Hard to know where to begin, but let's pick 2019, the year Haiti was supposed to have parliamentary elections.
In 2019 President Jovenel Moïse was in power, after winning the Nov 2016 election, which saw just 21% of the population turn out to vote. The scheduled parliamentary elections for that year were delayed, a frequent occurrence in Haitian politics.
By 2020 this left Moïse governing almost alone, with just a rump legislature of senators. The deputies and even local official's terms had ended without new elections. Then Moïse was assassinated on July 7th 2021.
In what seems to be a well publicised affair, a conspiracy between diaspora Haitians and Colombian mercenaries resulted in Moïse's residence being attacked. His bodyguards and security team were all unharmed 👀
So the country turned to the appointed but unelected Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who assumed leadership after Moïse's death. The final blow came on Jan 10th 2023, when the remaining senators left office. There are now no elected officials running Haiti.
Into the void came the gangs. Many outlets float the number 200, half of whom battle it out in Port-au-Prince. The two main gang alliances are the G9 an Fanmi e Alye, led by former cop Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, and the GPèp la, led by Gabriel Jean Pierre - Ti Gabriel.
The G9 alliance looks focused on extortion, kidnapping and capturing public facilities, like electricity and water. In sept 2022 the G9 closed a fuel terminal, demanding amnesty and even seats in the Cabinet, protesting Henry's regime and the cutback to fuel subsidies.
2022 also saw a battle over the notorious slum Cité Soleil, a G-PEP stronghold. With no water, electricity, food, sanitation or protection, the shanty town's thousands of unfortunates were trapped under constant gunfire.
Haiti is a failed state, no way around it. The army, disbanded in 1995 after decades of political interference, was re-established in 2017 and has possibly 500 recruits, for a country with over 11 million people. The police are riddled with corruption and gang connections.
In March inflation was at 49.3% and around 5 million Haitians were on the verge of starvation. Official figures for murders and kidnappings exist but they seem far too conservative for such an anarchic situation.
Various NGOs and the UN report gang rapes, extortion, torture, ransoms, sniper attacks and general lawlessness across the country. Numerous videos of executions, beheadings, beatings and cannibalism have surfaced online.
Just yesterday videos appeared showing Haitian police beating and stoning gang members before piling tyres on top of them and setting them on fire.
Henry called for foreign intervention to help restore order to the country - the US and Canada seem unsurprisingly reluctant to engage. Kenya, Rwanda, Trinidad and Jamaica have either volunteered or been suggested, along with Brazil.
Exactly how and what the objectives of an intervention would be are unclear. The alternative power block - the Montana Group - is looking to unseat Henry and push for a 2yr transitional government under different interim leadership, and rejects military intervention.
It's hard to imagine that any future Haitian govt would not make use of foreign powers, be they food distributing NGOs, educational charities, police trainers, special forces, military equipment or UN peacekeepers, despite their record.
What are chances of foreign intervention do you think?
I also have other threads on overlooked Haitian history
On May 4th 2021, the Ugandan Parliament passed the The Prevention and Prohibition of Human Sacrifice Bill - a piece of legislation aimed at stamping out the pervasive problem of child sacrifice in the country.
A quick thread on how it's been going in Uganda since then:
'Hunting dogs lead police to den of human sacrifices'
The data is difficult to gather but maybe two children a week are abducted and ritually murdered in the country.
The reasons behind it are varied, usually to bring luck and fortune to a particular endeavour - an election, a new business or growing a church community
The story of the Arctic Dorset people, Palaeo-Eskimos who lived in Canada between ~ 700 BC to ~ 1200 AD, is quite well known now. They disappeared in the face of the advancing Thule Inuit. But - what if some of them survived in some isolated form until recent times?
Dorset culture technology was more limited compared to the Thule. They didn't hunt whales, use dogs or use bows-and-arrows. Instead they were masters of hunting seals. The broader diet of the Inuit certainly helped them move into and conquer a climatically unstable Arctic.
We don't know exactly what happened between the Thule Inuit and the Dorset (the Inuit called them Tuniit), but oral legends speak of the reluctance of the Dorset to fight and their rage at losing their hunting grounds.
The power of Orkney during the late Neolithic period is best seen through the movement of grooved ware pottery and the associated ritual package. This map shows the locations of grooved ware pottery finds, expanding outwards from Orkney down the coast and over to Ireland...
The enduring story of Tasmanian aboriginal cultural decline includes the fact that they stopped eating fish around 2000 BC, or worse - that they lost or forgot the skills to do so.
Let's examine this claim 🧵
The origin of the claim is two-fold, firstly ethnographic evidence from Europeans on Tasmania, who observed that the inhabitants ate no fish, and secondly an absence of fish in the archaeological record starting around 1,800 BC.
The famous researcher, Rhys Jones, excavated two caves at Rocky Cape on Tasmania's northwest coast during the 1960's, concluding that seal and fish bones were predominant in older middens, but absent later on. This was corroborated elsewhere on the island.
Thread of some unusual mixed peoples from around the world
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Hakka or Chinese-Jamaicans are the descendants of Chinese workers brought to Jamaica in the 1850s. Genetically there are more paternal Chinese markers in the population than maternal.
Lemba Jews - the Lemba are a southern African ethnic group with Semitic male ancestry. Some practice a variant of Judaism. Genetically the Lemba have a mix of Y-haplogroups such as J and the CHM marker.
In 2008 a team of geneticists met with leaders of the Uros people, in a hotel lobby in Puno, Peru.
They had travelled from their artificial floating island homes on Lake Titicaca.
They had come to find out if science backed them up - were they the oldest people in the Andes?
The modern Uros people are a tiny remnant of a large group which lived along the waterways in the Andes. After persecution from the Aymara and then the Inca, the Uros retreated to the interior of the lake - using reeds to build islands, houses and boats.
The water world of the reeds allowed them to escape the Inca, but they were relegated to the lowest rung of the Andean social hierarchy. They were believed to be people who were born before the sun, with black blood - a different kind of human being.