During the Sept. 30 meeting of the UN Security Council during which a U.S.-Panamanian resolution creating a Gang Suppression Force (GSF) for Haiti was passed (see separate slug), Russian UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia and China’s Permanent Representative Fu Cong raised additional pressing questions which the U.S. Trump administration would prefer not to address. Both diplomats raised the matter of the unimpeded flow of weapons and ammunition entering Haiti from south Florida, which has never ceased despite a UNSC arms embargo.
Sophisticated weaponry is never lacking for Haitian gangs. Increasingly powerful Haitian gangs are “armed to the teeth,” Ambassador Fu insisted, “a phenomenon inextricably linked to an endless influx of weapons and ammunition.” Thus, allowing weapons to flow into the hands of gangs, he said, “while pushing for the deployment of armed forces to operate in Haiti is a contradictory approach that risks plunging Haiti into greater security turmoil and exposing both the Haitian people and the troops deployed to heightened risks.”
Nebenzia chastised the U.S. for failing to address the “root causes” of the Haitian crisis, trying, instead, to shift the responsibility for the country’s crisis away from itself and onto the entire international community. It is within the U.S.’s power to resolve the real problem, he said, which requires “first and foremost stopping the unimpeded flow of illegal weapons, as required by the existing Security Council embargo.” In this context, Nebenzia also raised the issue of the U.S.’s current escalating naval operations in the Caribbean, threatening to invade Venezuela or overthrow its President Nicolas Maduro, using the pretext that he runs a drug cartel.
Is there some plan to make Haiti a part of this U.S. deployment? Beware, warned Russian ambassador Nebenzia. This GSF initiative “inspires even less trust in us given the escalating tensions in the Caribbean and the deployment of American armed forces near the shores of Venezuela. We have no confidence that it will not occur to the authors of today’s text”—the U.S.-Panama resolution—"to connect in some `creative way’ their military activity against alleged drug cartels with the situation in Haiti.”
