'One
Step At A Time': An Interview With Jean-Bertrand Aristide
By Peter Hallward
17 February, 2007
HaitiAnalysis.com
[Introduction] In the
mid 1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a young parish priest working
in an impoverished and embattled district of Haiti's capital city Port-au-Prince.
A courageous champion of the rights and dignity of the poor, he soon
became the most widely respected spokesman of a growing popular movement
against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse
in 1986 of the US-backed Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country's
first democratic presidential elections, with 67% of the vote. Perceived
as a dangerous threat by Haiti's tiny ruling elite, he was overthrown
by a military coup in September 1991. Conflict with that same elite
and its army, backed by their powerful allies in the U.S. and France,
has shaped the whole of Aristide's political trajectory. After winning
another landslide election victory in 2000, his enemies launched a massive
propaganda campaign to portray him as violent and corrupt. Foreign and
elite resistance eventually culminated in a second coup against him,
the night of 28 February 2004. A personal and political ally of the
ANC's Thabo Mbeki, Aristide then went into a reluctant exile in South
Africa, where he remains to this day.
Since his expulsion
from Haiti three years ago Aristide's supporters have suffered the most
brutal period of violent oppression in the country's recent history.
According to the best available estimates perhaps 5000 of them died
at the hands of the US- and UN-backed régime that replaced the
constitutional government in March 2004. Although the situation remains
tense and UN troops still occupy the country, the worst of this violence
came to an end in February 2006, when after another extraordinary electoral
campaign Aristide's old prime minister and ally René Préval
(who succeeded him as president in 1996) was himself re-elected in yet
another landslide victory. Calls for Aristide's immediate and unconditional
return continue to polarise Haitian politics. Many commentators, as
well as some prominent members of the current government, acknowledge
that if the constitution allowed Aristide to stand for re-election again
then he would easily win.
* * * * *
Peter Hallward:
Haiti is a profoundly divided country, and you have always been a profoundly
divisive figure. For most of the 1990s many sympathetic observers found
it easy to make sense of this division more or less along class lines:
you were demonised by the rich, and idolised by the poor. But then things
started to seem more complicated. Rightly or wrongly, by the end of
the decade, many of your original supporters had become more sceptical,
and from start to finish your second administration (2001-2004) was
dogged by accusations of violence and corruption. Although by every
available measure you remained by far the most trusted and popular politician
among the Haitian electorate, you appeared to have lost much of the
support you once enjoyed among parts of the political class, among aid-workers,
activists, intellectuals and so on, both at home and abroad. Most of
my questions have to do with these accusations, in particular the claim
that as time went on you compromised or abandoned many of your original
ideals.
To begin with though, I'd
like quickly to go back over some familiar territory, and ask about
the process that first brought you to power back in 1990. The late 1980s
were a very reactionary period in world politics, especially in Latin
America. How do you account for the remarkable strength and resilience
of the popular movement against dictatorship in Haiti, the movement
that came to be known as lavalas (a Kreyol word that means 'flood' or
'avalanche', and also a 'mass of people', or 'everyone together')? How
do you account for the fact that, against the odds and certainly against
the wishes of the U.S., the military and the whole ruling establishment
in Haiti, you were able to win the election of 1990?
Jean-Bertrand Aristide:
Much of the work had already been done by people who came before me.
I'm thinking of people like Father Antoine Adrien and his co-workers,
and Father Jean-Marie Vincent, who was assassinated in 1994. They had
developed a progressive theological vision that resonated with the hopes
and expectations of the Haitian people. Already in 1979 I was working
in the context of liberation theology, and there is one phrase in particular
that remains etched in my mind, and that may help summarise my understanding
of how things stood. You might remember that the Conferencia de Puebla
took place in Mexico, in 1979, and at the time several liberation theologians
were working under severe constraints. They were threatened and barred
from attending the conference. And the slogan I'm thinking of ran something
like this: si el pueblo no va a Puebla, Puebla se quedará sin
pueblo. If the people cannot go to Puebla, Puebla will remain cut off
from the people.
In other words, for me the
people remain at the very core of our struggle. It isn't a matter of
struggling for the people, on behalf of the people, at a distance from
the people; it is the people themselves who are struggling, and it's
a matter of struggling with and in the midst of the people.
This ties in with a second
theological principle, one that Sobrino, Boff and others understood
very well. Liberation theology can itself only be a phase in a broader
process. The phase in which we may first have to speak on behalf of
the impoverished and the oppressed comes to an end as they start to
speak in their own voice and with their own words. The people start
to assume their own place on the public stage. Liberation theology then
gives way to the liberation of theology. The whole process carries us
a long way from paternalism, a long way from any notion of a 'saviour'
who might come to guide the people and solve their problems. The priests
who were inspired by liberation theology at that time understood that
our role was to accompany the people, not to replace them.
The emergence of the people
as an organised public force, as a collective consciousness, was already
taking place in Haiti in the 1980s, and by 1986 this force was strong
enough to push the Duvalier dictatorship from power. It was a grassroots
popular movement, and not at all a top-down project driven by a single
leader or a single organisation. It wasn't an exclusively political
movement, either. It took shape above all through the constitution,
all over the country, of many small church communities or ti legliz.
It was these small communities that played the decisive historical role.
When I was elected president it wasn't a strictly political affair,
it wasn't the election of a politician, of a conventional political
party. No, it was an expression of a broad popular movement, of the
mobilisation of the people as a whole. For the first time, the national
palace became a place not just for professional politicians but for
the people themselves. The simple fact of allowing ordinary people to
enter the palace, the simple fact of welcoming people from the poorest
sections of Haitian society within the very centre of traditional power
? this was already a profoundly transformative gesture.
PH: You
hesitated for some time, before agreeing to stand as a candidate in
those 1990 elections. You were perfectly aware of how, given the existing
balance of forces, participation in the elections might dilute or divide
the movement. Looking back at it now, do you still think it was the
right thing to do? Was there a viable alternative to taking the parliamentary
path?
JBA: I tend
to think of history as the ongoing crystallisation of different sorts
of variables. Some of the variables are known, some are unknown. The
variables that we knew and understood at the time were clear enough.
We had some sense of what we were capable of, and we also knew that
those who sought to preserve the status quo had a whole range of means
at their disposal. They had all sorts of strategies and mechanisms ?
military, economic, political... ? for disrupting any movement that
might challenge their grip on power. But we couldn't know how exactly
they would use them. They couldn't know this themselves. They were paying
close attention to how the people were struggling to invent ways of
organising themselves, ways of mounting an effective challenge. This
is what I mean by unknown variables: the popular movement was in the
process of being invented and developed, under pressure, there and then,
and there was no way of knowing in advance the sort of counter-measures
it might provoke.
Now given the balance of
these two sorts of variables, I have no regrets. I regret nothing. In
1990, I was asked by others in the movement to accept the cross that
had fallen to me. That's how Father Adrien described it, and how I understood
it: I had to take up the burden of this cross. 'You are on the road
to Calvary', he said, and I knew he was right. When I refused it at
first, it was Monsignor Willy Romélus, whom I trusted and still
trust, as an elder and as a counsellor, who insisted that I had no choice.
'Your life doesn't belong to you anymore', he said. 'You have given
it as a sacrifice for the people. And now that a concrete obligation
has fallen on you, now that you are faced with this particular call
to follow Jesus and take up your cross, think carefully before you turn
your back on it.'
This then is what I knew,
and knew full well at the time. It was a sort of path to Calvary. And
once I had decided, I accepted this path for what it was, without illusions,
without deluding myself. We knew perfectly well that we wouldn't be
able to change everything, that we wouldn't be able to right every injustice,
that we would have to work under severe constraints, and so on.
