Haiti Russe?
Has the Kremlin Turned Its Sights on the Western Hemisphere’s Second-Oldest Republic?
“Leaked Pentagon documents reveal terrifying Russian mercenary group Wagner is operating under United States' nose in Haiti” blared the headline in the British tabloid Daily Mail. What followed was a florid article that provided no evidence for the initial claim but rather referred to series of classified Pentagon documents that had been uploaded to the social media platform Discord and then shared widely over Twitter. A more circumspect article appearing in The New York Times and addressing the same document leak noted that the paramilitary organization Wagner Group, founded by former convict Yevgeny Prigozhin and which operates as a virtual private army for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, had “explored branching out to Haiti, right under the nose of the United States, with an offer to help that country’s embattled government take on violent gangs.”
The Daily Mail story has already burned a trail of hysteria through Haitian social media and WhatsApp groups, leading those to wonder whether an entity that could give the worst of Haiti’s gangs a run for their money in terms of brutality and wanton blood-letting might already be on the ground. Would Stolichnaya replace Barbancourt and tafia as the national tipple of choice? Would soup joumou be replaced with borscht? Would a fur cap-wearing Prime Minister Ariel Henry be far off?
Clearly, Haiti’s police are in desperate need of assistance. Only in the last few days, the Haitian human rights organization Réseau National des Droits Humains has bemoaned the extreme forms of violence such as “beheadings, mutilations and burning of bodies, as well as the murder of minors accused of being informers for rival gangs” employed by the armed groups in and around Haiti’s capital while the city’s spiraling kidnapping epidemic has recently touched some of its most notable medical professionals, including Dr Jacques Boncy, director of the National Public Health Laboratory, who was released grievously injured last week, and Dr. Geneviève Arty, who remains missing. This past Sunday, the gang of Ti Makak (Little Monkey) killed another three policeman in Thomassin, in the hills above Port-au-Prince, echoing the killing of three policemen in Métivier, another hilly suburb of the capital, by the Krazé Baryè (Gate Breakers) gang of Vitel'Homme Innocent this past January. According to the Syndicat National des Policiers Haitiens (SYNAPOHA) police union, at least 21 police officers have been killed so far this year. Police recently asked a judge to issue arrest warrant against the former Minister of Justice Berto Dorcé "for treachery, influence peddling, and criminals association" within the framework of investigation into illegal import of arms and ammunition into Haiti. Dorcé has been sanctioned by the government of Canada for his alleged involvement in criminal activities.
The presence of mercenaries would by no means be a new thing in Haiti. More than two dozen former Colombian soldiers have been alleged to have been part of the wide-ranging conspiracy that took the life of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, in July 2021. Five Americans, a Serb and a Russian, all heavily-armed, were arrested in Haiti in early 2019 and then released and spirited back to the United States in circumstances that still remain unclear. During the 2001 to 2004 presidency of Jean-Bertrand Ariustide, he was protected by private contractors from the California-based Steele Foundation.
The Wagner Group, however, has a reputation for barbarism that precedes it. As part of the frontline shock troops of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (a campaign for which Wagner is recruiting prisoners from Russia’s jails), Wagner combatants bring with them a record of involvement in torture and extrajudicial executions in half a dozen countries.
In November 2022, a Wagner-linked Telegram channel broadcast footage from Ukraine of the murder of deserter Yevgeny Nuzhin, who was beaten repeatedly over the head with a sledgehammer. The footage was reminiscent of the 2017 on-camera torture and murder in Syria of Muhammad Taha Ismail Alabdullah, known as Hamadi Bouta, who was beaten with a hammer and then had his hands and head cut off by Wagner mercenaries. In Africa, where Wagner has been busy pillaging gold, wood, coffee and other resources as it supports the region’s authoritarian leaders, the group has also been accused of involvement in a March 2002 massacre in Moura in central Mali, where witnesses said the worst atrocities were carried out by “white soldiers…[who] did not speak French.” Mali’s military dictator, Assimi Goïta, has reportedly been pouring the state budget into financing Wagner’s presence in the country. In the Central African Republic, Wagner has been accused of massacring and raping even local troops who serve as their ostensible allies as well as civilians. In Libya, the group laid banned landmines outside the capital, Tripoli.
All of which begs the question: Who would benefit from an increased Russian presence in Haiti?
