 You're watching Daily Debrief and in today's episode we are going to be talking about Haiti which is going through quite tumultuous times. The acting prime minister and acting president Oriol Henry resigned a couple of days ago amidst a mounting crisis. We have heard reports of gang violence, there's a lot of poverty, various kinds of social crisis that are gripping the country and a lot of that has to do with the lack of democracy, with the lack of any representative system, the kind of stranglehold that Oriol Henry who was for a long time backed by key powers including the US had on the country. Now Oriol Henry has finally resigned, there are talks of some kind of a transition system towards elections. To find out more, we go to Zoe. Zoe, thank you so much for joining us. So could you first maybe take us through what has been happening in Haiti over the past few days? Why was the acting president forced to resign and what has been the political context to the past in recent times for instance? As you said Prashant, yes, the situation in Haiti is critical. Late on Monday night, Oriol Henry who was the acting prime minister and president of the country resigned. He announced this, which was also announced following a meeting of CARICOM along with other international partners and so-called Haitian stakeholders. His resignation comes amid an upsurge of violence which saw an attempted airport takeover which has caused great disruption to what to normal airport traffic and actually planes being able to arrive and leave. A massive prison break, Oriol Henry had actually traveled outside the country in recent weeks to visit Kenya. We'll get back to that about why he was there in a minute and essentially he was unable to return back to Haiti and again for the past several years people have been calling for his resignation. These calls and demands for his resignation intensified and in light of the deepening crisis in the country, essentially it was decided that he would have to resign. And so this of course once again opens up a deep problem in Haiti which has been this political institutional crisis which again has roots in the 2004 coup. But more recently, Oriol Henry actually took over as acting prime minister and president in 2021 following the assassination of Jovenin Moise who was the president of Haiti who had been essentially overstaying his term by five months at the point of his assassination. He had faced widespread protests both against the inconstitutional way in which he overstayed his term. He defied the constitution. He repressed very, very heavily these protests, repressed the political opposition. And previously he had also been, and you know until his death was deeply embroiled in different corruption scandals. So already when Oriol Henry takes office there has been a long standing kind of conflict and demand from Haitian society from broad sectors of the opposition and different groups demanding that a process be started for there to be an actual democratization and for there to be a kind of re-stabilization of politics in the country and a return to democratic order. And so Oriol Henry takes essentially asserts himself as acting leader. He's of course backed by key members of the core group which is a group with representatives from the EU, United States, United Nations, Canada and France. Interestingly enough these are the kind of major powers that have been meddling in Haitian politics for decades, propping up corrupt leaders, turning a blind eye to or even supporting all of the human rights violations that have been taking place under these leaders. And so the situation at hand right now is seeing a lot of different voices across the world. On one hand we have kind of the warmongers of the United States, the imperialist countries saying that the situation is untenable and the only way to save the Haitian people is to call for a foreign military intervention. This of course has been widely rejected by Haitian groups and big parts of the progressive international community and so it's Haiti right now is at again another tipping point. We've seen many tipping points in Haitian politics over the past couple of years and always, always, always. It is the outside powers, the foreign powers who are unwilling to actually listen to what the Haitian people are demanding on the streets and within Haiti and rather they're sort of taking decisions outside of Haiti without Haitian voices and coming up with solutions that often just imply more suffering and less autonomy, less sovereignty and less ability for the Haitian people again to just sort of chart their own path and have the full economic and political sovereignty to really actually take those plans forward. Right. And a key aspect is of course been the question of foreign intervention itself, multiple proposals made. Haiti also has a very, you know, a record, very dangerous record of being intervened in on multiple occasions which have brought a lot of damage to society as well. Could you tell us a bit about that? So for the past several decades, again, foreign military intervention has been kind of a key aspect that dictates and impacts Haitian politics and life in Haiti. We know that following the coup and the earthquake in Haiti in the 2000s, the United Nations deployed what was called the Stabilization Mission which was known as MINUSTA. This was a multinational so-called peacekeeping force which was really a military occupation