Dru Oja Jay and Jemima Pierre
Canadian military pilots fly over Port-au-Prince in March 2004, a few weeks after the coup d’etat. Photo: Combat Camera
Professor Jemima Pierre dissects Canada’s participation in a 20-year debacle of military occupations and failed elections in Haiti
Dru Oja Jay: Welcome to The Breach Show featuring sharp analysis on politics and social movements in Canada. I’m your host, Dru Oja Jay, and my guest today is Dr. Jemima Pierre. She is Professor at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg.
Today we’re talking about the dire situation in Haiti. For the past two decades, Canada has been a key player in a succession of military occupations of the country. Despite Canada’s rhetoric about democracy promotion, it has in fact helped impose a series of undemocratic regimes that have culminated in the current crisis.
Haiti’s most recent presidential election was in 2016 and featured reports of widespread fraud. In 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. And more recently, his unelected successor, Ariel Henry, has been prevented from returning to the country after an overseas trip by gang leaders who are calling for his resignation, bringing the crisis once again to a head.
All of this has happened while the U.S. has kept a tight grip on the reins of power in Haiti. As most informed observers note, this is a continuation of the way Haiti has been treated for over 200 years since its successful revolution in 1804, which overturned a brutal slavery-based system and put several European empires on the back foot.
The history of Haiti cannot be done justice without several hours, and there are luckily a lot of great accounts that have been produced in recent years. That being said, Professor Pierre, what do you think is the most important thing for people in Canada to understand about the governmental collapse we see today?
Jemima Pierre: The most important thing about this governmental collapse is to understand that it is primarily the result of extensive foreign meddling and intervisions in Haiti. This latest one really goes back to 20 years ago when the U.S., France, and Canada planned to remove Haiti’s democratically elected president and government through a coup d’état and then using the United Nations Security Council as a way to hide that coup d’état when they remove the president. Then, dismantling that democratically elected government, including all the political structures of that government from the prime minister on down, allowing the attempted destruction of the political party that brought him into power, and then installing from the very beginning, from 2004, an illegitimate set of so-called government agencies and peoples and parties, and to the moment where we are here, where we actually have no elected officials in Haiti, which is unusual for any state.
To understand what’s going on in Haiti is to understand the process that began the dismantling of the Haitian state on February 29, 2004. If we don’t do that, we can’t really make a clear diagnosis of the problem or come up with some kind of solution to what’s going on in Haiti.
Oja Jay: What do you think is behind the decades of intervention and suppression of basic democratic functioning in Haiti? Why do the U.S. and its allies keep doing this?
Pierre: It’s Haiti’s history. Haiti is the second independent nation in the Western hemisphere, but also the first completely free independent nation in the hemisphere.
Haiti was a very rich colony of France, where you had a large enslaved population of Africans basically destroying the plantation system and slavery and white supremacy, defeating the world’s most powerful army at the time—that was Napoleon’s French army—which lost about 50,000 soldiers in Haiti to these enslaved Africans.
Haiti declared its independence after a 13 year brutal war against the French, but as well as the Spanish and the British who tried to come in and steal what was left of this colony as the French were losing out to these Africans. I don’t think the West has ever forgiven Haiti for winning that revolution.
Even after the revolution, what ended up happening was France tried to come back and take up its territory by threatening nonstop intervention into Haiti. The gunboats would show up on the shores and threaten to invade again. You have to understand, this was like a scorched earth war that these Africans had to fight.
In 1825, the government of Haiti agreed to pay back France its money, to pay the enslavers money for losing their Africans. They had to pay this indemnity, which was 150 million gold francs, which is the equivalent of almost $30 billion today. It took Haiti more than 100 years to finish paying this back. They didn’t finish until 1947.
They were forced to pay it back because they would be threatened with invasion over and over again until they finished paying it. That history is very important.
Haiti is very significant for the region because of its position. It’s in the Windward Passage. The U.S. has always wanted to use Haiti as a way to stage its imperialist ambitions.
