Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan

Canada: Junior Partner of U.S. Imperialism

The Tory government has seized on the Haiti earthquake disaster to refurbish Canadian capitalism’s threadbare “humanitarian” pretenses. Ottawa sent 2,000 troops together with relief supplies, while prime minister Harper blew into the largely destroyed town of Jacmel for a photo-op. The reality is that, by helping subject the Haitian masses to brutal poverty and neocolonial oppression, the Canadian imperialist rulers have contributed to the devastation wreaked upon that country.

In 1993, Canadian troops and RCMP officers were among the forces dispatched to “retrain” the blood-soaked Haitian police and army. Two years later, Canada joined the U.S.-led military intervention that had returned former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Then in January 2003 Canada hosted a secret meeting of senior U.S., Latin American and European officials, dubbed the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti,” where a “consensus” was reached that Aristide must now be ousted.

More than 500 Canadian troops joined in the February 2004 kidnapping of Aristide, aiding the U.S. in whisking him out of the country. Right-wing paramilitaries with links to the former death-squad regime then went on a killing spree, massacring thousands of poor peasants and slum dwellers. Hundreds more were later murdered by the RCMP-trained Haitian National Police. The commander of the Canadian forces in Haiti at the time publicly acknowledged in July 2004 that at least 1,000 bodies had been buried in a mass grave within three weeks of the coup. He went on to defend the slaughter of dozens of civilians by United Nations troops on 12 March 2004, an atrocity known locally as the Belair Massacre. Ever since, Haiti has been occupied by UN “peacekeeping” forces including Canadian troops and police.

The history of Canadian imperialist depredations in the guise of “peacekeeping” by no means began with Haiti. In the 1950s, more than 20,000 Canadian troops joined the U.S./UN war against the North Korean and Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers states. A decade later, Canadian “UN peacekeepers” were sent to the Congo to help protect its vast mineral wealth for imperialist exploitation. Helping to overthrow Patrice Lumumba’s radical-nationalist government, they set the stage for his murder. During Washington’s long, losing war against the Vietnamese Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, Canadian “peacekeepers” and “observers” served as spies for the U.S., while Canada supplied the U.S. war machine with $1 million a day in arms shipments.

In the 1990s, Canadian UN troops tortured and killed civilians in Somalia, including the gruesome murder of Shidane Arone by the fascist-infested Canadian Airborne Regiment. Canada joined in the bloody U.S. neocolonial war on Iraq in 1991. From 2001 on, Canadian troops have been part of the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan, killing large numbers of civilians and handing over prisoners to the notoriously corrupt Afghan regime for torture. Canada also provided substantial covert military support to the second U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, while successive Liberal and Conservative regimes seized the opportunity to push through unprecedented increases in military spending. In this, they had the fulsome backing of the pro-imperialist social democrats of the NDP who in 2005 backed the Liberals’ $13 billion increase in military spending.

The pro-NDP reformist left fosters the deadly illusion that the Canadian imperialist rulers can be pressured into playing a “progressive” role internationally. This is exemplified by the International Socialists (I.S.), whose response to the Haiti disaster has been to beg the rulers to send “Aid Not Troops,” while the Canadian Peace Alliance pleads for “humanitarian aid, not militarization of aid.” As for the Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN), their alternative is to promote the return of Aristide, who was propped up by the very imperialist forces they claim to oppose. A few years ago, CHAN organized a speaking tour for Haitian politician Patrick Elie, who served as Aristide’s anti-drug czar from 1991-94, and was Secretary of State for National Defense in 1994-95, when he was instrumental in creating the National Police. During his tour, Elie publicly defended the presence of the UN troops in Haiti as providing a stabilizing role.

While acting as Washington’s junior partner in the region, Canadian capitalism has long had its own predatory interests, especially in the English-speaking Caribbean. This is particularly notable in the financial sector where the assets of Canadian banks dwarf those of locally-owned institutions. At home, the Canadian ruling class and its state machine are the class enemies of the workers and the oppressors of Native people, immigrants and the Québécois.

This system cannot be reformed. Imperialism is not a “bad policy” of the rulers, who cannot be “pressured” into serving the needs of the workers and oppressed. In his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin exposed this conception as pushing “a more subtle and more disguised (and therefore more dangerous) advocacy of conciliation with imperialism, because a ‘fight’ against the policy of the trusts and banks that does not affect the economic basis of the trusts and banks is mere bourgeois reformism and pacifism....” The imperialist order that has unleashed barbarism on the peoples of the world from Iraq to Afghanistan, Haiti and beyond must be swept away through international proletarian revolution, the only road to the liberation of humanity.