Montana Accord Monitoring Office Calls for a Fair Sanctions Regime for All Those Involved in Gang Financing

The Montana Accord Monitoring Office (BSA Montana) is sounding the alarm on the need to apply sanctions not only against actors of the Haitian political class, but also against those of the economic class involved in crime in the country.
In a note dated November 30, 2022, a copy of which is forwarded to the ZoomHaitiNews Editorial Office, the BSA Montana, setting its position on the evolution of the crisis that is raging in the country and the international sanctions against Haitian political actors, describes what it considers as the inability, the incompetence and the lack of will of the government led by the de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry to address the crisis of the country.

The BSA Montana denounces the contempt and silence of the government of Haiti in relation to the fact that the Dominican authorities trample on the rights of Haitian migrants, overriding bilateral and international conventions. Without lifting a finger in favor of the compatriots who are being massacred in the neighboring Republic, the BSA’s note emphasizes that the Haitian authorities have preferred to direct the repression against civil society in the border zone.
The BSA also adds that the growing insecurity in the country, aggravated by heinous murders, is largely the result of impunity, arguing that no serious judicial investigation has been opened or arrests made in this regard. The BSA’s note goes so far as to assume that the degree of impunity appears to be a complicity between the government in power and the criminals.

The BSA recalls that the Montana Agreement signed on August 30, 2021, enshrines the fight against impunity as one of the fundamental elements of its strategic approach to the establishment of what it calls the transition of rupture.

The note adds that it is necessary to decriminalize political and economic life in the country, which, it adds, will better address the problem of insecurity. << To do this, it is necessary that the representative social and political actors manage to find a consensus aimed at changing the political leadership at the highest level of the state and adopt all the measures necessary for the functioning of justice, as it should.>>

Based on the role also played by the international community in the collapse of the State and the bankruptcy of the country’s economy, the BSA Montana, as well as several other bodies, invites different countries to adopt measures to indiscriminately punish all political actors they identify as being in cahoots with the gangs or guilty of any other wrongdoing. But not only that.
The BSA calls attention to the fact that the focus should not be solely on Haitian political actors. This is a first step, but the sanctions must also affect all actors of the economic class. In this sense, citing the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2653 adopted in October 2022, following which the United States of America and Canada had announced sanctions only against Haitian political actors, the BSA Montana calls on the American and Canadian governments to also consider economic actors, not without basing themselves on solid legal evidence.

<<These sanctions should not be used as leverage to settle political issues with fellow Haitians in good standing and defending the rights and interests of the country>>, the BSA writes, adding that further action must be taken to bring the country to grips with the illegal trafficking of arms, ammunition, drugs, organs and human trafficking.

The BSA continues to promote the transition known as rupture, which, only, according to the signatories of the note, is capable of reforming the judicial system of the country, which must take charge of the different judicial files with the aim of punishing, according to the law, the intellectual and physical perpetrators of financial crimes, blood crimes, which sow grief in families in particular and the population in general.