America's record on Haiti and Biden's right to be at the Queen's funeral - II

US president Joe Biden is key to our discussion of the rightness or wrongness of having only lily-whites on the state funeral guest list. As I said before, no one — country or individual involved in international politics — can possibly be described as lily-white and pure. If one set out to compile a guest list of the lily-whites, it would probably be a very short one indeed.

How then to address the perception, in the words of an American friend in Haiti, that the US has blood on its hands with respect to Haiti? As I said before, the Biden administration has played a dreadful role in the year since Haiti’s president Jovenel Moise was assassinated and an unelected “acting” prime minister, Ariel Henry, took charge. The US has sought nothing more from the interim Haitian administration than permission to fly in deportation flights loaded up with Haitians migrants. It is an attempt to address a hot-button issue ahead of the mid-term elections and as my friend in Haiti notes, it has contrib…