People underestimate the role of Haiti as a source of not just mineral resources, but also human resources. People don’t realize that Haiti is used as a sweatshop for Canadian products. Gildan products, for example, are put together in Haiti. It’s cheaper to send the component parts down to Haiti and have them put together in Haiti. Canada’s companies do it. The U.S.’s companies do it instead of using Asia.
As they prepare to move away from using industries in Asia for cheap labor, they want to keep this captive workforce of 12 million people, which is one of the most populous places in the Caribbean, to use that cheap labor.
There’s a lot of reasons, geopolitically as well as culturally and racially, that there’s a need to control Haiti. The problem with Haiti is that Haitians have always protested in particular ways. It’s this constant resistance, I think, for 200 years that’s actually. They have not taken this lying down. I think that’s also part of the reason why there’s this constant onslaught, constant need to invade, reinvade, occupy, and so on.
Oja Jay: When you look at the history, it really feels like there’s 200 years of resistance to colonialism and slavery, and then there’s also 200 years of the imperial resentment.
It’s interesting you mentioned Gildan, because I remember after the 2004 coup, we looked at Gildan stock price on that day. A day later, it went up by a hefty percentage. It was just remarkably direct in terms of how investors perceived the coup in Haiti and who it was benefiting.
In 2004, Canada sent soldiers, police officers, government experts, development NGOs to back the post-coup regime led by Gérard Latortue, as you mentioned, who was placed after Jean-Bertrand Aristide was unceremoniously flown off to the Central African Republic by U.S. Marines.
This time around, the U.S. has asked the Canadians to take a leadership role in a new mission, but this time Canada has refused. Instead, they’ve sent troops to Jamaica to train soldiers from Belize and the Bahamas on their way to Port-au-Prince.
What do you think has made them stay away this time? What do you think has made Canada decline?
Pierre: There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of parallels to what happened in 2004 to what’s been happening in Haiti. Once the Marines landed in Aristide’s house, put him in [a truck] and took him to the airport to fly him out to Africa, to send him back to Africa.
There were already hundreds of French, Canadian, and U.S. soldiers in Haiti that came over, that were there on the ground. Then you have the U.S. Ambassador, James Foley, going to the house of the head of the Supreme Court in Haiti, and basically telling him that he’s going to be interim president.
Already, we’re [going] against the Haitian Constitution because the only way that the Supreme Court justice can become president is through parliamentary vote and action. But the U.S. State Department official was able to basically say, “You’re now president, right?” while we still had a sitting prime minister, which was not even consulted in this. Then they removed them and brought in Gérard Latortue—and I have to say this—who had been living in Boca Raton, Florida for 15 years, flown in to be brought in where a Haitian constitution says: you cannot take office if you have not lived in the country for at least five years.
They threw away every kind of legal mechanism that the Haitian state had put in place. They basically dismantled the state from that moment. Then you had the core group that was put in, which is the Friends of Haiti. But these are like those are the people that politically ran Haiti through the UN. The core group includes U.S., France, Canada.
Notice that France is always involved here, even though they’re all the way in Europe. They’re always in Haiti’s business. It’s France right now negotiating for Haiti’s new government. That’s an important thing to think about.
I want to quickly talk about this invasion because what people don’t realize, especially now that the UN Security Council is in the news, is you had a coup d’état that was put together before 2004.
There was the Ottawa Initiative. I’m sure some of your listeners might know about this. It was a secret meeting a year before, in 2003, hosted by the Liberal government. Dennis Paradis was there.
They met in Ottawa for a secret meeting about regime change in Haiti. This was reported by l’Actualité magazine by Michel Vastel. So people can look up the Ottawa Initiative where they’d already laid out a plan for removing Haiti’s president the year before.
