UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Haiti’s foreign minister on Monday asked the U.N. Security Council and the rest of the world to continue supporting the impoverished Caribbean nation after President Michel Martelly named a new cabinet to end street protests.
Martelly announced his cabinet choices via Facebook late on Sunday night, keeping the ministers of defense, foreign affairs, health, tourism, education and public works in their jobs and appointing allies to the key positions of planning minister and secretary of state for public security.
The announcement was part of an attempt to end a wave of street demonstrations against Martelly’s rule.
“We’d like the Security Council as well as all of our partners in the international community to continue to back the government and people of Haiti as they move toward shoring up the rule of law and democracy,” Haiti’s Foreign Minister Duly Brutus told the 15-nation council.
He added that Haiti “has overcome successfully the crisis which was threatening to undercut the achievements and results of the stabilization program undertaken over the past decade.”
Brutus was speaking at a special Security Council session on the connection between development, peace and security.
The United Nations, which has a peacekeeping force in Haiti, has not commented on Martelly’s announcement of a new cabinet. The Security Council is due to visit the island nation for several days later this week.
Haiti has a long history of coups, uprisings and dictatorships and the dissolution of parliament raised fears that it is again on a slippery slope toward violent unrest.
Although Martelly is barred from re-election, his opponents accuse him of engineering the current crisis in order to promote his own candidate to succeed him in election late this year, possibly even his wife, Sophia Martelly.
Haiti is struggling to overcome decades of instability. It is recovering from a devastating 2010 earthquake and a cholera epidemic that has killed thousands and is widely blamed on U.N. peacekeepers.
The United Nations has not accepted responsibility for the cholera outbreak.
(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)