Suppose I had said no, I
won't stand. How would the people have reacted? I can still hear the
echo of certain voices that were asking, 'let's see now if you have
the courage to take this decision, let's see if you are too much of
a coward to accept this task. You who have preached such fine sermons,
what are you going to do now? Are you going to abandon us, or are you
going to assume this responsibility so that together we can move forward?'
And I thought about this. What was the best way to put the message of
the Gospels into practice? What was I supposed to do? I remember how
I answered that question, when a few days before the election of December
1990, I went to commemorate the victims of the ruelle de Vaillant massacre,
where some twenty people were killed by the Macoutes on the day of the
aborted elections of November 1987. A student asked me: 'Father, do
you think that by yourself you'll be able to change this situation,
which is so corrupt and unjust?' And in reply I said: 'In order for
it to rain, do you need one or many raindrops? In order to have a flood,
do you need a trickle of water or a river in spate?' And I thanked him
for giving me the chance to present our collective mission in the form
of this metaphor: it is not alone, as isolated drops of water, that
you or I are going to change the situation but together, as a flood
or torrent, lavalassement, that we are going to change it, to clean
things up, without any illusions that it will be easy or quick.
So were there other alternatives?
I don't know. What I'm sure of is that there was then an historic opportunity,
and that we gave an historic answer. We gave an answer that transformed
the situation. We took a step in the right direction. Of course, in
doing so we provoked a response. Our opponents responded with a coup
d'état. First the attempted coup of Roger Lafontant, in January
1991, and when that failed, the coup of September 30th 1991. Our opponents
were always going to have disproportionately powerful means of hindering
the popular movement, and no single decision or action could have changed
this. What mattered was that we took a step forward, a step in the right
direction, followed by other steps. The process that began then is still
going strong. In spite of everything it is still going strong, and I'm
convinced that it will only get stronger. And that in the end it will
prevail.
PH: The
coup of September 1991 took place even though the actual policies you
pursued once in office were quite moderate, quite cautious. So was a
coup inevitable? Regardless of what you did or didn't do, was the simple
presence of someone like you in the presidential palace intolerable
for the Haitian elite? And in that case, could more have been done to
anticipate and try to withstand the backlash?
JBA: Well
it's a good question. Here's how I understand the situation. What happened
in September 1991 happened again in February 2004, and could easily
happen again soon, in the future, so long as the oligarchy who control
the means of repression use them to preserve a hollow version of democracy.
This is their obsession: to maintain a situation that might be called
'democratic', but which consists in fact of a superficial, imported
democracy that is imposed and controlled from above. They've been able
to keep things this way for a long time. Haiti has been independent
for 200 years, and we now live in a country in which just 1% of its
people control more than half of its wealth. For the elite, it's a matter
of us against them, of finding a way of preserving the massive inequalities
that affect every facet of Haitian society. We are subject to a sort
of apartheid. Ever since 1804, the elite has done everything in its
power to keep the masses at bay, on the other side of the walls that
protect their privilege. This is what we are up against. This is what
any genuinely democratic project is up against. The elite will do everything
in its power to ensure that it controls a puppet president and a puppet
parliament. It will do everything necessary to protect the system of
exploitation upon which its power depends. Your question has to be addressed
in terms of this historical context, in terms of this deep and far-reaching
continuity.
PH: Exactly
so ? but in that case, what needs to be done to confront the power of
this elite? If in the end it is prepared to use violence to counter
any genuine threat to their hegemony, what is the best way to overcome
this violence? For all its strength, the popular movement that carried
you to the presidency wasn't strong enough to keep you there, in the
face of the violence it provoked.
People sometimes compare
you to Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led his people to freedom and won
extraordinary victories under extraordinary constraints ? but Toussaint
is also often criticised for failing to go far enough, for failing to
break with France, for failing to do enough to keep the people's support.
It was Dessalines who led the final fight for independence and who assumed
the full cost of that fight. How do you answer those (like Patrick Elie,
for instance, or Ben Dupuy) who say you were too moderate, that you
acted like Toussaint in a situation that really called for Dessalines?
What do you say to those who claim you put too much faith in the U.S.
and its domestic allies?
JBA: Well
[laughs]. 'Too much faith in the U.S.', that makes me smile... In my
humble opinion Toussaint L'Ouverture, as a man, had his limitations.
But he did his best, and in reality he did not fail. The dignity he
defended, the principles he defended, continue to inspire us today.
He was captured, his body was imprisoned and killed, yes; but Toussaint
is still alive, his example and his spirit still guide us now. Today
the struggle of the Haitian people is an extension of his campaign for
dignity and freedom. These last two years, from 2004-2006, they continued
to stand up for their dignity and refused to fall to their knees, they
refused to capitulate. On 6 July 2005 Cité Soleil was attacked
and bombarded, but this attack, and the many similar attacks, did not
discourage people from insisting that their voices be heard. They spoke
out against injustice. They voted for their president this past February,
and this too was an assertion of their dignity; they will not accept
the imposition of another president from abroad or above. This simple
insistence on dignity is itself an engine of historical change. The
people insist that they will be the subject of their history, not its
object. As Toussaint was the subject of his history, so too the Haitian
people have taken up and extended his struggle, as the subjects of their
history.
Again, this doesn't mean
that success is inevitable or easy. It doesn't mean we can resolve every
problem, or even that once we have dealt with a problem, that powerful
vested interests won't try to do all they can to turn the clock back.
Nevertheless, something irreversible has been achieved, something that
works its way through the collective consciousness. This is precisely
the real meaning of Toussaint's famous claim, once he had been captured
by the French, that they had cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty
but that its roots remained deep. Our struggle for freedom will encounter
many obstacles but it will not be uprooted. It is firmly rooted in the
minds of the people. The people are poor, certainly, but our minds are
free. We continue to exist, as a people, on the basis of this initial
prise de conscience, of this fundamental awareness that we are.
It's not an accident that
when it came to choosing a leader, this people, these people who remain
so poor and so marginalised by the powers that be, should have sought
out not a politician but a priest. The politicians had let them down.
They were looking for someone with principles, someone who would speak
the truth, and in a sense this was more important than material success,
or an early victory over our opponents. This is Toussaint's legacy.
As for Dessalines, the struggle that he led was armed, it was a military
struggle, and necessarily so, since he had to break the bonds of slavery
once and for all. He succeeded. But do we still need to carry on with
this same struggle, in the same way? I don't think so. Was Dessalines
wrong to fight the way he did? No. But our struggle is different. It
is Toussaint, rather than Dessalines, who can still accompany the popular
movement today. It's this inspiration that was at work in the election
victory of February 2006, that allowed the people to out-fox and out-manoeuvre
their opponents, to choose their own leader in the face of the full
might of the powers that be.
For me this opens out onto
a more general point. Did we place too much trust in the Americans?
Were we too dependent on external forces? No. We simply tried to remain
lucid, and to avoid facile demagoguery. It would be mere demagoguery
for a Haitian president to pretend to be stronger than the Americans,
or to engage them in a constant war of words, or to oppose them for
opposing's sake. The only rational course is to weigh up the relative
balance of interests, to figure out what the Americans want, to remember
what we want, and to make the most of the available points of convergence.
Take a concrete example, the events of 1994. Clinton needed a foreign
policy victory, and a return to democracy in Haiti offered him that
opportunity; we needed an instrument to overcome the resistance of the
murderous Haitian army, and Clinton offered us that instrument. This
is what I mean by acting in the spirit of Toussaint L'Ouverture. We
never had any illusions that the Americans shared our deeper objectives,
we knew they didn't want to travel in the same direction. But without
the Americans we couldn't have restored democracy.
PH: There
was no other option, no alternative to reliance on American troops?
JBA: No.
