Interview
with Ben Dupuy by Peter Hallward, Haitian
Perspectives, | Source: Haiti Progres
online mailing, Feb.
20, 2007
"They
came here to terrorise the population," said Rose Martel,
a (slum dweller) Site Soley resident, referring to the police
and UN troops. "I don't think they really killed the
bandits, unless they consider all of us as bandits."
(regarding UN assault on Dec. 22, 2006 on Site Soley residents)-
Reuters
*****************
Double standards, racism and imperialism: Haiti, only place
in the world where the main job of soldiers of war from
the UN is to "police" local, city criminals to
get their paycheck and endless UN extensions of that war
check. When will it be acceptable to pay these "proud,
UN warriors" killing Haitians over $70 million per
month, as in Haiti, to come rid LA, NY, Paris, London, Italy,
Germany of its local city gangs? |
| 
|
| "They
came here to terrorise the population," said Rose Martel,
a (slum dweller) Site Soley resident, referring to the police
and UN troops. "I don't think they really killed the
bandits, unless they consider all of us as bandits."
(regarding UN assault on Dec. 22, 2006 on Site Soley residents)-
Reuters
|
Interview with Ben Dupuy, General
Secretary of the Parti Populaire National (PPN), Feb. 16, 2007
The following is an extract of an interview with the Secretary
General of the Parti Populaire National (PPN) Ben Dupuy. The interview
was conducted by Peter Hallward, a philosophy teacher at Middlesex
University in England.
Hallward who also interviewed President Jean Bertrand Aristide
in Pretoria, South Africa in July 2006 is finishing his next book
- Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.
The book aims to be an examination of recent Haitian politics
and will come out from the London-based publisher Verso this summer.
During the next few weeks Haiti Progres will publish the French
translation of President Aristide's interview with Peter Hallward.
*
Interview with Ben Dupuy, 16 February 2007. ( By Peter Hallward
).
DRAFT EXTRACTS
"With friends like the US", Ben Dupuy told Aristide
soon after the first coup, "we don't need enemies."
He looked first to Venezuela and then to China and Cuba for alternative
sources of support.
In the first months after the coup, Ben Dupuy held out some hope
that Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Pèrez might stand
by his promise to help train and arm a Haitian resistance force
to overcome Cèdras, but he acknowledges that it was never
likely that Pèrez would have gone against the wishes of
his patron George Bush.
"It is standard US policy to distinguish between good drug-dealers
and bad drug-dealers. Good ones do what they're told, and are
allowed to pursue their interests undisturbed."
"The so-called 'war on drugs' is an instrument of political
blackmail pure and simple."
"In 1991, the bourgeoisie tried to co-opt Aristide and the
Lavalas movement, since Aristide was very popular and had proved
how easily he could win an election. But when he didn't go along
with them entirely they quickly turned against him. The new party
[the OPL] that Pierre-Charles, Antoine Adrien and other 'enlightened'
members of the political class formed apparently to support Lavalas
soon turned into an anti-Lavalas opposition party, in 1995, once
its leaders discovered that they wouldn't be able to dominate
the movement."
"During his second administration there were some opportunists
in Aristide's security apparatus who started operating on their
own, in pursuit of their own interests. People like Oriel Jean
and Dany Toussaint had their own agenda, but it's clear that they
acted without Aristide's knowledge or approval. When US intelligence
began to accuse these people of drug smuggling and corruption
Aristide was initially reluctant to believe it, thinking that
it was another attempt to isolate him. With good reason, he saw
these accusations as an attempt to drive a wedge between him and
his allies in the security forces. Who was he supposed to trust?
Unlike the US itself, Aristide had no secret police, no force
with which he could 'police the police'. Given their history and
the material conditions in which they work it is virtually impossible
for any Haitian government, on its own, to root out corruption
in the security forces. But the US blamed Aristide for this anyway,
for failing to accomplish an impossible task."
"I'm convinced that the laboratory engineered the murder
of Amiot Mètayer, so as then to pin it on Aristide; Mètayer
was the perfect target, and the consequences of his death were
expertly and instantly manipulated, with devastating effect."