Then, days before the actual coup d’état, you had Dominique Villepin [who] was the French foreign minister, who had already written out a regime change plan for the UN Security Council, which we actually published a couple of weeks ago. You know, the actual plan, February 25, when the coup d ‘etat happens, February 29. That tells you these people were there.
But I wanted to point out just clearly, just how it is that two members of the UN Security Council could conduct a coup d’état, and then turn around, use their position in the UN Security Council to call for a chapter seven military invasion of this country whose president they just removed. If we’re talking in the language of gangster and gangs, those are the gangsters.
If you think about the French government, the Canadian government, the U.S. government—what these people did—these are gangsters in suits. Because how do you plan a removal of a government and then turn around and use this the international body?
Some scholars called it “multilateralism as terror,” because it was basically using the UN to consecrate a coup d’état to bring violence. This UN occupation happened through Lula’s Brazil, who led the military wing of this occupation. That’s the other thing when we have to think about the leftism of the Latin Americas’ relationship to Haiti.
This occupation lasts from 2004. I remember going to Haiti, seeing these tanks going through these tiny towns. Haiti was not a country at war, but they were under occupation by the UN.
The UN is responsible for thousands of deaths and homicides, rape, sexual exploitation, as well as bringing cholera to Haiti, killing 30,000, but also sickening more than a million.
This is the occupation that was unleashed on Haiti after following the coup d’état, in addition to the dismantling of the Haitian state, right?
I think that the U.S.’s new policy was not to actually lead another intervention. I think part of it is the visual imagery of having white soldiers pointing guns at these black Haitian people in this day of quick phones and iPhones and Google phones, taking pictures and uploading pictures and so on and so forth.
I also think the U.S. realized through Haiti—that’s why I say Haiti’s a laboratory—that it could be cheaper to get a whole bunch of different people to do the dirty work for them. Because that’s what the UN occupation did. It was a cheap thing. You had the UN pay for an occupation that the U.S., France, and Canada wanted, and you had buy-in from all these countries from all over the world to come and occupy Haiti.
By the time the U.S. installed [Joseph Jouthe] in 2021 and all the protests, they were calling these protests gangs, right? That’s why I’m weary about using the term “gangs” because I think what’s happening in Haiti—these groups are paramilitary groups, they’re armed groups, but the the unpopular U.S. governments have always used the term gangs as a way to say: these protests are not legitimate, these people are gangs. We have to make that distinction.
By the time they did that, I think the U.S. wanted someone else to take the lead. Canada said no, and I think there’s even a New York Times article that says: Canada lacks the resources to actually take on a full-blown occupation, but also doesn’t see the value, because they don’t want to get stuck in Haiti.
Because if you go to Haiti, you’re going to get stuck. You’re going to actually have to really shoot people, shoot all these young people—Haiti’s population, the majority of the population is under 24 years old, right?
Imagine the imagery of like these white soldiers from Canada and the U.S. shooting down 14, 15, 16 year old black kids in Haiti. I don’t think Canada wanted to do that, but they wanted to support the U.S. occupation because they need Haiti. So, they worked with the U.S. to try and push CARICOM, the Caribbean countries, to actually take the lead.
They tried to get Brazil to do it. Brazil did not want to get marred in that because of the way the leftist organizations in Brazil were very much against the occupation that Brazil participated to from 2004 to 2017. They did not want to seem like they were taking the lead, which is why the U.S. then had to go all the way to Kenya to find the most neo-colonial government that it could pay $200 million to just come do this dirty job of occupying and invading Haiti.
Oja Jay: Yeah, it’s interesting to think about the contrast of Canada’s position in 2004 versus now. Some of the officials at the time have actually said that they needed to pay the U.S. back for not supporting the Iraq War, and so that was their way to get back in the good books of the U.S.
Pierre: Yes. France too, They both used Haiti to make up for Iraq.
Oja Jay: Today, as you said, the optics of a mostly white Canadian armed force going in and conducting what, in 2004, certainly the reports were that there were some pretty heavy massacres happening by the Haitian National Police, if not directly by the occupying military forces. It’s very hard to pin down what happened.