The Haitian people are not armed. Of course there are some criminals
and vagabonds, some drug dealers, some gangs who have weapons, but the
people have no weapons. You're kidding yourself if you think that the
people can wage an armed struggle. We need to look the situation in
the eye: the people have no weapons, and they will never have as many
weapons as their enemies. It's pointless to wage a struggle on your
enemies' terrain, or to play by their rules. You will lose.
PH: Did
you pay too high a price for American support? They forced you to make
all kinds of compromises, to accept many of the things you'd always
opposed ? a severe structural adjustment plan, neo-liberal economic
policies, privatisation of the state enterprises, etc. The Haitian people
suffered a great deal under these constraints. It must have been very
difficult to swallow these things, during the negotiations of 1993.
JBA: Yes
of course, but here you have to distinguish between the struggle in
principle, the struggle to persist in a preferential option for the
poor, which for me is inspired by theology and is a matter of justice
and truth, on the one hand, and on the other hand, their political struggle,
which plays by different rules. In their version of politics you can
lie and cheat if it allows you to pursue your strategic aims. The claim
that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for instance, was
a flagrant lie. But since it was a useful way of reaching their objective,
Colin Powell and company went down that path.
As for Haiti, back in 1993,
the Americans were perfectly happy to agree to a negotiated economic
plan. When they insisted, via the IMF and other international financial
institutions, on the privatisation of state enterprises, I was prepared
to agree in principle, if necessary ? but I refused simply to sell them
off, unconditionally, to private investors. I said no to untrammelled
privatisation. Now that there was corruption in the state sector was
undeniable, but there were several different ways of engaging with this
corruption. Rather than untrammelled privatisation, I was prepared to
agree to a democratisation of these enterprises. What does this mean?
It means an insistence on transparency. It means that some of the profits
of a factory or a firm should go to the people who work for it. It means
that some of those profits should be invested in things like local schools,
or health clinics, so that the children of the workers can derive some
benefit from their work. It means creating conditions on the micro level
that are consistent with the principles that we want to guide development
on the macro level. The Americans said fine, no problem.
We all signed those agreements,
and I am at peace with my decision to this day. I spoke the truth. Whereas
they signed them in a different spirit. They signed them because by
doing so they could facilitate my return to Haiti and thus engineer
their foreign policy victory, but once I was back in office, they were
already planning to renegotiate the terms of the privatisation. And
that's exactly what happened. They started to insist on untrammelled
privatisation, and again I said no. They went back on our agreement,
and then relied on a disinformation campaign to make it look like it
was me who had broken my word. It's not true. The accords we signed
are there, people can judge for themselves. Unfortunately we didn't
have the means to win the public relations fight. They won the communications
battle, by spreading lies and distorting the truth, but I still feel
that we won the real battle, by sticking to the truth.
PH: What
about your battle with the Haitian army itself, the army that overthrew
you in 1991? The Americans re-made this army in line with their own
priorities back in 1915, and it had acted as a force for the protection
of those priorities ever since. You were able to disband it just months
after your return in 1994, but the way it was handled remains controversial,
and you were never able fully to demobilise and disarm the soldiers
themselves. Some of them came back to haunt you with a vengeance, during
your second administration.
JBA: Again
I have no regrets on this score. It was absolutely necessary to disband
the army. We had an army of some 7000 soldiers, and it absorbed 40%
of the national budget. Since 1915, it had served as an army of internal
occupation. It never fought an external enemy. It murdered thousands
of our people. Why did we need such an army, rather than a suitably
trained police force? So we did what needed to be done.
In fact we did organise
a social programme for the reintegration of former soldiers, since they
too are members of the national community. They too have the right to
work, and the state has the responsibility to respect that right ? all
the more so when you know that if they don't find work, they will be
more easily tempted to have recourse to violence, or theft, as did the
Tontons Macoutes before them. We did the best we could. The problem
didn't lie with our integration and demobilisation programme, it lay
with the resentment of those who were determined to preserve the old
status quo. They had plenty of money and weapons, and they work hand
in hand with the most powerful military machine on the planet. It was
easy for them to win over some former-soldiers, to train and equip them
in the Dominican Republic and then use them to destabilise the country.
That's exactly what they did. But again, it wasn't a mistake to disband
the army. It's not as if we might have avoided the second coup, the
coup of 2004, if we had hung on to the army. On the contrary, if the
army had remained in place then René Préval would never
have finished his first term in office (1996-2001), and I certainly
wouldn't have been able to hold out for three years, from 2001 to 2004.
By acting the way we did
we clarified the real conflict at issue here. As you know, Haiti's history
is punctuated by a long series of coups. But unlike the previous coups,
the coup of 2004 wasn't undertaken by the 'Haitian' army, acting on
the orders of our little oligarchy, in line with the interests of foreign
powers, as happened so many times before, and as happened again in 1991.
No, this time these all-powerful interests had to carry out the job
themselves, with their own troops and in their own name.
PH: Once
Chamblain and his little band of rebels got bogged down on the outskirts
of Port-au-Prince and couldn't advance any further, U.S. Marines had
to go in and scoop you out of the country.
JBA: Exactly.
The real truth of the situation, the real contradiction organising the
situation, finally came out in the open, in full public view.
PH: Going
back to the mid 1990s for a moment, did the creation of the Fanmi Lavalas
party in 1996 serve a similar function, by helping to clarify the actual
lines of internal conflict that had already fractured the loose coalition
of forces that first brought you to power in 1990? Why were there such
deep divisions between you and some of your erstwhile allies, people
like Chavannes Jean-Baptiste and Gérard Pierre-Charles? Almost
the whole of Préval's first administration, from 1996 to 2000,
was hampered by infighting and opposition from Pierre-Charles and the
OPL. Did you set out, then, to create a unified, disciplined party,
one that could offer and then deliver a coherent political programme?
JBA: No,
that's not the way it happened. In the first place, by training and
by inclination I was a teacher, not a politician. I had no experience
of party politics, and was happy to leave to others the task of developing
a party organisation, of training party members, and so on. Already
back in 1991, I was happy to leave this to career politicians, to people
like Gérard Pierre-Charles, and along with other people he began
working along these lines as soon as democracy was restored. He helped
found the Organisation Politique Lavalas (OPL) and I encouraged people
to join it. This party won the 1995 elections, and by the time I finished
my term in office, in February 1996, it had a majority in parliament.
But then, rather than seek to articulate an ongoing relation between
the party and the people, rather than continue to listen to the people,
after the elections the OPL started to pay less attention to them. It
started to fall into the traditional patterns and practices of Haitian
politics. It started to become more closed in on itself, more distant
from the people, more willing to make empty promises, and so on. As
for me I was out of office, and I stayed on the sidelines. But a group
of priests who were active in the Lavalas movement became frustrated,
and wanted to restore a more meaningful link with the people. They wanted
to remain in communion with the people. At this point (in 1996) the
group of people who felt this way, who were unhappy with the OPL, were
known as la nébuleuse ? they were in an uncertain and confusing
position. Over time there were more and more such people, who became
more and more dissatisfied with the situation.
We engaged in long discussions
about what to do, and Fanmi Lavalas grew out of these discussions. It
emerged from the people themselves. And even when it came to be constituted
as a political organisation, it never conceived of itself as a conventional
political party. If you look through the organisation's constitution,
you'll see that the word 'party' never comes up. It describes itself
as an organisation, not a party. Why? Because in Haiti we have no positive
experience of political parties; parties have always been instruments
of manipulation and betrayal. On the other hand, we have a long and
positive experience of organisation, of popular organisations ? the
ti legliz, for instance.