"The PPN criticised Aristide's willingness to create free
trade zones and to accept the main thrust of neo-liberal structural
adjustment. "Aristide thought he could walk down the middle
of the road", remembers Ben Dupuy: "I used to tell him
that that's where accidents happen. I told him that sooner or
later he would have to choose the left sidewalk, or the right
sidewalk. It seemed to me that he never really made up his mind,
and he paid a high price for his hesitation."
"The great symbol of Lavalas was the table. Aristide used
to say that he wanted the masses who were living under the table
to rise up and join the elite who were already sitting at the
table; it was a project of social reconciliation. But in my opinion
this was never feasible. The contradictions are too intense. The
small handful of people sitting around the table owe their place
to the fact they continue, very deliberately, to keep the great
majority of Haitians under the table; the poverty in places like
Citè Soleil is a necessary condition of their wealth. In
the end, the only way forward will be to overthrow this table
and to pursue a programme of truly revolutionary change. Our class
polarisation is now so intense that it's reached a point of no
return. I see no possibility of compromise. Members of the elite
are now contemplating a sort of 'final solution' that amounts
to little less than a strategy of open warfare - the use of foreign
and domestic troops to kill off the poorest of the poor, pure
and simple"
"The poverty in places like Citè Soleil is a direct
result of the neo-liberal reconfiguration of the Haitian economy
that began in the late 1970s - the result of what many Haitians
call the "death plan". The US and the Haitian elite
believe that they can manage the consequences of this plan by
sending foreign troops to police the neighbourhoods populated
by those that suffer the worst of its effects. They think they
can control rising levels of poverty by shooting at the poor.
In Haiti as in various other parts of the world ( Darfur , Sierra
Leone , Somalia ...) they use the UN to put out the fire, without
considering who started it. They do everything possible to avoid
the obvious conclusion - that this poverty, and the violence that
accompanies it, is a direct consequence of the neo-liberal plan
itself. The only way to reverse it is to put a stop to the plan
and undo its effects."
"In places like Haiti and much of Africa, the great imperial
powers use the UN as humanitarian fire-fighters, but they never
identify, let alone prosecute, the neo-liberal arsonists. They
never ask why social divisions have become so intense, why the
levels of poverty are now so extreme, why people are so desperate
that they prefer to fight, rather than starve."
"Perhaps the most important factor behind the recent rise
in violent crime in Haiti is the increase over the last couple
of years in the number of offenders deported from the US. These
are young Haitian-Americans who grew up in the US , usually in
poor black neighbourhoods, and who were 'educated', so to speak,
in the American underworld. The US cannot cope with its own catastrophic
levels of criminality; its prisons are already stretched to the
breaking point. So now they started to export these casualties
of their own social system back to Haiti , a country that doesn't
have anything like the police or judicial resources needed to
handle them. By the end of 2006, the US was shipping around 100
convicts to Haiti every month. Most of these people arrive in
the country with nothing, with no skills or family ties. What
can they do to survive? Of course they do what they know: they
turn to drugs and kidnapping, they create or join armed gangs.
In the space of two years they have driven Haitian street crime
to an entirely new level. But the people that the US and the elite
blames for this rise in insecurity are not these criminals but
the "bandits" of the Lavalas baz."
"It's clear that the great
majority of Haiti's poor still perceive Aristide as a symbol of
their struggle. Aristide still has a very important role to play
in the liberation of our country, though I hope that when he comes
back he will adopt a different, less conciliatory, less 'middle-of-the-road'
approach."
"Preval has benefited from his old alliance with Aristide,
and he owes his election victory in 2006 to the support of the
Lavalas baz. But his own agenda is different. He mainly represents
the interests of the oligarchy, and this puts his government in
constant tension with its own political base."
************
- Stop the genocide in Haiti
Sign Petition demanding UN leave Haiti
UN : MINUSTAH - OUT OF HAITI
SAY NO TO THE HAITIAN GENOCIDE BY THE UN SOLDIERS
SAY NO TO THE HOLOCAUST AGAINST THE HAITIAN PEOPLE!
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stoptheholocaust
- See Expose
the lies
- The
Legacy of Impunity
(The Neocolonialist inciting political instability is the problem.
