Just hours after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, the de facto Haitian government quietly requested troop deployments by the US and United Nations to defend the country’s essential infrastructure. However, the first reason the US has thus far rejected the request is reported because it had been “confusing.”
“With regard to the circumstances [in] which we would send military troops to Haiti, we’re only sending American Marines to our embassy to make sure they are secure and nothing is out of whack at all,” US President Joe Biden said at a news conference in Washington, DC, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday.
“But the idea of sending American forces into Haiti is not on the agenda at this moment,” he added.
The government of acting Haitian Prime Minister Claude Joseph made its request for troops public on July 9, but consistent with Reuters, which viewed copies of two letters sent by the govt to the US and UN, the request had first been made privately two days earlier.
Congressional sources told Capitol Hill that the request was ambiguous about several things, including whether or not Joseph’s government was requesting police or troops, thanks to the very fact that “gendarmerie” can ask either.
However, the US has already sent several officials from the FBI and US Department of Homeland Security to the Caribbean nation to assist with the investigation of Moïse’s murder, also as $5 million in supplemental funding for the Haitian National Police (PNH).
A US troop deployment to Haiti is unpopular in both nations: since early this year, when the US-backed Moïse’s claim to possess a presidency one year longer than the supreme court had ruled, Haitians demonstrating in mass protests have demanded the US stop meddling in Haitian affairs.
Earlier on Thursday, protesters outside the US State Department headquarters in Washington, DC, also demanded the US, also because the Organization of yank States core and therefore the United Nations, stop intervening in Haiti and let Haitians mapped out the difficulty themselves.
Moïse was slain early within the morning on July 7 by a team of gunmen who stormed his range in a Port-au-Prince suburb. His wife, Martine, was badly wounded but survived and is recovering during a hospital in Miami, Florida. consistent with the PNH, the squad included 26 Colombians, most of them ex-military, and two Americans; 20 of them are arrested and therefore charged, while the remainder were killed in gun battles with police.
On Thursday, PNH chief Leon Charles said that Dimitri Herard, the top of Moïse’s security detail, had been far away from his post, interrogated, and placed in isolated detention. However, Charles dismissed claims the killing had been a government transgression as “a lie.”
The US has repeatedly intervened in Haiti since it won its independence from France in 1804, including a 19-year military occupation from 1915 to 1934 under which 15,000 Haitians were killed, and more recently in 2004 when the US overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
