Six US legislators said on Friday they will push for US Marines to extend a three-month mission to stabilize Haiti, acting at the request of the Caribbean nation's new US-backed interim leaders.
The bipartisan delegation led by Republican Mark Foley of Florida made the announcement at a news conference after a few hours visit to meet with interim President Boniface Alexandre, interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue and other officials.
"We are hopeful that this will not be just a few short months that we will be here. We want to be part of helping Haiti in the long term," Foley said.
Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Florida, said Haiti's leaders told them the country was "at a critical stage in its history" and that "the solutions must be critical" following the Feb. 29 departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide fled under pressure from the US and France, and a popular rebellion led by ex-soldiers of the disbanded Haitian army.
"Both the president and prime minister have made it clear that they would like to see some presence of United States Marines beyond June 1," Cummings said.
"This is a message that we will take back to the United States" to ensure Haiti has the security needed for development.
US Marines arrived within hours of Aristide's hasty departure and lead a multinational force of 3,600 troops from France, Chile and Canada that is to hand over to UN peacekeepers on June 1.
The US legislators gave no details of how many Marines they would like to see remain in Haiti, nor how they would interact with the UN force.
On Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for the new Brazilian-led mission to include 6,700 troops and more than 1,600 international police and experts to turn the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere into a "functioning democracy."
But Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Tuesday that was conditional on "a firm commitment by the international community to rebuild Haiti" and participation by the 15-nation Caribbean Community that has refused to recognize Latortue's government.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the