Following the Moïse assassination, Ariel Henry, who Moïse had selected but who had not been confirmed as Prime Minister, took the reins of power in the nation. The fact that Henry clearly had a close relationship with Joseph Felix Badio, a fugitive currently wanted for questioning in connection with Moïse’s killing - including receiving phone calls from him directly before and after Moïse was murdered - appears to be something the international community would just rather not talk about. Tempting as his own army of private mercenaries might be, it is hard to imagine that Henry would risk falling afoul of his patrons in the United States and elsewhere in order to have them.
Without doubt, the biggest booster for a Russian presence in Haiti has been Moïse Jean-Charles (whose name is actually Jean-Charles Moïse, though no one calls him that), the former mayor of the northern town of Milot (just outside of Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Haïtien), a former senator and the leader of the Pitit Desalin (Children of Dessalines, a reference to Haitian revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines) party. Moïse came in third in Haiti’s November 2016 presidential elections - the last presidential elections held - with 11.04% of the vote. His electoral manifesto from that year refers to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as “his main revolutionary model for whom he has great admiration” before going on to inveigh against “so-called representative liberal democracy.”
During his tenure as mayor of Milot, which lasted from the late 1990s until early 2004, Moïse was affiliated with the Fanmi Lavalas party of the-Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Following Aristide’s February 2004 overthrow, Moïse was chased into hiding, only to resurface months later in an uneasy modus vivendi with the Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH), the United Nations peacekeeping mission that was present in Haiti from 2004 to 2017. After the election of René Préval as Haiti’s president in 2006, Moïse served as part of Préval’s private cabinet before being elected to the senate as a senator from Haiti’s North Department. The decision of Préval’s Lespwa party to run Moïse as their candidate was a controversial one at the time, with Hugues Célestin, himself then serving under the Lespwa banner as a deputy in the Haiti’s lower house of parliament, charging that, while acting as Milot’s mayor, Moïse had been involved in the murder of one Guitz Adrien Salvant, a charge that was echoed by another former senator, Edmonde Supplice Beauzile, as recently as October 2020.
In August 2019, Moïse met Vladimir Fedorovich Zaemsky, at the time Russia’s ambassador to Venezuela, at the Karibe Hotel in Port-au-Prince for over two hours, saying at the meeting’s conclusion that “the Russians want to offer a lot of opportunities to our country in terms of bilateral cooperation, including scholarships, support for national production.” He went on to say that Pitit Desalin wanted to “establish relations” with United Russia, the extreme-right political coalition that supports Vladimir Putin and that Pitit Desalin had “reached agreements” with the Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC) and the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), the parties that serve as the vehicles for the dictatorships in both those countries, the Partido Comunista de España, Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, now known as Comunes for electoral purposes) and Germany's extremist, far left Die Linke.
In January 2022, while transiting the United States on his return from a trip to Nigeria in Miami, Moïse was expelled from the country and his U.S. visa revoked (he had previously claimed that his U.S. visa had been revoked in 2017). The Miami Herald reported that he had been interrogated about the Nigeria visit and his contacts with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro (Moïse’s pinned tweet shows him grinning with the despot in Caracas). U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents also reportedly found photos of him with “questionable contacts” on his phone, including Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s former Vice President who in 2020 was charged in the Southern District of New York with conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, and associated firearms violations and who currently has a $10 million bounty on his head courtesy of the U.S. Department of State. This past February - on the one year anniversary of Russia’s genocidal, imperialist invasion of Ukraine - Moïse boasted of his visit to Russia, posting a video where he said he had landed at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport and stating that “today, we have an interest in connecting the two countries despite the geographical distance” and that “we need an army to control the territory, a professional police to guarantee the safety of the population, electricity, roads, universities, ports, national production, science for young people.”
I have interviewed Moïse twice, once in his home in Milot in 2005 as he was urging people to register for their national identity cards and to vote in elections that would eventually be held in February 2006 (this meeting is recounted in my 2017 book Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History) and once in the run-up to the 2016 electoral season. In the first meeting - a little more than a year after he narrowly survived being lynched by anti-Lavalas crowds following Aristide’s February 2004 overthrow - I found a figure of solicitous humility. The figure I met more than a decade later was much more reminiscent of the bellicose public persona that has since defined his image. [In recent years, Moïse has also taken to referring to himself as “Doctor” despite the fact that the he holds no advanced academic qualification and only received an honorary doctorate in 2021 from Florida's Cornerstone Christian University, with the university's rector admonishing that “the honorary doctorate should not be used as an academic degree.”]
There have been visual and rhetorical flourishes evoking Russia in recent years, as well.