In any case, the optics would be bad.
You mentioned Kenya as a neocolonial sort of government, but can we just touch on Jamaica, Bahamas and Belize, the other countries that are sending troops from the region? What is the relationship like the sort of rulers of those countries and Haiti and Haitians?
Pierre: That relationship is a very contentious one. Part of it is, and I have to be careful because I don’t want to talk necessarily about just the people and people think I’m talking about just the local people in these countries, but these governments have always been, there’s an anti-Haitianism in the Caribbean and Latin America that’s hard to fully articulate and explain.
I think part of it has to do with the way that Haiti has been presented in the media from 200 years ago. The revolution was presented as, you know, you have headlines like “Cannibalism!” “Haitians raping all the white women on the island,” during the slave revolt. But even [in] 1921 during the invasion, there’s a New York Times headline—I think people can look this up—that says, “Haitians eat a U.S. Marine.”
Claims of cannibalism and Vodou. These are like weird African black people who practice Vodou and even the WikiLeaks papers have the Pope, the Vatican hating Aristide because they’re like, “he’s a Vodou priest.” Things like that. This is in the WikiLeaks papers. In terms of the stereotype.
I do think a lot of people, the elite in the Caribbean believe those stereotypes. They’ve always seen Haiti as this savage backwater, even though Haiti is the only revolution in that area that actually got rid of slavery. The other countries, for example, the other Francophone countries are still French territories. They’re not even independent. Even in Jamaica, its highest court is still in England, the Privy Council. These are still colonial governments, as far as I’m concerned.
They’ve always hated Haiti. One of the key examples of this is the fact that CARICOM, the Caribbean community, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, never wanted Haiti as part of the CARICOM group. In fact, which is what makes it ironic today is that CARICOM is supposedly trying to come up with a solution for Haiti. That’s ridiculous.
I want to say two things. One of them is just the treatment of Haiti and Haitians in these Caribbean countries has been horrendous. Bahamas in particular has been, their immigration laws and treatment of Haitian migrants is worse than what you see happening at the U.S.-Mexico border. They treat Haitians—and this has been going back for decades—they treat them as worse than humans. The dehumanization of Haitian migrants is just unbelievable across the board.
Even though Haiti, for example, is a member of CARICOM, where CARICOM countries basically have freedom of movement, Haiti is the only place where you need a visa to go to a CARICOM country. You have that. There’s always been a complete disrespect for Haiti and mistreatment. Haiti did not even become a member of CARICOM until 2002. This was pushed by PJ Patterson, the prime minister of Jamaica who was head of CARICOM in the early 2000s.
He’s the first one that’s saying, well, “Haiti needs to be part of that.” The problem, they’re afraid of Haiti because our numbers are great. Once Haiti became part of CARICOM, it became more than 50% of CARICOM’s population. Then they always thought the language. These were backwards people, they spoke a language that nobody spoke. CARICOM was predominantly Anglophone. They were complaining about minor things like, well, “we’re going to have to spend a lot of money to translate documents.” Things like that.
The relationship of the rest of the Caribbean to Haiti is one that is terrible. I don’t think any Haitian believes that whatever CARICOM is doing is for their best interest. I don’t think it’s about benevolence at all. Which is the other reason why everybody thinks that what CARICOM is doing is the bidding of the U.S.
You have to know this because CARICOM, after the U.S., Canada, France, and even Mexico declined leading an intervention, an invasion of Haiti. They tried to get the CARICOM countries. Back then the St. Vincent Prime Minister said, no, he was completely against it and CARICOM was against it. Then what happens? You have the Canadian foreign minister attend the CARICOM meetings last year. Then you have Kamala Harris.
They were all at the CARICOM 50th anniversary celebration. Immediately after these meetings, what do you have? CARICOM countries say, “yes, we’re supporting this invasion of Haiti.”
