesn’t resonate with what’s going on in Iran and makes a lot of Iranians angry, because it’s really not about ethnicity at all.  I mean, Mahsa Amini’s family made it very clear that they consider themselves Iranian before anything and it’s really not about ethnicity.  But these people are totally disregarding that.  They don’t care about the hair case or the case of women; they’re just exploiting it to create chaos inside Iran and make it very difficult for Iranian people to take part in those protests because they can be easily exploited.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  And we saw rather small protests in Cuba in 2021 backed by the U.S., staged by people who’d been involved in U.S. embassy programs, be exploited by the Biden administration to justify not returning to the normalization deal that the Obama administration had hashed out with the Cuban government.  Do you think these protests will have a similar effect, and will provide the Biden administration with justification for not returning to the JCPOA Iran deal that the Obama administration and the Iranian government agreed to?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Absolutely.  And not only that, I think it gives more justification for the U.S. government to impose even more sanctions on Iranian people, which, as I said, and the UN also acknowledges that the unilateral coercive measures by the United States are hurting ordinary people in Iran, especially women.  I mean, they’re taking a lot of opportunities away from women.  So, yeah, that’s why this is another reason for me, for example, and a lot of people in Iran and a lot of women inside Iran, that if these protests are going to lead to more sanctions, which seems to be the case already, they don’t want to be a part of this.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  And do you think that these protests and the attendant violence could prove destabilizing to Iran’s internal security or expand in any way?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Well, by now the protests are almost finished and everyone is talking about how there are no longer massive protests.  And even on outlets, especially Persian-speaking TV, for example, like BBC or Manoto or VOA Persian, they tried hard to say that the protests are still going on.  And I was checking the hashtags today and there are still millions of hashtags for what’s going on in Iran, but if you go on the streets and just walk around, even in Tehran by now there’s really nothing significant happening.  In Esfahan, it’s almost over.  It’s very insignificant, and that’s something that you will hear from a lot of people who live here, and actually in certain neighborhoods if you walk you would never see anything.  I had a friend of my family saying that if a tourist comes to Iran at this time and they go walk around Esfahan, they will believe that whatever they heard on social media or mainstream media was absolutely fake.  That’s how normal life is just going on in Iran, and things are gradually going back to normal.  Even the Internet crackdown eased today, and that’s why I’ve been able to do this interview.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Well, looks like at this point the medium is the message.  Setareh Sadeghi, thanks so much for joining us at The Grayzone and keeping us informed.

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Thank you for having me and giving me a platform, as someone who lives in Iran, to have a voice.

Source: Greyzone

De-facto leader Ariel Henry’s request for foreign military support to curb gang violence has generated widespread criticism among civil society organizations, political and social leaders, and citizens in general.

On Monday October 10, under the banner of “Down with Ariel Henry, Down with the Foreign Occupation,” hundreds of thousands of Haitians took to the streets across the country against a resolution passed by de-facto Prime Minister and acting President Ariel Henry, requesting the international community to send armed help to resolve gang-related crisis in Haiti.

In the capital Port-au-Prince, thousands of citizens gathered in the Cité-Soleil commune and marched towards the Pétion-Ville commune via the Delmas commune, demanding Henry’s unconditional resignation and an end to all kinds of foreign interference in the country’s internal affairs. Protesters raised slogans such as “the United States is the problem, it cannot be the solution.”

At the Delmas 40 B crossroads, the protesters were brutally repressed by the police. Police officers used tear gas and fired live bullets against them. According to reports from local media, at least one protester was killed in the repression.

Similar massive demonstrations were also organized in other main cities. The mobilizations were held as a part of the week-long protests against the US-backed Henry administration. On Saturday, October 8, various civil society organizations, trade unions, and left-wing opposition parties called for nationwide protest actions against the multidimensional crisis facing the country due to the misgovernment of the ruling far-right Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK). October 10 was the first day of the nationwide protests, which will continue until next Monday, October 17.

https://twitter.com/viliusyvon/status/1579535415111225345

For the past seven weeks, since August 22, Haitians have been tirelessly mobilizing against increasing poverty and food insecurity amid soaring prices of essential commodities and basic services; acute shortage of fuel amid brutal increase in prices; widespread gang-related kidnappings, killings and violence; and the crushing devaluation of the national currency, the Haitian Gourde, against the $USD.

Watch: Radyo Rezistans live from the protests

Protesters have criticized that during the past one year of Henry’s illegitimate leadership, the economic, political and social crises have deepened in the country. Many have denounced that activation of criminal gangs, following the assassination of the country’s de-facto president Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, is a part of Henry’s strategy to remain in power, where he was put and held up by the US, the UN, the OAS and the Core Group. Several also have stated that Henry’s open call for foreign invasion, using gang-violence as pretext and criminalizing people’s movements demanding his resignation, provides further evidence of his intentions.

Nevertheless, the Haitian people have stressed that they will defend their sovereignty, will not allow another foreign occupation, and will themselves find a concrete solution to their situation. They have clarified that the application of the Montana Agreement is the ultimate goal of their struggle. The Montana Agreement advocates for the installation of a transitional government to govern the country for two years, in order to recover the nation from the institutional crisis caused by the PHTK, rebuild society, and organize elections for the next government.