So no, it wasn't me who
'founded' Fanmi Lavalas as a political party. I just brought my contribution
to the formation of this organisation, which offered a platform for
those who were frustrated with the party that was the OPL (which was
soon to re-brand itself as the neo-liberal Organisation du Peuple en
Lutte), those who were still active in the movement but who felt excluded
within it. Now in order to be effective Fanmi Lavalas needed to draw
on the experience of people who knew something of politics, people who
could act as political leaders without abandoning a commitment to truth.
This is the hard problem, of course. Fanmi Lavalas doesn't have the
strict discipline and coordination of a political party. Some of its
members haven't yet acquired the training and the experience necessary
to preserve both a commitment to truth and an effective participation
in politics. For us, politics is deeply connected to ethics, this is
the crux of the matter. Fanmi Lavalas is not an exclusively political
organisation. That's why no politician has been able simply to appropriate
and use Fanmi Lavalas as a springboard to power. That will never be
easy: the members of Fanmi Lavalas insist on the fidelity of their leaders.
PH: That's
a lesson that Marc Bazin, Louis-Gérald Gilles and a few others
had to learn during the 2006 election campaign, to their cost.
JBA: Exactly.
PH: To what
extent, however, did Fanmi Lavalas then become a victim of its own success?
Rather like the ANC here in South Africa, it was obvious from the beginning
that Fanmi Lavalas would be more or less unbeatable at the polls. But
this can be a mixed blessing. How did you propose to deal with the many
opportunists who immediately sought to worm their way into your organisation,
people like Dany Toussaint and his associates?
JBA: I left
office early in 1996. By 1997, Fanmi Lavalas had emerged as a functional
organisation, with a clear constitution. This was already a big step
forward from 1990. In 1990, the political movement was largely spontaneous;
in 1997 things were more coordinated. Along with the constitution, at
the first Fanmi Lavalas congress we voted and approved the programme
laid out in our Livre Blanc: Investir dans l'humain, which I know you're
familiar with. This programme didn't emerge out of nothing. For around
two years we held meetings with engineers, with agronomists, with doctors,
teachers, and so on. We listened and discussed the merits of different
proposals. It was a collective process. The Livre Blanc is not a programme
based on my personal priorities or ideology. It's the result of a long
process of consultation with professionals in all these domains, and
it was compiled as a truly collaborative document. And as even the World
Bank came to recognise, it was a genuine programme, a coherent plan
for the transformation of the country. It wasn't a bundle of empty promises.
Now in the midst of these
discussions, in the midst of the emergent organisation, it's true that
you will find opportunists, you will find future criminals and future
drug-dealers. But it wasn't easy to identify them. It wasn't easy to
find them in time, and to expel them in time, before it was too late.
Most of these people, before gaining a seat in parliament, behaved perfectly
well. But you know, for some people power can be like alcohol: after
a glass, two glasses, a whole bottle... you're not dealing with the
same person. It makes some people dizzy. These things are difficult
to anticipate. Nevertheless, I think that if it hadn't been for the
intervention of foreign powers, we would have been able to make real
progress. We had established viable methods for collaborative discussion,
and for preserving direct links with the people. I think we would have
made real progress, taking small but steady steps.
Even in spite of the aid
embargo we managed to accomplish certain things. We were able to invest
in education, for instance. As you know, in 1990 there were only 34
secondary schools in Haiti; by 2001 there were 138. The little that
we had to invest, we invested it in line with the programme laid out
in Investir dans l'humain. We built a new university at Tabarre, a new
medical school. Although it had to run on a shoestring, the literacy
programme we launched in 2001 was also working well; Cuban experts who
helped us manage the programme were confident that by December 2004
we'd have reduced the rate of adult illiteracy to just 15%, a small
fraction of what it was a decade earlier. Previous governments never
seriously tried to invest in education, and it's clear that our programme
was always going to be a threat to the status quo. The elite want nothing
to do with popular education, for obvious reasons. Again it comes down
to this: we can either set out from a position of genuine freedom and
independence, and work to create a country that respects the dignity
of all its people, or else we will have to accept a position of servile
dependence, a country in which the dignity of ordinary people counts
for nothing. This is what's at stake here.
PH: Armed
then with its programme, Fanmi Lavalas duly won an overwhelming victory
in the legislative elections of May 2000, winning around 75% of the
vote. No one disputed the clarity and legitimacy of the victory. But
your enemies in the U.S. and at home soon drew attention to the fact
that the method used to calculate the number of votes needed to win
some senate senates in a single round of voting (i.e. without the need
for a run-off election between the two most popular candidates) was
at least controversial, if not illegitimate. They jumped on this technicality
in order to cast doubt on the validity of the election victory itself,
and used it to justify an immediate suspension of international loans
and aid. Soon after your own second term in office began (in February
2001), the winners of these seats were persuaded to stand down, pending
a further round of elections. But this was a year after the event; wouldn't
it have been better to resolve the matter more quickly, to avoid giving
the Americans a pretext to undermine your administration before it even
began?
JBA: I hope
you won't mind if I take you up on your choice of verbs: you say that
we gave the Americans a pretext. In reality the Americans created their
pretext, and if it hadn't been this it would have been something else.
Their goal all along was to ensure that come January 2004, there would
be no meaningful celebration of the bicentenary of independence. It
took the U.S. 58 years to recognise Haiti's independence, since of course
the U.S. was a slave-owning country at the time, and in fact U.S. policy
has never really changed. Their priorities haven't changed, and today's
American policy is more or less consistent with the way it's always
been. The coup of September 1991 was undertaken by people in Haiti with
the support of the U.S. administration, and in February 2004 it happened
again, thanks to many of these same people.
No, the U.S. created their
little pretext. They were having trouble persuading the other leaders
in CARICOM to turn against us (many of whom in fact they were never
able to persuade), and they needed a pretext that was clear and easy
to understand. 'Tainted elections', it was the perfect card to play.
But I remember very well what happened when they came to observe the
elections. They came, and they said 'very good, no problem'. Everything
seemed to go smoothly, the process was deemed peaceful and fair. And
then as the results came in, in order to undermine our victory, they
asked questions about the way the votes were counted. But I had nothing
to do with this. I wasn't a member of the government, and I had no influence
over the CEP (Provisional Electoral Council), which alone has the authority
to decide on these matters. The CEP is a sovereign, independent body.
The CEP declared the results of the elections; I had nothing to do with
it. Then once I had been re-elected, and the Americans demanded that
I dismiss these senators, what was I supposed to do? The constitution
doesn't give the president the power to dismiss senators who were elected
in keeping with the protocol decided by the CEP. Can you imagine a situation
like this back in the U.S. itself? What would happen if a foreign government
insisted that the president dismiss an elected senator? It's absurd.
The whole situation is simply racist, in fact; they impose conditions
on us that they would never contemplate imposing on a 'properly' independent
country, on a white country. We have to call things by their name: is
the issue really a matter of democratic governance, of the validity
of a particular electoral result? Or is actually about something else?
In the end, what the Americans
wanted to do was to use the legislature, the senate, against the executive.
They hoped that I would be stupid enough to insist on the dismissal
of these elected senators. I refused to do it. In 2001, as a gesture
of goodwill, these senators eventually chose to resign on the assumption
that they would contest new elections as soon as the opposition was
prepared to participate in them. But the Americans failed to turn the
senate and the parliament against the presidency, and it soon became
clear that the opposition never had the slightest interest in new elections.
Once this tactic failed, however, they recruited or bought off a few
hotheads, including Dany Toussaint and company, and used them, a little
later, against the presidency.
Once again, the overall
objective was to undermine the celebration of our bicentenary, the celebration
of our independence and of all its implications. When the time came
they sent emissaries to Africa, especially to francophone Africa, telling
their leaders not to attend the celebrations. Chirac applied enormous
pressure on his African colleagues; the Americans did the same. Thabo
Mbeki was almost alone in his willingness to resist this pressure, and
through him the African Union was represented. I'm very glad of it.