Even now what’s happening once Ariel Henry cannot come back into the country, what you have is [Anthony] Blinken is the one that’s actually leading the CARICOM group. Before the meetings where they decided that they’re gonna come up with a Haitian solution.
It was Brazil, France, Canada, the US, France, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, meeting with CARICOM. When they had that first meeting, they met secretly for three hours before they even let in the hand-picked Haitians that they said would participate in the Haitian solution.
The only way that they would allow these Haitians participants is for them to agree for a military invasion of Haiti. Whatever people are participating in this conversation is set up by the U.S., given cover by CARICOM, but also the Haitians that they picked [who] have already agreed to the terms of the discussion. So whatever is going to happen is going to be illegitimate for the majority of the Haitians underground.
Dru: I was really struck by what you’re saying about the visas. Just delving into the history and even current situation in Haiti, one of the things that you can’t really capture in a 30-minute conversation is all the really minute and larger ways that Haiti has been made to pay for the revolution 200 and some years ago, but also the continuing resistance.
It’s remarkable how it filters down, not just from the U.S. to Canada to all these other CARICOM countries and so on.
I wanted to loop back to Canada, which has in addition to sending troops to Jamaica to do this training, is also putting a hundred million dollars just this year toward policing within Haiti, which is a tidy sum to say the least.
From your perspective, what does that money buy?
Pierre: That money buys Canadian equipment and U.S. equipment. That money goes right back. I mean, let’s be real, that’s how U.S. wars work. When you say you’re going to give military aid to Ukraine, what it means is you’re setting up the military industrial complex for more contracts.
I do know that the Canadian government, for example, shipped a bunch of armored vehicles to the Haitian police supposedly to be paid for. To me, when we’re thinking about this aid, what’s fascinating is [that] Canada also provided $3 million for the Kenyans to go learn French. The Kenyan force, mind you.
Can you imagine: you have this force coming, they don’t speak our language. First of all, most people don’t speak French, they speak Creole, but they’re paying for that.
I also want to point out how, whatever solution these Western powers have for Haiti, it’s always a violent one. It’s always about force. It’s always about prisons. Like, you know, after the earthquake, the first thing the U.S. built were two prisons. The most infrastructure aid that the U.S. has provided to Haiti has been the construction of three prisons. They don’t build schools. They don’t build hospitals. They don’t do anything but create this carceral logic, violence and imprisonment. That’s what they think of when they think of us.
Oja Jay: One of the things that’s interesting about reading media accounts of what’s happening in Haiti is that, I sort of read them having the sneaking suspicion—and also [from] the accounts of some colleagues who’ve been on the ground and sort of seen it firsthand—that the point of view that’s being reported or sympathized are the sort of people in these wealthy or extremely wealthy neighborhoods and not the majority of people who live in either displaced camps, villages or popular neighborhoods.
So when we’re reading reporting from Haiti, do you have that sense as well? Do you think we needed some kind of find and replace function to be able to interpret it, make sense of the reporting that comes out of Haiti?
Pierre: Well, two things. One of the things the reporting on Haiti is horrendous. It’s racist. You’ve had reports that there are cannibals in Haiti. It’s almost as if it hadn’t changed from the 1800s. The reporting is racist.
The other thing, I’m glad you mentioned Port-au-Prince and Pétionville, because if you watch the Western media on Haiti, you would think the whole country is in flames, that there’s a civil war going on. You can’t go anywhere.
But then you wouldn’t be able to explain why the commercial airport in Northern Haiti is still open and their flights coming in and out. It’s like, okay, so Haiti’s up in flames, but you could still have JetBlue and Spirit Airlines flying in every day?
One of the things that happens is that people take Port-au-Prince as a representation of the entire country. I’ve seen images from the earthquake in 2010 to represent what’s going on today as if things are falling apart at that scale.
