Chantale Ismé’s Address to the Sub-Commission on International Rights:

Chantal Ismé, vice-president of community organization Maison d’Haïti, said most of Montreal’s Haitian community opposes foreign military intervention.

Ladies and gentlemen deputies, I am here to deliver a strong message on behalf of the Ayitian people to you, those at home as well as those abroad. We, all our people, wherever we are. categorically reject any form of invasion of our land and would view any potential invasion as a criminal act of international aggression.

We are formally and irrevocably opposed to any form of intervention, regardless of whatever fake name those who invade our land invent for the harm they do Ayitian people and justice-loving people of the world are well-aware that previous invasions have masqueraded under titles like “occupation, intervention, stabilization and peacekeeping missions”. We categorically reject such criminal invasions whatever mask they wear or whatever form, colour or style is employed by those who sponsor and pay for bone-crushing “boots on the ground”.

The Ayitian people have historically experienced the disastrous consequences of unending White intervention since the European invasion of Indigenous land in 1492. The invader’s rap-sheet is long. Case in point, Europeans began and ruthlessly pursued genocide against the Taino People, and then compounded their crimes against humanity by terrorizing and dragging Black hostages, bound and shackled to die, far from home, in this hemisphere. After Ayitians won their Independence, France imposed an ‘independence-debt’ imposed in 1825. From the 1915-1934 the USA orchestrated a hostile occupation of the country, and robbed Ayitians of the gold reserves of their National Bank. No White thieves have never given back stolen treasure to its Black owners since that time.

In addition, under the USA’s brutal occupation from 1915-1934, the country’s peasantry also had their farmland stolen; there was a foreigner-created campaign of forced and orchestrated migration; state institutions were dismantled and the loyal National Guard were replaced of by a force without fealty or identity.

Today, the Core Group, under the leadership of Canada, among others, seems willing to respond to an unconstitutional, illegal request from an illegitimate government, denounced by the Ayitian people. Once again, those who failed to provide even clean water after the earthquake and failed to hold their countries’ banks accountable as six billion dollars of critical aid vanished into thin air are shamelessly claiming once again to be invading Haiti to counter insecurity and resolve a humanitarian crisis.

For more than 20 years, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and police forces such as the RCMP have been part of the Blue Helmets of the various UN missions in Haiti, from UNMIH 1993 to UNIHRO 2019. This last stabilization force in the country until 2022 had a mandate to “support good governance, stability, professionalization of the police, reduction of community violence and gang violence’’. All of these so-called stabilization and peacekeeping missions have been demonstrably incompetent and have failed to achieve even their own objectives, while heaping more suffering on the heads of Haiti’s long-suffering Black women, men and children. Under Canadian “peacekeepers” there has been increasing to rape, fatherless children and prostitution.

The government of Canada, as well as Canadian religious, academic and political institutions have remained remarkably and culpably silent while the national police, under Canadian RCMP and police tutelage, have carried out systematic and savage campaigns of repression against unarmed Haitians demonstrating for a return of the democracy Canada, France and the USA tore from their grasp. democracy. Nothing has been said about initiatives to federate and give legal status to the gangs that we now forced to fight. And, more immediately, there is an iron curtain of silence around the massive and ongoing importation of arms and ammunition from the United States of North America. And we could go on…

Based on these observations, the CHCDH (Haitian Coalition in Canada against the Dictatorship in Haiti) demand that Canadians and the Canadian government support a Haitian solution to the crisis that has been systematically ignored, in particular the Montana Agreement that brings together the nation’s active forces, the result of a broad consensus (peasant, worker, woman, youth, grassroots organizations, political parties of both the left and the right) and that advocates a transition that breaks away from corruption, outdated forms of governance, administrative mismanagement and impunity.