By Yves Engler - December 20th, 2012

Since taking over from the US/French/Canadian troops that helped oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and thousands of other elected officials the UN force has been a tool of political repression. MINUSTAH backed up a violent political pacification campaign waged by the coup government’s police force against poor neighbourhoods in Port-au-Prince from March 2004-May 2006. It also participated directly in attempts to pacify the slums...that each left at least a dozen civilians dead in Cité Soleil...Aside from political repression UN troops have been accused of various abuses ranging from having sex with minors to sodomizing boys.

By Justin Podur - December 20, 2012

...[I]s it unfair to call Haiti, a country that suffered 30 years of classic dictatorship under the Duvaliers from the 1950s to the 1980s, a dictatorship today?...When the institutions that govern Haiti today are examined, it is clear that the label ‘dictatorship’ applies. Haitians have no effective say over their own economic and political affairs. Their right to assemble and organize politically is sharply limited. Human rights violations are routine and go unpunished. Popular political parties are effectively banned from running.

Haitians know adversity and anguish as well as anyone.

Following Haiti's catastrophic January 12, 2010 earthquake, billions of dollars in relief aid were raised. Suffering Haitians got virtually none of it.

By Mark Weisbrot - Znet

Haitians have been ready for democracy for many decades. They were ready when they got massacred at polling stations, trying to vote in 1987, after the fall of the murderous Duvalier dictatorship. They were ready again in 1990, when they voted by a two-thirds majority for the leftist Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, only to see him overthrown seven months later in a military coup. The coup was later found to have been organized by people paid by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

Haiti remains devastated two years after its catastrophic earthquake.

Except briefly after their successful 1804 revolution and under Aristide, Haitians have suffered over 500 years of persecution and human misery.

By Yves Engler - September 13th, 2011

Rather than support calls for UN accountability, the NGOs jumped to the international organization’s defence. Highly dependent on Western government funding and political support, NGOs are overwhelmingly focused on a charitable model that fails to challenge the political or economic structures that cause the poverty and illness they seek to cure. But without political pressure the practices that engender poverty and illness will continue...

By Mark Weisbrot - Monday, August 1, 2011

United States diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks make it clearer than ever that foreign troops occupying Haiti for more than seven years, under the banner of the United Nations, have no legitimate reason to be there...They show that this a US occupation, as much as in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it is part of a decades-long US strategy to deny Haitians the right to democracy and self-determination.

Washington controls Haitian elections.

By Yves Engler - rabble.ca

Since hosting the Jan. 2003 round-table meeting dubbed the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti, Canada has been a dominant player in Haitian life. At that meeting high level U.S., Canadian and French officials discussed overthrowing elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, putting the country under international trusteeship and resurrecting Haiti's dreaded military. Thirteen months after the Ottawa Initiative meeting Aristide had been pushed out and a quasi UN trusteeship had begun.

By Roger Annis and Kevin Edmonds - April 14, 2011

Michel Martelly is closely associated with the extreme right in Haiti that twice overthrew elected government...He has vowed to reconstitute the notorious Armed Forces of Haiti, disbanded in 1995 due to its record of massive human rights violations...He says that Haiti's economic and social development depends on convincing more foreign investors to set up shop.

Aristide is due in Haiti Friday PM unless last minute US obstruction blocks him.

By BEN TERRALL - March 1, 2011

Haiti watchers in the U.S. repeatedly hear several questions from North Americans new to the island nation’s history: Why is Washington obsessed with containing any legitimate pro-democracy movement in the hemisphere’s poorest country?...Classified U.S. diplomatic cables recently released through Wikileaks provide some interesting insights into how to answer such queries.

The Obama administration is willfully obstructing Aristide's right to return home.