[News] Interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide

[Anti-Imperialist News]

On February 29, 2004, a U.S.-orchestrated coup in 
Haiti ousted the democratically elected 
government of President Jean-Bertrand 
Aristide.  Now, three years later, we thought it 
important to send out this just-released 
interview with President Aristide. It reaffirms 
the vision and goals of the Lavalas movement and 
sheds important light on the criminal role played 
by the U.S. government in the brutal coup which 
turned Haiti into a graveyard for human rights.

  A shorter version of this interview is out in 
the current issue of the London Review of Books, 
but the full interview is now up at 
<http://www.haitisolidarity.net>www.haitisolidarity.net, 
the new companion site to <http://www.haitiaction.net>www.haitiaction.net.

We hope you will take the time to read this 
interview and circulate it to your friends and contacts.

In solidarity,

The Haiti Action Committee
<http://www.haitiaction.net>www.haitiaction.net        www.haitisolidarity.net
510-483-7481


'One Step at a Time': An interview with 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide (Pretoria, 20 July 2006) by Peter Hallward

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 Å\ 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 Å\ military, economic, political... Å\ 
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 Å\ 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 Å\ 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 Å\ 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 Å\ 
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 Å\ 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 Å\ 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 Å\ 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 when 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 Å\ 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 Å\ 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 Å\ 
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 Å\ 
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 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 Å\ Ambassador Foley, Luis 
Moreno, and so on Å\ 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 doings. 
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 Å\ 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 Å\ and consciously or 
unconsciously, that's what they see Å\ 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>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.






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