The same pressure was applied in the Caribbean: the prime minister of
the Bahamas, Perry Christie, decided to come, but that's it, he was
the only one. It was very disappointing.
PH: In the
press, meanwhile, you came to be presented not as the unequivocal winner
of legitimate elections, but as an increasingly tyrannical autocrat.
JBA: Exactly.
A lot of the $200 million or so in aid and development money for Haiti
that was suspended when we won the elections in 2000 was simply diverted
to a propaganda and destabilisation campaign waged against our government
and against Fanmi Lavalas. The disinformation campaign was truly massive.
Huge sums of money were spent to get the message out, through the radio,
through newspapers, through various little political parties that were
supposed to serve as vehicles for the opposition... It was extraordinary.
When I look back at this very discouraging period in our history I compare
it with what has recently happened in some other places. They went to
the same sort of trouble when they tried to say there were weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq. I can still see Colin Powell sitting there
in front of the United Nations, with his little bag of tricks, demonstrating
for all the world to see that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Look at this irrefutable proof! It was pathetic. In any case the logic
was the same: they rig up a useful lie, and then they sell it. It's
the logic of people who take themselves to be all-powerful. If they
decide 1 + 1 = 4, then 4 it will have to be.
PH: From
My Lai to the Iran-Contras to Iraq to Haiti, Colin Powell has made an
entire career along these lines... But going back to May 2000: soon
after the results were declared, the head of the CEP, Leon Manus, fled
the country, claiming that the results were invalid and that you and
Préval had put pressure on him to calculate the votes in a particular
way. Why did he come to embrace the American line?
JBA: Well,
I don't want to judge Leon Manus, I don't know what happened exactly.
But I think he acted in the same way as some of the leaders of the Group
of 184. They are beholden to a patron, a boss. The boss is American,
a white American. And you are black. Don't underestimate the inferiority
complex that still so often conditions these relationships. You are
black. But sometimes you get to feel almost as white as the whites themselves,
you get to feel whiter than white, if you're willing to get down on
your knees in front of the whites. If you're willing to get down on
your knees, rather than stay on your feet, then you can feel almost
as white as they look. This is a psychological legacy of slavery: to
lie for the white man isn't really lying at all, since white men don't
lie! [laughs]. How could white men lie? They are the civilised ones.
If I lie for the whites I'm not really lying, I'm just repeating what
they say. So I don't know, but I imagine Leon Manus felt like this when
he repeated the lie that they wanted him to repeat. Don't forget, his
journey out of the country began in a car with diplomatic plates, and
he arrived in Santo Domingo on an American helicopter. Who has access
to that sort of transport?
In this case and others like it, what's really going on is clear enough.
It's the people with power who pull the strings, and they use this or
that petit nègre de service, this or that black messenger to
convey the lies that they call truth. The people recruited into the
Group of 184 did much they same thing: they were paid off to say what
their employers wanted them to say. They helped destroy the country,
in order to please their patrons.
PH: Why
were these people so aggressively hostile to you and your government?
There's something hysterical about the positions taken by the so-called
'Democratic Convergence', and later by the 'Group of 184', by people
like Evans Paul, Gérard Pierre-Charles and others. They refused
all compromise, they insisted on all sorts of unreasonable conditions
before they would even consider participation in another round of elections.
The Americans themselves seemed exasperated with them, but made no real
effort to rein them in.
JBA: They
made no effort to rein them in because this was all part of the plan.
It's a little bit like what's happening now [in July 2006], with Yvon
Neptune: the Americans have been shedding crocodile tears over poor
imprisoned Neptune, as if they haven't been complicit in and responsible
for this imprisonment! As if they don't have the power to change the
situation overnight! They have the power to undermine and overthrow
a democratically elected government, but they don't have the power to
set free a couple of prisoners that they themselves put in prison [laughs].
Naturally they have to respect the law, the proper procedures, the integrity
of Haitian institutions! This is all bluff, it's absurd.
Why were the Group of 184 and our opponents in 'civil society' so hostile?
Again it's partly a matter of social pathology. When a group of citizens
is prepared to act in so irrational and servile a fashion, when they
are so willing to relay the message concocted by their foreign masters,
without even realising that in doing so they inflict harm upon themselves
? well if you ask me, this is a symptom of a real pathology. It has
something to do with a visceral hatred, which became a real obsession:
a hatred for the people. It was never really about me, it's got nothing
to do with me as an individual. They detest and despise the people.
They refuse absolutely to acknowledge that we are all equal, that everyone
is equal. So when they behave in this way, part of the reason is to
reassure themselves that they are different, that they are not like
the people, not like them. It's essential that they see themselves as
better than others. I think this is one part of the problem, and it's
not simply a political problem. There's something masochistic about
this behaviour, and there are plenty of foreign sadists who are more
than willing to oblige!
I'm convinced it's bound
up with the legacy of slavery, with an inherited contempt for the people,
for the common people, for the niggers [petits nègres]... It's
the psychology of apartheid: it's better to get down on your knees with
whites than it is to stand shoulder to shoulder with blacks. Don't underestimate
the depth of this contempt. Don't forget that back in 1991, one of the
first things we did was abolish the classification, on birth certificates,
of people who were born outside of Port-au-Prince as 'peasants'. This
kind of classification, and all sorts of things that went along with
it, served to maintain a system of rigid exclusion. It served to keep
people outside, to treat them as moun andeyo ? people from outside.
People under the table. This is what I mean by the mentality of apartheid,
and it runs very deep. It won't change overnight.
PH: What
about your own willingness to work alongside people compromised by their
past, for instance your inclusion of former Duvalierists in your second
administration? Was that an easy decision to take? Was it necessary?
JBA: No
it wasn't easy, but I saw it as a necessary evil. Take Marc Bazin, for
instance. He was minister of finance under Jean-Claude Duvalier. I only
turned to Bazin because my opponents in Democratic Convergence, in the
OPL and so on, absolutely refused any participation in the government.
PH: You
were under pressure to build a government of 'consensus', of national
unity, and you approached people in the Convergence first?
JBA: Right,
and I got nowhere. Their objective was to scrap the entire process,
and they said no straightaway. Look, of course we had a massive majority
in parliament, and I wasn't prepared to dissolve a properly elected
parliament. What for? But I was aware of the danger of simply excluding
the opposition. I wanted a democratic government, and so I set out to
make it as inclusive as I could, under the circumstances. Since the
Convergence wasn't willing to participate, I invited people from sectors
that had little or no representation in parliament to have a voice in
the administration, to occupy some ministerial positions and to keep
a balance between the legislative and the executive branches of government.
PH: This
must have been very controversial. Bazin not only worked for Duvalier,
he was your opponent back in 1990.
JBA: Yes
it was controversial, and I didn't take the decision alone. We talked
about it at length, we held meetings, looking for a compromise. Some
were for, some were against, and in the end there was a majority who
accepted that we couldn't afford to work alone, that we needed to demonstrate
we were willing and able to work with people who clearly weren't pro-Lavalas.
They weren't pro-Lavalas, but we had already published a well-defined
political programme, and if they were willing to cooperate on this or
that aspect of the programme, then we were willing to work with them
as well.
PH: It's
ironic: you were often accused of being a sort of 'monarchical' if not
tyrannical president, of being intolerant of dissent, too determined
to get your own way... But what do you say to those who argue instead
that the real problem was just the opposite, that you were too tolerant
of dissent? You allowed ex-soldiers to call openly and repeatedly for
the reconstitution of the army. You allowed self-appointed leaders of
'civil society' to do everything in their power to disrupt your government.