Haiti is
underdeveloped in crime, corruption, violence, compared to other
nations)
"Political security is Haiti biggest problem. It is this
political instability that is primarily responsible for the legacy
of impunity, endemic poverty and violence in Haiti. This political
instability is due to what HLLN calls neocolonialism - the diplomatic,
military and economic efforts of the former colonists and enslavers,
who with their black opportunists in Haiti, work feverishly to
limit Haitian independence and sovereignty, binding Haiti to endless
foreign debt, dependency and domination....
- Write your Congressional representatives ask they Support Congresswoman
Barbara Lee's H.R.
351: To establish the Independent Commission on the 2004 Coup
d'Etat in the Republic of Haiti
|
| An
Interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Peter Hallward | London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n04/hall02_.html
In the mid-1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a parish priest working
in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He
became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the
series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse
in 1986 of the Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country’s
first democratic presidential election, with 67 per cent of the
vote. He was overthrown by a military coup in September 1991 and
returned to power in 1994, after the US intervened to restore
democratic government. In 1996 he was succeeded by his ally René
Préval. Aristide won another landslide election victory
in 2000, but the resistance of Haiti’s small ruling elite
eventually culminated in a second
coup against him, on the night of 28 February 2004. Since then,
he has been
living in exile in South Africa.
According to the best available estimates, around five thousand
of Aristide’s supporters have died at the hands of the regime
that replaced the constitutional government. Although the situation
remains tense and UN troops still occupy the country, the worst
of the violence came to an end in February 2006, when after an
extraordinary electoral campaign, René Préval was
himself re-elected in a landslide victory. Calls for Aristide’s
immediate and unconditional return continue to polarise Haitian
politics. Many commentators, including several prominent members
of the current government, believe that if Aristide was free to
stand for re-election he would win easily.
This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July
2006.
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
your second administration was dogged by accusations of violence
and corruption. Although you remained the most popular politician
among the electorate, you appeared to have lost much of the support
you once enjoyed among aid-workers, activists, intellectuals and
so on, both at home and abroad.
I’d like to ask about the process that first brought you
to power. How do you account for the fact that, against the odds,
and certainly against the wishes
of the US, the military and the 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, 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 may help summarise my understanding of how things stood.
The Conferencia de Puebla took place in Mexico in 1979, and several
liberation theologians were threatened and barred from attending.
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, it isn’t a matter of
struggling for the people, on behalf of the people, at a distance
from the people; it’s a matter of
struggling with and in the midst of the people.
This ties in with a second principle: liberation theology can
itself only be a phase in a broader process. The phase in which
we may 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 whole process carries us a long way
from paternalism, from any notion of a ‘saviour’ who
might come to guide the people and solve their problems.
The emergence of the people as an organised public force 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 grass-roots movement, not a top-down project driven by a
single leader or a single organisation. It wasn’t exclusively
political, either. It took shape above all through the constitution,
all over the country, of many small church communities or ti legliz.
When I was elected president it wasn’t the election of a
politician, or a conventional political party; it was an expression
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. Welcoming people from the poorest sections
of Haitian society within the centre of traditional power –
this was a profoundly transformative gesture.
PH: The coup of September 1991 took place even
though the policies you pursued once in office were quite moderate,
quite cautious. So was a coup inevitable? 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: What happened in September 1991 happened
again in February 2004, and could easily happen again soon, 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 imposed and controlled from above. They’ve
been able to keep things this way for a long time. Haiti has been
independent for two hundred years, but we now live in a country
in which just 1 per cent of the people control more than half
of the wealth.
PH: For all its strength, the popular movement
that carried you to the presidency wasn’t strong enough
to keep you there. People sometimes compare you to Toussaint L’Ouverture,
who won extraordinary victories under extraordinary constraints
– but Toussaint is also often criticised for failing to
go far enough. It was Dessalines who led the final fight for independence.
How do you answer those 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
US and its allies?
JBA: ‘Too much faith in the US’:
that makes me smile. Toussaint L’Ouverture, as a man, had
his limitations. But he did his best, and in reality he did not
fail. He was captured, imprisoned and killed; but his example
and his spirit still guide us now. These last two years, from
2004 to 2006, the Haitian people have continued to stand up for
their dignity and refused to capitulate. On 6 July 2005, Cité
Soleil was attacked and bombarded, but this, and many similar
attacks, didn’t discourage people from insisting that their
voices be heard. They spoke out against injustice. They voted
for their president this past February; they won’t accept
the imposition of another president from abroad or above.