During a March 2019 demonstration against Jovenel Moïse, a handful of protesters waved Russian flags and chanted “long live Putin, down with the Americans…We want the presence of Vladimir Putin physically and militarily on Haitian soil.” In late March 2022, a plane belonging to Agape Flights, a nonprofit Christian aviation ministry based at Florida, was burned in the city of Les Cayes by protesters waving the Russian flag. With travel from Port-au-Prince to the south of the country often subjects to bouts of merciless gang warfare and kidnapping as drivers transit the neighborhood of Martissant, some protesters chanted Si pa gen a-tè, pa gen an-lè (No ground travel means no air travel, either).
When a vote for the renewal of the mandate of MINUSTAH’s successor, the Bureau Intégré des Nations Unies en Haïti (BINUH), came up before the United Nations in June 2022, some Haitian organizations claimed that the “Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China have a crucial role to play, by refusing the path of complicity in the destabilization of Haiti, by opposing the pure and simple renewal of the BINUH’s mandate.” Seeing these self-appointed representatives of one of the world’s oldest and proudest anti-imperialist countries throwing their lot in with the rapists and murderers of Bucha and the tormentors of the Uyghurs was a sight to behold. [For the record, I have written about the mistakes and crimes that some of MINUSTAH’s troops committed during their long presence in Haiti, but that in no way exculpates the crimes of Moscow and Beijing).
During August 2022 demonstrations that Moïse Jean-Charles organized in Cap-Haïtien, protesters carried Russian and Chinese flags and chanted Aba Ameriken! Viv Larisi! (Down with the Americans! Long live Russia!). During the same rally, Moïse attacked Haiti’s main banks by name while the crowd chanted “Burn them!” in response. In the lovely southern city of Jacmel, where Haiti’s revolutionary leaders gave shelter to Simón Bolívar when no one else would, an October 2022 demonstration also saw some protesters flying the Russian flag. Before a scheduled docking of the hospital ship USNS Comfort in December 2022, demonstrations in the southern city of Jérémie (birthplace of the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas and site of a hideous 1964 massacre by the forces of the dictator François Duvalier), issued a confusing amalgam of demands, with some praising Russia and others arguing in favour of U.S. military intervention in the country.
If all this sounds a bit ridiculous, one should consider the lay of the land in Haiti. In 2005, would anyone have predicted that Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, the singer who released an album called 100% Kaka and performed in a diaper, would one day be president? When he took office in 2017, did anyone really imagine that Jovenel Moïse would be murdered in his bed, the victim of a vast international conspiracy for which no one has yet been convicted? Would anyone imagine that an undistinguished journeyman politico like Ariel Henry would take over as Prime Minister and rule the county with virtually no oversight for the next two years? As politics in Haiti has become ever more the provenance of the worst and most violent people in the country - with voters told by Jovenel Moïse’s opponents during the 2016 vote that “there will not be elections; we will have our machetes and stones in hand” - it requires a very slim margin indeed to ascend to the throne should anything resembling elections ever occur again in Haiti.
The two once-dominant political parties in Haiti - Martelly’s Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale and Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas - are now closely associated in peoples’ minds with corruption, gangs and chaos, and René Préval’s death in 2017 left a centrist void that opened the door open for a new political force or forces to emerge. Whether that will be one that engages in demagogic and unhealthy revisionism regarding Russia’s track record in the so-called “developing world” remains to be seen. No doubt busy plotting his latest atrocity in Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine that Vladimir Putin is giving a lot of thought to the fate of several million economically-impoverished people living under palm trees in the middle of the Caribbean beyond the momentary glee, perhaps, of how he might use them to annoy the United States.
For months, first the United States, then Canada, then Jamaica passed the idea of leading some kind of force to support Haiti’s police back and forth, handing the proposed leadership off as if it was a hand grenade about to explode. Every month that passes increases the desperation of Haiti’s people as the gangs take over more and more territory weekly and commit untold outrages for which the citizens have no recourse. The failures of these “friends of Haiti,” as much as those of Haiti’s leaders themselves, have helped pave the way for this seemingly unending season in hell which the Haitians are currently enduring. As they struggle to survive the daily assaults of the gangs, who have enforced their presence in their lives as ruthlessly as any imperial conqueror, one hopes that it would be clear to all within and outside the country that Haiti’s children of heroes, as the Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot called these heirs of a revolutionary nation, have more in common with the heroic defenders of Bakhmut than with the war-mongering, empire-building killer in the Kremlin. The lives of the thousands of Central Africans, Libyans, Malians, Syrians, Ukrainians and others killed by the Russian leader’s sociopathic vainglorious militarism are not worth any more than those of the Haitians - each one irreplaceable - that the country has lost in recent years. But they are not worth any less, either.