The first thing I want to say is what’s happening in Haiti, most of the violence is happening in the Port-au-Prince area, in the popular neighborhood. That’s been happening for a long time. It’s flared up because now the armed groups might move close to Pétionville, the rich area in the hills. The rich people live in the hills, which is why the helicopters now can just land up there and put them in there and fly them to Cape Haitian so that they can fly out of Haiti.
But if you look at the map of Port-au-Prince, you have these, what they call popular neighborhoods, quartier populaire. They’re very concentrated, very poor, impoverished people, which is where the UN forces used to go in and shoot up, just empty their cartridges onto the population there, right? That’s where the resistance is. They’ve been suffering under armed groups paid by the politicians for years.
For years, people have been killed. Young people. That has not made the news, right? It’s only now that these armed groups have gotten together, they seem to have a little more money, that then it becomes, “Oh my God, the country is under siege.” It’s not to say that it’s not, but when you see burning tires in these images, [those] are neighbourhoods actually protecting themselves.
They set up barricades, they set up sandbags and so on and so forth to stop people from coming in. That doesn’t get explained. You think the whole country’s in flames, that doesn’t get explained. It is. It does then represent the views of some of the Haitian elite that are saying they’re under siege.
My thing is, why didn’t you say that about all the young people in the poor neighborhoods that were being shot at the behest of politicians and the oligarchy two years ago, three years ago, or when Jovenel Moise and Michel Martelly would send armed groups into these neighborhoods and shoot them up?
BBC, CNN, Voice of America, they have the same story. If we know how neocolonial, how the media works globally, all these countries in Africa and Latin America, what do they do? They cut and paste on BBC, CNN, Voice of America, and they repeat the same story. You manufacture consent. Everybody I talked to outside of the U.S., I was like, “oh my God, your country, I’m so sorry, the whole country is in a civil war, it’s in flames.”
For me, the media is just as responsible for the violence that is coming to Haiti, that has been on Haitian people, and that’s gonna come with its intervention. But the other thing is, the people that get interviewed in Haiti are the people that are holed up in Port-au-Prince. In fact, I was on a TV show with someone who was just like, “Yeah, you know, I’m stuck in my house. I haven’t been able to leave in a few days. I go down the street and my driver’s passing by and I see bodies here and there.” And I’m like, “You have a driver.? Oh, well, that’s interesting. Right.”
So part of that is just really interesting. The other thing is the foreign forces, even after the earthquake in Haiti, the people that made off the best, the people that made off with all that money that was distributed supposedly on behalf of Haiti are the economic elite in Haiti.
They’re the ones that actually benefit from foreign invasion because then they get the subcontracts. Their hotels get filled up. They can rent cars to the aid agencies and so on and so forth. Of course, they’re going to be behind [an] invasion because they’re not the ones getting killed because they’re living in fortified compounds in the hills of Haiti.
Oja Jay: I guess turning to the diaspora, you yourself, as I understand, are a member of the Haitian diaspora, which is certainly a huge presence in Montreal and some other Canadian cities as well.
Can you describe how you see the response from people here in Canada, who have relations in Haiti? What’s the range of reactions and do you see any points of consensus emerging or is there a common progressive position?
Pierre: I have to say, I moved to Canada from the U.S. nine months ago, so that’s an important point to make. That’s to say that I don’t know the range of responses in Canada, but I can generally say that there are a range of responses.
You have the older generation that was very much in support of the Aristide Lavalas, and are still angry about the 2004 coup d’état. That’s still the progressive voice.
What you’ve had over the years, [and] what I’ve noticed, which is fascinating, is a bureaucratic upper middle class that are in, especially in Miami for example, in government. They’re the Haitian American legal groups and Haitian American Lawyers Association or Haitian American elected officials that actually take on a similar view as the U.S. State Department.
They think that they need to, for example, lobby representatives here and there to support invasion. I see that a lot of them are supporting invasion. But you do have a strong progressive group, especially in Ottawa. You do have a lot of progressive organizations that actually have been consistent against [the] Canadian role in the continued occupation. Because Haiti is under occupation. It’s been under occupation for 20 years by these foreigners.