This doesn’t mean that success is inevitable or easy, 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 the meaning of Toussaint’s famous
claim, after 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.
As for Dessalines, the struggle that he led was armed, and necessarily
so, since he had to break the bonds of slavery once and for all.
But our struggle is different. It is Toussaint, rather than Dessalines,
who can accompany the popular movement today. It’s this
inspiration that was at work in the election victory of February
2006, which allowed the people to outmanoeuvre their opponents,
to choose their own leader in the face of the powers that be.
Did we place too much trust in the Americans? Were we too dependent
on external forces? No. 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. In 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. We never
had any illusions that
the Americans shared our deeper objectives. But without them we
couldn’t have
restored democracy.
PH: There was no alternative to reliance on American
troops?
JBA: No. The Haitian people are not armed. There
are criminals and vagabonds, drug dealers, 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. 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 compromise, to accept
many of the things you’d always opposed – a severe
structural adjustment plan, neoliberal economic policies, the
privatisation of 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: 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 – but I refused simply to sell them off, unconditionally,
to private investors. That there was corruption in the state sector
was undeniable, but there were several different ways of engaging
with it. Rather than untrammelled privatisation, I was prepared
to agree to a democratisation of these enterprises, so that some
of the profits of a factory or firm should go to the people who
worked for it, be invested in nearby schools or health clinics,
so that the workers’ children could derive
some benefit. The Americans said fine, no problem.
But when I was back in office, they went back on our agreement,
and then relied on a disinformation campaign to make it look as
if I 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.
PH: What about your battle with the Haitian army,
the army that overthrew you in 1991? The Americans remade this
army in 1915 in line with their own priorities, 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.
JBA: We had an army of some 7000 soldiers, and
it absorbed 40 per cent 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?
We organised a social programme for the reintegration of disbanded
soldiers.
They too have the right to work, and the state has a 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 turn to violence, or theft, as the Tontons Macoutes did. We
did the best we could. The problem lay with the resentment of
those who were determined to preserve the 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. But it wasn’t a mistake to disband the army. It’s
not as if we might have avoided the second coup, in 2004, if we’d
hung on to it. On the contrary, if the army had remained in place,
René Préval would never have finished his first
term in office, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able
to hold out for three years, from 2001 to 2004.
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.
No, this time these all-powerful interests had to carry out the
job themselves, with their own troops and in their own name.
PH: Did the creation of the Fanmi Lavalas party
in 1996 serve a similar function, by helping to clarify the lines
of internal conflict that had already fractured the loose coalition
of forces that first brought you to power?[*] Almost the whole
of Préval’s first administration was hampered by
infighting. Did you set out, then, to create a unified, disciplined
party, one that could 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. I was happy to leave this
to career politicians, to people like Gérard Pierre-Charles,
and along with others, 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 after the elections the OPL started to fall into
the traditional patterns and practices of Haitian politics. It
became more closed in on itself, more distant from the people,
more willing to make empty promises. I was out of office, and
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. At this point, in 1996,
the group of those 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, more and more people
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.
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. In Haiti
we don’t have a 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 popular
organisations – the ti legliz, for instance.
By 1997, Fanmi Lavalas had emerged as a functional organisation,
with a clear constitution. In spite of the aid embargo we managed
to accomplish certain things. We were able to invest in education,
for instance. In 1990, there were only 34 secondary schools in
Haiti; by 2001 there were 138. 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 it were confident that by December
2004 we’d have reduced the rate of adult illiteracy to just
15 per cent, a small fraction of what it was a decade earlier.
Previous governments had 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.
PH: Fanmi Lavalas duly won an overwhelming victory
in the legislative elections of May 2000, with around 75 per cent
of the vote. But your enemies in the US and at home soon drew
attention to the fact that the method used to calculate the number
of votes needed to win some senate seats 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 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, which
effectively cut your government’s budget in half. 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. 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: You say that we ‘gave’ the Americans
a pretext. In reality the Americans created their own pretext,
and if it hadn’t been this it would have been something
else. It took the US 58 years to recognise Haiti’s independence.