You allowed radio stations to sustain a relentless campaign of misinformation.
You allowed all sorts of demonstrations to go on day after day, calling
for you to be overthrown by fair means or foul, and many of these demonstrators
were directly funded and organised by your enemies in the U.S. Eventually
the situation got out of hand, and the people who sought to profit from
the chaos certainly weren't motivated by respect for the rights of free
speech!
JBA: Well,
this is what democracy requires. Either you allow for the free expression
of diverse opinions or you don't. If people aren't free to demonstrate
and to give voice to their demands there is no democracy. Now again,
I knew our position was strong in parliament, and that the great majority
of the people were behind us. A small minority opposed us, a small but
powerful minority. Their foreign connections, their business interests,
and so on, make them powerful. Nevertheless they have the right to protest,
to articulate their demands, just like anyone else. That's normal. As
for accusations that I was becoming dictatorial, authoritarian, and
so on, I paid no attention. I knew they were lying, and I knew they
knew they were lying. Of course it was a predictable strategy, and it
helped create a familiar image they could sell to the outside world.
At home, however, everyone knew it was ridiculous. And in the end, like
I said before, it was the foreign masters themselves who had to come
to Haiti to finish the job. My government certainly wasn't overthrown
by the people who were demonstrating in the streets.
PH: Perhaps
the most serious and frequent accusation that was made by the demonstrators,
and repeated by your critics abroad, is that you resorted to violence
in order to hang on to power. The claim is that, as the pressure on
your government grew, you started to rely on armed gangs from the slums,
so-called 'chimères', and that you used them to intimidate and
in some cases to murder your opponents.
JBA: Here
again the people who make these sort of claims are lying, and I think
they know they are lying. As soon as you start to look rationally at
what was really going on, these accusations don't even begin to stand
up. Several things have to be kept in mind. First of all, the police
had been working under an embargo for several years. We weren't even
able to buy bullet-proof vests or tear-gas canisters. The police were
severely under-equipped, and were often simply unable to control a demonstration
or confrontation. Some of our opponents, some of the demonstrators who
sought to provoke violent confrontations, knew this perfectly well.
The people also understood this. It was common knowledge that while
the police were running out of ammunition and supplies in Haiti, heavy
weapons were being smuggled to our opponents in and through the Dominican
Republic. The people knew this, and didn't like it. They started getting
nervous, with good reason.
The provocations didn't
let up, and there were some isolated acts of violence. Was this violence
justified? No. I condemned it. I condemned it consistently. But with
the limited means at our disposal, how could we prevent every outbreak
of violence? There was a lot of provocation, a lot of anger, and there
was no way that we could ensure that each and every citizen would refuse
violence. The president of a country like Haiti cannot be held responsible
for the actions of its every citizen. But there was never any deliberate
encouragement of violence, there was no deliberate recourse to violence.
Those who make and repeat these claims are lying, and they know it.
Now what about these 'chimères', the people they call chimères?
This is clearly another expression of our apartheid mentality, the very
word says it all. 'Chimères' are people who are impoverished,
who live in a state of profound insecurity and chronic unemployment.
They are the victims of structural injustice, of systematic social violence.
And they are among the people who voted for this government, who appreciated
what the government was doing and had done, in spite of the embargo.
It's not surprising that they should confront those who have always
benefited from this same social violence, once they started actively
seeking to undermine their government.
Again, this doesn't justify
occasional acts of violence, but where does the real responsibility
lie? Who are the real victims of violence here? How many members of
the elite, how many members of the opposition's many political parties,
were killed by 'chimères'? How many? Who are they? Meanwhile
everyone knows that powerful economic interests were quite happy to
fund certain criminal gangs, that they put weapons in the hands of vagabonds,
in Cité Soleil and elsewhere, in order to create disorder and
blame it on Fanmi Lavalas. These same people also paid journalists to
present the situation in a certain way, and among other things they
promised them visas ? recently some of them who are now living in France
admitted what they were told to say, in order to get their visa. So
you have people who were financing misinformation on the one hand and
destabilisation on the other, and who encouraged little groups of hoodlums
to sow panic on the streets, to create the impression of a government
that is losing control.
As if all this wasn't enough, rather than allow police munitions to
get through to Haiti, rather than send arms and equipment to strengthen
the Haitian government, the Americans sent them to their proxies in
the Dominican Republic instead. You only have to look at who these people
were ? people like Jodel Chamblain, who is a convicted criminal, who
escaped justice in Haiti to be welcomed by the US, and who then armed
and financed these future 'freedom fighters' who were waiting over the
border in the Dominican Republic. That's what really happened. We didn't
arm the 'chimères', it was they who armed Chamblain and Philippe!
The hypocrisy is extraordinary. And then when it comes to 2004-2006,
suddenly all this indignant talk of violence falls quiet. As if nothing
had happened. People were being herded into containers and dropped into
the sea. That counts for nothing. The endless attacks on Cité
Soleil, they count for nothing. I could go on and on. Thousands have
died. But they don't count, because they are just 'chimères',
after all. They don't count as equals, they aren't really people in
their own right.
PH: What
about people in your entourage like Dany Toussaint, your former chief
of security, who was accused of all kinds of violence and intimidation?
JBA: He
was working for them! It's clear. From the beginning. And we were taken
in. Of course I regret this. But it wasn't hard for the Americans or
their proxies to infiltrate the government, to infiltrate the police.
We weren't even able to provide the police with the equipment they needed,
we could hardly pay them an adequate salary. It was easy for our opponents
to stir up trouble, to co-opt some policemen, to infiltrate our organisation.
This was incredibly difficult to control. We were truly surrounded.
I was surrounded by people who one way or another were in the pay of
foreign powers, who were working actively to overthrow the government.
A friend of mine said at the time, looking at the situation, 'I now
understand why you believe in God, as otherwise I can't understand how
you can still be alive, in the midst of all this.'
PH: I suppose
even your enemies knew there was nothing to gain by turning you into
a martyr.
JBA: Yes,
they knew that a mixture of disinformation and character assassination
would be more effective, more devastating. I'm certainly used to it
[laughs].
PH: How
can I find out more about Dany Toussaint's role in all this? He wasn't
willing to talk to me when I was in Port-au-Prince a couple of months
ago. It's intriguing that the people who were clamouring for his arrest
while you were still in power were then suddenly quite happy to leave
him in peace, once he had openly come out against you (in December 2003),
and once they themselves were in power. But can you prove that he was
working for or with them all along?
JBA: This
won't be easy to document, I accept that. But if you dig around for
evidence I think you'll find it. Over time, things that were once hidden
and obscure tend to come to light. In Haiti there are lots of rumours
and counter-rumours, but eventually the truth tends to come out. There's
a proverb in Kreyol that says twou manti pa fon. Lies don't run very
deep. Sooner or later the truth will out. There are plenty of things
that were happening at the time that only recently are starting to come
to light.
PH: You
mean things like the eventual public admissions, made over the past
year or so by rebel leaders Rémissainthe Ravix and Guy Philippe,
about the extent of their long-standing collaboration with the Convergence
Démocratique, with the Americans?
JBA: Exactly.
PH: Along
the same lines, what do you say to militant leftwing groups like Batay
Ouvriye, who insist that your government failed to do enough to help
the poor, that you did nothing for the workers? Although they would
appear to have little in common with the Convergence, they made and
continue to make many of the same sorts of accusations against Fanmi
Lavalas.
JBA: I think,
although I'm not sure, that there are several things that help explain
this. First of all, you need to look at where their funding comes from.
The discourse makes more sense, once we know who is paying the bills.
The Americans don't just fund political groups willy-nilly.
PH: Particularly
not quasi-Trotskyite trade unionists...
