This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006.
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/2009<snip>
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: 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
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.
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