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 with the support
of the US administration, and in February 2004 it happened again,
thanks to many of the same people.
The US was having trouble persuading the other leaders in Caricom
[the Caribbean Community and Common Market] to turn against us
(they were never able to persuade many of them), and they needed
a pretext that was easy to understand. ‘Tainted elections’
was the perfect card to play. But when they came to observe the
elections, they said ‘very good, no problem’: the
process was judged 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 Provisional Electoral Council, which alone
has the authority to decide on these matters. The CEP is a sovereign,
independent body. 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 in the
US? What would happen if a foreign government insisted that the
president dismiss an elected senator? It’s absurd. The whole
situation is simply racist; they impose conditions on us that
they would never contemplate imposing on a ‘properly’
independent country, on a white country.
The Americans wanted to use the legislature against the executive.
They hoped that I would be stupid enough to insist on the dismissal
of the senators. I refused. In 2001, as a gesture of goodwill,
the senators 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 had no interest in new elections. Once
this tactic failed, however, the US recruited or bought off a
few hotheads, including Dany Toussaint and company, and used them,
a little later, against the presidency.
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 that was suspended when we won the
elections in 2000 was diverted to a propaganda and destabilisation
campaign waged against our government and against Fanmi Lavalas.
PH: Soon after the results were declared in May 2000,
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 patrón, 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 whiter than white,
if you’re willing to get down on your knees in front of
the whites. 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]. If I lie for the whites I’m
not really lying, I’m just
repeating what they say. So 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.
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 Convergence Démocratique, and later by the
Group of 184, by people like Gérard Pierre-Charles. They
refused all compromise, they insisted on all sorts of conditions
before they would even consider participating in another round
of elections. The Americans seemed exasperated with them, but
made no real effort to rein them in.
JBA: 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 everyone is equal.
So when they behave in this way, part of the reason is to reassure
themselves that they are different. It’s essential that
they see themselves as better than others. I’m convinced
it’s bound up with the legacy of slavery, with an inherited
contempt for the common people, for the petits nègres.
It’s the psychology of apartheid: it’s better to get
down on your knees with whites than to stand shoulder to shoulder
with blacks. Don’t underestimate the depth of this contempt.
One of the first things we did in 1991 was abolish the classification,
on birth certificates, of people who were born outside 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 out, 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.
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?
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 Duvalier. I only turned to Bazin because my opponents in
Convergence Démocratique, in the OPL and so on, refused
to participate in the government.
Their objective was to scupper the entire process, and they said
no straightaway. 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 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.
We had already published a well-defined political programme, and
if they were willing to co-operate on this or that aspect, then
we were willing to work with them.
PH: You were often accused 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? 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 disinformation. You allowed
demonstrations to go on day after day, calling for you to be overthrown,
and many of the demonstrators were directly funded and organised
by your enemies in the US.
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. I knew our position was strong
in parliament, and that the great majority of the people were
behind us. A small minority opposed us. 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.
PH: 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,
that, as the pressure on your government grew, you started to
rely on armed gangs from the slums, so-called chimères,
and used them to intimidate and in some cases murder your opponents.
JBA: As soon as you look rationally at what was
going on, these accusation 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
able to buy bullet-proof vests or tear-gas canisters. The police
were severely underequipped, 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. It was common knowledge that while the
police were running out of ammunition and supplies, heavy weapons
were being smuggled to our opponents 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 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.
But there was never any deliberate encouragement of violence.
As for the chimères, this is clearly another expression
of our apartheid mentality, the 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 those people had
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, powerful
economic interests were quite happy to fund criminal gangs, to
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 promised them visas –
recently, some of them who are now living in France admitted having
been told what to say in order to get their visas. So you have
people who were financing misinformation, on the one hand, and
destabilisation, on the other, and who encouraged small groups
of hoodlums to sow panic on the streets, to create the impression
of a government 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 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, a convicted
criminal, who escaped justice in Haiti to be welcomed by the US,
and who then armed and financed these ‘freedom fighters’
waiting over the border in the Dominican Republic. That’s
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