JBA: Of
course not. And again, I think that part of the reason comes back to
what I was saying before, that somewhere, somehow, there's a little
secret satisfaction, perhaps an unconscious satisfaction, in saying
things that powerful white people want you to say. Even here, I think
it goes something like this: 'yes we are workers, we are farmers, we
are struggling on behalf of the workers, but somewhere, there's a little
part of us that would like to escape our mental class, the state of
mind of our class, and jump up into another mental class.' My hunch
is that it's something like that. In Haiti, contempt for the people
runs very deep. In my experience, resistance to our affirmation of equality,
our being together with the people, ran very deep indeed. Even when
it comes to trivial things.
PH: Like
inviting kids from poor neighbourhoods to swim in your pool?
JBA: Right.
You wouldn't believe the reactions this provoked. It was too scandalous:
swimming pools are supposed to be the preserve of the rich. When I saw
the photographs this past February, of the people swimming in the pool
of the Montana Hotel, I smiled [laughs]. I thought that was great. I
thought ah, now I can die in peace. It was great to see. Because at
the time, when kids came to swim in our pool at Tabarre, lots of people
said look, he's opening the doors of his house to riff-raff, he's putting
ideas in their heads. First they will ask to swim in his pool; soon
they will demand a place in our house. And I said no, it's just the
opposite. I had no interest in the pool itself, I hardly ever used it.
What interested me was the message this sent out. Kids from the poorer
neighbourhoods would normally never get to see a pool, let alone swim
in one. Many are full of envy for the rich. But once they've swum in
a pool, once they realise that it's just a pool, they conclude that
it doesn't much matter. The envy is deflated.
PH: That
day in February, a huge crowd of thousands of people came up from the
slums to make their point to the CEP (which was stationed in the Montana
Hotel), they made their demands, and then hundreds of them swam in the
Montana's pool and left, without touching a thing. No damage, no theft,
just making a point.
JBA: Exactly.
It was a joy to see those pictures.
PH: Turning
now to what happened in February 2004. I know you've often been asked
about this, but there are wildly different versions of what happened
in the run-up to your expulsion from the country. The Americans insist
that late in the day you came calling for help, that you suddenly panicked
and that they were caught off guard by the speed of your government's
collapse. On the face of it this doesn't look very plausible. Guy Philippe's
well-armed rebels were able to outgun some isolated police stations,
and appeared to control much of the northern part of the country. But
how much support did the rebels really have? And surely there was little
chance that they could take the capital itself, in the face of the many
thousands of people who were ready to defend it?
JBA: Don't
forget that there had been several attempts at a coup in the previous
few years, in July 2001, with an attack on the police academy, the former
military academy, and again a few months later, in December 2001, with
an incursion into the national palace itself. They didn't succeed, and
on both occasions these same rebels were forced to flee the city. They
only just managed to escape. It wasn't the police alone who chased them
away, it was a combination of the police and the people. So they knew
what they were up against, they knew that it wouldn't be easy. They
might be able to find a way into the city, but they knew that it would
be hard to remain there. It was a little like the way things later turned
out in Iraq: the Americans had the weapons to battle their way in easily
enough, but staying there has proved to be more of a challenge. The
rebels knew they couldn't take Port-au-Prince, and that's why they hesitated
for a while, on the outskirts, some 40 km away. So from our perspective
we had nothing to fear. The balance of forces was in our favour, that
was clear. There are occasions when large groups of people are more
powerful than heavy machine guns and automatic weapons, it all depends
on the context. And the context of Port-au-Prince, in a city with so
many national and international interests, with its embassies, its public
prominence and visibility, and so on, was different from the context
of more isolated places like Saint-Marc or Gonaïves. The people
were ready, and I wasn't worried.
No, the rebels knew they
couldn't take the city, and that's why their masters decided on a diversion
instead, on attacks in the provinces, in order to create the illusion
that much of the country was under their control, that there was a major
insurrection under way. But it wasn't the case. There was no great insurrection:
there was a small group of soldiers, heavily armed, who were able to
overwhelm some police stations, kill some policemen and create a certain
amount of havoc. The police had run out of ammunition, and were no match
for the rebels' M16s. But the city was a different story.
Meanwhile, as you know on
February 29 a shipment of police munitions that we had bought from South
Africa, perfectly legally, was due to arrive in Port-au-Prince. This
decided the matter. Already the balance of forces was against the rebels;
on top of that, if the police were restored to something like their
full operational capacity, then the rebels stood no chance at all.
PH: So at
that point the Americans had no option but to go in and get you themselves,
the night of 28 February?
JBA: That's
right. They knew that in a few more hours, they would lose their opportunity
to 'resolve' the situation. They grabbed their chance while they had
it, and bundled us onto a plane in the middle of the night. That's what
they did.
PH: The
Americans ? Ambassador Foley, Luis Moreno, and so on ? insist that you
begged for their help, that they had to arrange a flight to safety at
the last minute. Several reporters were prepared to endorse their account.
On the other hand, speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the American
security guards who was on your plane that night told the Washington
Post soon after the event that the U.S. story was a pure fabrication,
that it was 'just bogus.' Your personal security advisor and pilot,
Frantz Gabriel, also confirms that you were kidnapped that night by
U.S. military personnel. Who are we supposed to believe?
JBA: Well.
For me it's very simple. You're dealing with a country that was willing
and able, in front of the United Nations and in front of the world at
large, to fabricate claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq. They were willing to lie about issues of global importance.
It's hardly surprising that they were able to find a few people to say
the things that needed to be said in Haiti, in a small country of no
great strategic significance. They have their people, their resources,
their way of doing things. They just carried out their plan, that's
all. It was all part of the plan.
PH: They
said they couldn't send peacekeepers to help stabilise the situation,
but as soon as you were gone, the troops arrived straight away.
JBA: The
plan was perfectly clear.
PH: I have
just a couple of last questions. In August and September 2005, in the
run up to the elections that finally took place in February 2006, there
was a lot of discussion within Fanmi Lavalas about how to proceed. In
the end, most of the rank and file threw their weight behind your old
colleague, your 'twin brother' René Préval, but some members
of the leadership opted to stand as candidates in their own right; others
were even prepared to endorse Marc Bazin's candidacy. It was a confusing
situation, one that must have put great strain on the organisation,
but you kept very quiet.
JBA: In
a dictatorship, the orders go from top to bottom. In a democratic organisation,
the process is more dialectical. The small groups or cells that we call
the ti fanmis are part of Fanmi Lavalas, they discuss things, debate
things, express themselves, until a collective decision emerges from
out of the discussion. This is how the organisation works. Of course
our opponents will always cry 'dictatorship, dictatorship, it's just
Aristide giving orders.' But people who are familiar with the organisation
know that's not the way it is. We have no experience of situations in
which someone comes and gives an order, without discussion. I remember
that when we had to choose the future electoral candidates for Fanmi
Lavalas, back in 1999, the discussions at the Foundation [the Aristide
Foundation for Democracy] would often run long into the night. Delegations
would come from all over the country, and members of the cellules de
base would argue for or against. Often it wasn't easy to find a compromise,
but this is how the process worked, this was our way of doing things.
So now, when it came to deciding on a new presidential candidate last
year, I was confident that the discussion would proceed in the same
way, even though by that stage many members of the organisation had
been killed, and many more were in hiding, in exile or in prison. I
made no declaration one way or another about what to do or who to support.
I knew they would make the right decision in their own way. A lot of
the things 'I' decided, as president, were in reality decided this way:
the decision didn't originate with me, but with them. It was with their
words that I spoke. The decisions we made emerged through a genuinely
collective process. The people are intelligent, and their intelligence
is often surprising.