led by Brazil and had again participation of countries across the world but was a brutal, brutal military occupation. On our site, on People's Dispatch, we have several articles sort of shining a light on the deep abuses and human rights violations that MINUSTA was complicit in, carried out. We know that the cholera outbreak was directly linked to the presence of MINUSTA troops in Haiti. There were thousands of women and girls and children who were experiencing sexual violence at the hands of the MINUSTA troops. We know that there were horrific massacres that took place in the popular neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince by the UN peacekeeping troops, part of the Stabilization Mission. The list really goes on and Haitian organizations have been quite adamant in saying that foreign military intervention, historically of course, but even just contemporarily in the past several years, has brought great suffering on the Haitian people. So essentially in the past couple of years, as there's been these mass protests, as I said under Joven and Mois, even before he'd overstayed his term limit, there had been mass protests against him because of his involvement, him and other members of his government and his party in corruption scandals, embezzling the funds from Petrocaribe, which were meant and destined for social purposes, but they were involved in kind of just pocketing these funds, using them for their own profiteering. There were massive protests against this and also the fuel crisis, a multitude of social and economic crises that brought thousands of Haitians onto the streets to demand the resignation of Joven and Mois. And again, the possibility to actually, for example, have access to these funds is that the Haitian state has been robbed of so that people can have access to education, so that they can have dignified conditions so that they can actually have the possibility of having, again, a dignified life. And so these protests were taking place, massive, massive protests in 2018, again in 2019, 2020, we saw this continually. And Joven and Mois, of course, responded with widespread repression. And at this point, we see, again, kind of this call for support, for being able to quell these outbursts by these social outbursts. After his assassination in July 2021, it was again another moment where the international community, the so-called international community, these imperialist forces said see the situation with the gangs, which of course are armed by the United States and, you know, backed by these elite groups who have held on to power. They say this is getting out of hand. All of these things, protests continue against Arielle Henri, and at the same time, the gang violence in the country proliferates, again, because there are these vacuum, socioeconomic vacuums, the Haitian people, again, do not have control over their economy. They're living with miserable conditions. Weapons are flowing in from the United States, again, elite groups in the country supporting these criminal groups. And so again, we see this rise in violence. And in this context, Arielle Henri actually requests, makes a formal request, the United Nations for foreign military intervention. This was in October 2022. This was met with, again, widespread protests. But in October 2023, the UN Security Council actually authorised a military intervention. It was not technically, it would not technically be a UN mission. This is called the multinational security support. And this, at the time, several months back, it was Kenya who offered to lead this mission and pledged 1,000 police officers. This created tensions within Kenya itself, many groups, left groups, and even opposition groups said, we're not going to send our police officers to essentially another country to repress their citizens. So this was met with widespread rejection. The Congress and Kenya and the High Court said that this was unconstitutional. The President, Ruto, was trying to press forward with this. This is the context within which Arielle Henri actually visits Kenya just a couple of weeks ago to try to kind of seal the deal and get the Kenyan police officers. But what do you know? After he resigns, Kenya backs out and said, definitively, we are not sending any police. So the threat of a foreign military intervention actually still hangs over Haiti. This multinational security support, MSS, is a U.S.-backed. And kind of given the go-ahead by the United Nations, they still want this to go forward. We're going to see how this evolves in the coming days. So we'll definitely continue to be watching what's happening in Haiti. It's a very crucial battleground right now. We know that they're continuing to face the threat of this foreign military intervention. The Haitian people say no to foreign military intervention. The people of the world say no to foreign military intervention in Haiti. And this, we'll see how it plays out over the next couple of weeks. How much pressure will the United States put on other countries to send military personnel to be part of this mission? That remains to be seen. But keep following this topic on People's Dispatch. Thanks so much, Zoe, for talking to us. And that's all we have in today's daily debrief. We'll be back with a fresh episode tomorrow. Meanwhile, do visit our website, peoplesdispatch.org, follow us on all the social media platforms. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button.