Assassination in Haiti

The assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse on Wednesday and the wounding of First Lady Martine Moïse during an invasion of their home just outside of the capital Port-au-Prince must be deplored in the strongest possible terms. This reprehensible attack immediately poses a challenge for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in terms of defending the shared values of its members, constitutional governance and the rule of law.

What purchase CARICOM will immediately have on the increasingly unstable situation is unclear since the United Nations Security Council was to have taken up the matter behind closed doors yesterday. The United States is also likely to push for a greater role for the Organisation of American States (OAS) - Colombia’s President Iván Duque has already sought this - in charting the way forward in the wake of the assassination. Nevertheless, CARICOM must show the intrinsic solidarity inherent in the Community and once the security situation permits a delegation of senior regional officials should travel to Port-auPrince to underline this.

Haiti under President Moïse had begun to unravel very evidently in the last two years before the eyes of those in the region and beyond. Even in hindsight – given the complexities of its historic anguish – it is unclear at which point mediatory measures driven by CARICOM or any other regional organisation might have yielded a beneficial result. Last month, the United Nations warned that violence had reached “unprecedented levels” while the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that the displacements caused by the violence were “creating a host of secondary issues, such as the disruption of community-level social functioning ... forced school closures, loss of livelihoods and a general fear among the affected populations.”

Just weeks before the assassination and in a demonstration of the impunity with which criminal elements have acted, one of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders, Jimmy Cherizier warned that he was launching “a revolution” against the country’s business and political elites. With the dubious pseudonym `Barbecue’, Reuters reported that surrounded by gang members wielding machetes and guns, Mr Cherizier gave a statement to local media outlets in the slum of La Saline saying the G9 agglomeration of nine gangs “had become a revolutionary force to deliver Haiti from the opposition, the government and the Haitian bourgeoisie”.

Human rights activists say Mr Cherizier was actually not targeting the government but the opposition. A suspect in several massacres of citizens in recent years, among other crimes for which he was sanctioned late last year by the United States, Reuters said that Mr Cherizier depicted himself as a community leader filling the void left by weak institutions. That, of course, is a

fundamental and continuing tragedy of Haiti, the constant undermining of key institutions as was the condition at the point that the President was assassinated.

There is already contestation over who should be recognised as the Prime Minister of Haiti. Mr Moïse had just this week appointed a new prime minister, Ariel Henry, to take over from interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph, although he was yet to be sworn in at the point that the President was killed.

Mr Joseph appeared on Wednesday to take charge of the situation, running the government response to the assassination, appealing to foreign governments for help, and declaring a state of emergency.

Reuters said that Mr Henry - who is considered more favourably by the opposition - told Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste that he did not consider Mr Joseph the legitimate prime minister anymore and he should revert to the role of foreign minister.

“I think we need to speak. Claude was supposed to stay in the government I was going to have,” Mr Henry was quoted as saying.

The United Nations Special Envoy for Haiti, Helen La Lime was reported yesterday as saying that Mr Joseph would remain leader until an election was held. It is unclear on what authority that pronouncement was made.

“I can picture a scenario under which there are issues regarding to whom the armed forces and national police are loyal, in the case there are rival claims to being placeholder president of the country,” Ryan Berg, an analyst with the Center for Strategic & International Studies said .

Haiti’s 1987 constitution mandates that the head of the supreme court should take over. However, amendments that are not unanimously recognized state that it be the prime minister, or, in the last year of a president’s mandate - like in the case of Mr Moïse - the parliament should elect a president.

Brian Concannon, an executive director at Project Blueprint, a collaboration of human rights experts, said Mr Moïse’s government had left Haiti’s democratic institutions weakened before the current crisis struck.

“There has been no parliament for 17 months, the judiciary is effectively neutralized, the police force is politicized and divided, all local elected positions are vacant, journalists and civil society actors feel intimidated,” he said.

Legislative elections scheduled for late 2019 were postponed amid political unrest and despite a commitment to hold them in September there is no certainty.

Reuters said that further complicating the situation, the head of the supreme court died last month due to COVID-19 amid a surge in infections in one of the few countries yet to commence a vaccination campaign.

President Moïse, backed by the international community, had been pushing to hold both legislative elections and a constitutional referendum in September, efforts that were strenuously opposed by Haitian civil society.

Civil society actors said elections under what they termed his “one-man rule”, amid rampant gang violence, could not be free and fair. They had pressed instead for a transitional government, and denounced the late President’s constitutional reform as part of a power grab.

“Moïse had been ruling by decree,” Tamanisha John, a Caribbean studies scholar at Florida International University, told Reuters after the president’s assassination. “He effectively shuttered the Haitian legislature by refusing to hold parliamentary elections scheduled for January 2020 and summarily dismissed all of the country’s elected mayors in July 2020, when their terms expired.”

As an aside, in 2017, Mr Moïse’s first year in office, the Haitian Senate issued a report accusing him of embezzling at least US$700,000 of public money from the Venezuelan infrastructure development fund, PetroCaribe to his banana business.

Protesters packed the streets crying “Kot Kòb Petwo Karibe a?” – “where is the PetroCaribe money?”, reports say adding that the late President relied on hard power thereafter to keep him in office.

“There are many unknowns about what happens next,” said Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “But it is important to remember that that was also the case before the assassination of Moïse”, he told Reuters.

CARICOM and the larger community face a major challenge in engendering stability in Haiti but they must persist in the interest of the masses, thousands of whom have left their homeland in recent years via Guyana and other countries in the region for betterment.