You have these three groups. Two of them are more progressive, but the bureaucratic ones are the ones I think that these governments are listening to because they speak that particular language of technocrats. Like, the solution should be done in a boardroom in Washington, D.C. or Ottawa, you know, to figure out what’s going on in Haiti, as opposed to the grassroots organizations, I think, that you have.
The other thing is among that, the younger generation, what you have is the belief in the demonization of Aristide and the Lavalas party that came from 2004.
There was a major media thing. There’s a great article called “How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal,” where the U.S. basically presented this view of Aristide as like the devil incarnate. Linking him to like Hitler and this and that, to really demonize the people’s movement, but also make it seem like he was behind all this violence and so on and so forth. I think a lot of these young people who grew up with the media representation of Aristide believe it.
They believe some of it, and that’s why they don’t see, for example, the figure of Guy Philippe—who was part of the groups that were funded and trained by U.S. and Canada—the paramilitary guy that wreaked havoc while Aristide was government and that the U.S. called the “freedom fighter” in the 2004 coup d’état. People are supporting him now, not realizing that he was funded by the CIA and trained by U.S. special forces in Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.
You do have this generational difference, but I do think there’s a key group of people who actually understand it through time, that understand what’s happened over the last 20 years in particular and that know—at the very least—no one should trust the U.S.
U.S. imperialism is not benevolent. Neither is Canadian imperialism. The other thing is, I don’t think people see Canada as an imperialist power. They see Canada as following the steps of the US. But we have to actually be clear and see Canada as having its own imperialist role. Remember, it’s Canadian companies that own most of the mining on the African continent, right? There’s gold in Haiti. There’s already Canadian corporations trying to work on this gold.
Also, people don’t realize that Canada has a military base in the Caribbean, in Jamaica. In fact, they used that military base for espionage right after independence in the region to go against supposed communist nations, to stop any communism that could have taken hold in the 60s and 70s.
So we have to be very clear that what these nations are doing are not for Haitians, are not because they care about what happens in Haiti.
Oja Jay: It’s interesting what you’re saying about Guy Philippe, because it just makes me realize that the majority of Haitians who are alive today were at a maximum, I guess, six or seven years old when the 2004 coup happened. The political consciousness is very much taking shape in the context of this ongoing, endless—from their perspective—military occupation.
Pierre: Exactly.
Oja Jay: Just to wrap up, what do you think is the most important thing for Canadians to do in response to this crisis, which we’re so deeply involved in creating?
Pierre: Tell your government to step aside and leave Haiti alone. And I know that sounds crazy, because you’re told that you have to do something, because things are so bad.
Let me just remind you, Haitian people defeated Napoleon’s army. They fought a war, and they became independent on their own. Haiti has the capacity to do the same.
I do think we have to step back and be respectful enough of Haitian sovereignty and Haitian humanity to allow people to do what they need to do without the constant meddling of U.S., France, [and] Canada into our affairs.
The most important thing that Canadians can do—Canadian leftists in particular—is to rally with Haitian people against intervention, against the constant meddling by the Canadian government. You need to stop the Canadian government from participating in this ongoing occupation of Haiti, from militarizing Haiti, from sending only military forces and so on and so on, but also their NGOs, which actually everybody makes their careers [out] of Haiti.
The most important thing is to leave Haiti alone. I say this with all the love for our Canadian brothers and sisters, but the message is leave Haiti alone and tell your government to leave us alone.
Oja Jay: Jemima Pierre, thank you so much for taking the time.
Pierre: Thank you so much for having me.
Oja Jay: If you’d like what you’ve heard on The Breach Show, please subscribe to the podcast or our YouTube channel. And if you want to support our work, please become a sustaining member to help us produce more journalism for transformation. You can do that at breachmedia.ca/support. Thanks for listening.
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