Henry’s call for foreign intervention

Last week, on October 5, Henry, while addressing the nation, expressed his intention to request the assistance of the international community to deal with the humanitarian crisis caused by criminal gangs. The statement came after the gangs blocked access to the main fuel terminal, limiting the operation of hospitals and water treatment companies amid a resurgence of cholera in the country, which has already left at least sixteen dead.

On October 6, the Council of Ministers met to discuss the PM’s proposal. On October 7, the Council authorized Henry to request foreign military support to curb gang violence. According to the decree published in the Official Gazette, the prime minister is authorized to request the presence of a specialized armed force in the country, “to stop the humanitarian crisis caused, among other reasons, by the insecurity derived from the actions of the gangs and their sponsors.” It also stated that the foreign military presence would help “resume the distribution of fuel and drinking water throughout the country, reactivate hospitals, restart economic activities, the movement of people and goods, and reopen schools.”

On October 9, Henry wrote a letter to the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, officially asking the UN to intervene militarily in the country. It is important to note that in the past weeks, Guterres, on French international radio, seconding Henry’s false claims, said that mass protests in the streets against the Henry government are being led by gangs.

National condemnation of Henry’s call for foreign military intervention

The resolution on the military intervention generated widespread criticism among civil society organizations, political and social leaders, and citizens in general, who considered that the decision put the sovereignty of the Caribbean country at stake.

Former senator and former presidential candidate Jean Charles Moïse, leader of the left-wing Platfòm Pitit Desalin party, pointed out that neither Henry nor his ministers have the authority or legitimacy to request a foreign military presence in the country. Charles Moïse added that the country’s sovereignty had been threatened and called on the people to stand up against it.

The Organization of People in Struggle party (OPL) expressed its disagreement with the entry of foreign military forces and reiterated that the country needs support so that the National Police can carry out its work.

Reyneld Sanon, coordinator of Radio Resistance and Haitian Popular Press Agency, in a statement, rejected the decision of the PHTK and its allies “to request international imperialist forces to occupy the country for a third time.” Sanon denounced that the decision insults “our ancestors, who fought to break the chains of slavery.” He assured that “in the case that the foreign military occupation force arrived in Haiti, all Haitians, progressive groups, popular organizations, and left-wing political parties, will stand to fight.”

Jean Launy Avril, a Haitian political science professor and anthropologist, emphasized that “the Haitian people do not need humanitarian refuge from any country. They have the right to live in peace in their country, without intervention, without interference, without gangs, without anti-popular governments and sepoys.”

In a series of tweets, Launy Avril said that “the solution to the Haitian crisis must be in the hands of the Haitian people, their social and political organizations and must be recognized by the UN.” “We demand that the international community respect the right of the Haitian people to mobilize and demand a more promising future. The Haitian people are sovereign, they have been in the streets for more than a month demanding profound changes to put an end to the bad governments and the system that oppresses them,” he added.

He recalled that “in a recent letter to the UN, Haitian social and political movements assured that it is the people, who are in the streets protesting, and that they are not bandits, and denounced the political persecution by repressive forces of the de-facto PM.”

Launy Avril pointed out that “military intervention has never been a solution; in Haiti the evidence is clear. The UN brought it Cholera, mass killings, more poverty, more people forced to seek bread in other countries.” “The UN with its MINUSTAH (Stabilisation Mission) soldiers raped girls, and have left countless boys and girls without parents, living in more poverty, the invasions of Haiti have only left pain,” he added. He also said that “the MINUSTAH massacred the civilian population, between 2004 and 2008, with multiple massacres in Cité-Soleil, and with a new invasion they are going to massacre the townspeople who fight for Haitian sovereignty.”

He stressed that “the Haitian people do not want and will not accept more elections organized by foreigners. They are always fraudulent and place their puppets against the interests of the people.”

Likewise, Madame Boukman, an Haitian anti-imperialist blogger, in a series of tweets, rejected the call for military intervention and exposed the collusion between criminal gangs, the government and the imperialist forces.

“Haiti’s US-controlled police force is under-equipped by design through an arms embargo. All weapons must be approved by the US State Department. Meanwhile, an unlimited flow of illicit high caliber weapons enter Haiti from the US to arm the gangs to keep Haiti permanently destabilized,” Boukman denounced.

“The gangs are low-level foot soldiers that take orders from the high level gangs in suits (imperialists, bourgeoisie and politicians). The system that upholds them needs to fall for them to fall, just like Duvalier Tonton Macoute’s gangs fell when the masses overthrew him,” she added.

“Ariel Henry, a de facto, unelected puppet imposed on Haiti after he participated in the assassination of Jovenel Moïse, was ordered by his imperialist bosses to publicly call for a foreign invasion. He does not represent the masses,” she criticized.

In another tweet, she pointed out that the “2004-2019 UN proxy military intervention to “stabilize” Haiti resulted in Cholera, child sex rings, massacres, mass rape, endemic kidnapping, electoral fraud, chronic insecurity, gang infestation, indefinite detention, and chronic inequality, among other issues.”

https://twitter.com/madanboukman/status/1579250659098267648

Source: Peoples Dispatch