I knew that the Fanmi Lavalas senators who decided to back Bazin would
soon be confronted by the truth, but I didn't know how this would happen,
since the true decision emerged from the people, from below, not from
above. And no-one could have guessed it, a couple of months in advance.
Never doubt the people's intelligence, their power of discernment. Did
I give an order to support Bazin or to oppose Bazin? No, I gave no order
either way. I trusted the membership to get at the truth.
Of course the organisation
is guided by certain principles, and I drew attention to some of them
at the time. In South Africa, back in 1994, could there have been fair
elections if Mandela was still in prison, if Mbeki was still in exile,
if other leaders of the ANC were in hiding? The situation in Haiti this
past year was much the same: there could hardly be fair elections before
the prisoners were freed, before the exiles were allowed to return,
and so on. I was prepared to speak out about this, as a matter of general
principle. But to go further than this, to declare for this or that
candidate, this or that course of action, no, it wasn't for me to say.
PH: How
do you now envisage the future? What has to happen next? Can there be
any real change in Haiti without directly confronting the question of
class privilege and power, without finding some way of overcoming the
resistance of the dominant class?
JBA: We
will have to confront these things, one way or another. The condition
sine qua non for doing this is obviously the participation of the people.
Once the people are genuinely able to participate in the democratic
process, then they will be able to devise an acceptable way forward.
In any case the process itself is irreversible. It's irreversible at
the mental level, at the level of people's minds. Members of the impoverished
sections of Haitian society now have an experience of democracy, of
a collective consciousness, and they will not allow a government or
a candidate to be imposed on them. They demonstrated this in February
2006, and I know they will keep on demonstrating it. They will not accept
lies in the place of truth, as if they were too stupid to understand
the difference between the two. Everything comes back, in the end, to
the simple principle that tout moun se moun ? every person is indeed
a person, every person is capable of thinking things through for themselves.
Either you accept this principle or you don't. Those who don't accept
it, when they look at the nègres of Haiti ? and consciously or
unconsciously, that's what they see ? they see people who are too poor,
too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see people
who need others to make their decisions for them. It's a colonial mentality,
in fact, and this mentality is still very widespread among our political
class. It's also a projection: they project upon the people a sense
of their own inadequacy, their own inequality in the eyes of the master.
So yes, for me there is a way out, a way forward, and it has to pass
by way of the people. Even if we don't yet have viable democratic structures
and institutions, there is already a democratic consciousness, a collective
democratic consciousness, and this is irreversible. February 2006 shows
how much has been gained, it shows how far down the path of democracy
we have come, even after the coup, even after two years of ferocious
violence and repression.
What remains unclear is
how long it will take. We may move forward fairly quickly, if through
their mobilisation the people encounter interlocutors who are willing
to listen, to enter into dialogue with them. If they don't find them,
it will take longer. From 1992 to 1994 for instance, there were people
in the U.S. government who were willing to listen at least a little,
and this helped the democratic process to move forward. Since 2000 we've
had to deal with a U.S. administration that is diametrically opposed
to its predecessor, and everything slowed down dramatically, or went
into reverse. The question is how long it will take. The real problem
isn't simply a Haitian one, it isn't located within Haiti. It's a problem
for Haiti that is located outside Haiti! The people who control it can
speed things up, slow them down, block them altogether, as they like.
But the process itself, the democratic process in Haiti itself, it will
move forward one way or another, it's irreversible. That's how I understand
it.
As for what will happen now, or next, that's unclear. The unknown variables
I mentioned before remain in force, and much depends on how those who
control the means of repression both at home and abroad will react.
We still need to develop new ways of reducing and eventually eliminating
our dependence on foreign powers.
PH: And
your own next step? I know you're still hoping to get back to Haiti
as soon as possible: any progress there? What are your own priorities
now?
JBA: Yes
indeed: Thabo Mbeki's last public declaration on this point dates from
February, when he said he saw no particular reason why I shouldn't be
able to return home, and this still stands. Of course it's still a matter
of judging when the time is right, of judging the security and stability
of the situation. The South African government has welcomed us here
as guests, not as exiles; by helping us so generously they have made
their contribution to peace and stability in Haiti. And once the conditions
are right we'll go back. As soon as René Préval judges
that the time is right then I'll go back. I am ready to go back tomorrow.
PH: In the
eyes of your opponents, you still represent a major political threat.
JBA: Criminals
like Chamblain and Philippe are free to patrol the streets, even now,
but I should remain in exile because some members of the elite think
I represent a major threat? Who is the real threat? Who is guilty, and
who is innocent? Again, either we live in a democracy or we don't, either
we respect the law or we don't. There is no legal justification for
blocking my return. It's slightly comical: I was elected president but
am accused of dictatorship by nameless people who are accountable to
no-one yet have the power to expel me from the country and then to delay
or block my return [laughs]. In any case, once I'm finally able to return,
then the fears of these people will evaporate like mist, since they
have no substance. They have no more substance than did the threat of
legal action against me, which was finally abandoned this past week,
once even the American lawyers who were hired to prosecute the case
realised that the whole thing was empty, that there was nothing in it.
PH: You
have no further plans to play some sort of role in politics?
JBA: I've
often been asked this question, and my answer hasn't changed. For me
it's very clear. There are different ways of serving the people. Participation
in the politics of the state isn't the only way. Before 1990 I served
the people, from outside the structure of the state. I will serve the
people again, from outside the structure of the state. My first vocation
was teaching, it's a vocation that I have never abandoned, I am still
committed to it. For me, one of the great achievements of our second
administration was the construction of the University of Tabarre, which
was built entirely under embargo but which in terms of its infrastructure
became the largest university in Haiti (and which, since 2004, has been
occupied by foreign troops). I would like to go back to teaching, I
plan to remain active in education.
As for politics, I never
had any interest in becoming a political leader 'for life.' That was
Duvalier: president for life. In fact that is also the way most political
parties in Haiti still function: they serve the interests of a particular
individual, of a small group of friends. Often it's just a dozen people,
huddled around their life-long chief. This is not at all how a political
organisation should work. A political organisation consists of its members,
it isn't the instrument of one man. Of course I would like to help strengthen
the organisation. If I can help with the training of its members, if
I can accompany the organisation as it moves forward, then I will be
glad to be of service. Fanmi Lavalas needs to become more professional,
it needs to have more internal discipline; the democratic process needs
properly functional political parties, and it needs parties, in the
plural. So I will not dominate or lead the organisation, that is not
my role, but I will contribute what I can.
PH: And
now, at this point, after all these long years of struggle, and after
the setbacks of these last years, what is your general assessment of
the situation? Are you discouraged? Hopeful?
JBA: No
I'm not discouraged. You teach philosophy, so let me couch my answer
in philosophical terms. You know that we can think the category of being
either in terms of potential or act, en puissance ou en acte. This is
a familiar Aristotelian distinction: being can be potential or actual.
So long as it remains potential, you cannot touch it or confirm it.
But it is, nonetheless, it exists. The collective consciousness of the
Haitian people, their mobilisation for democracy, these things may not
have been fully actualised but they exist, they are real. This is what
sustains me. I am sustained by this collective potential, the power
of this collective potential being [cet être collectif en puissance].
This power has not yet been actualised, it has not yet been enacted
in the building of enough schools, of more hospitals, more opportunities,
but these things will come. The power is real and it is what animates
the way forward.
Editorial note: This
interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006; it
was translated and edited by Peter Hallward, professor of philosophy
at Middlesex University. An abbreviated version of the interview appeared
in the London Review of Books 29:4 (22 February 2007), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n04/hall02_.html.
The text of the complete interview will appear as an appendix to Hallward's
forthcoming book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics
of Containment, due out from Verso in the summer of 2007.
Complete transcript originally
published at HaitiAnalysis.com
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