[R-G] Haiti's Catch-22: An Interview with Patrick Elie

[Anthony Fenton]

February 27, 2008
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1736
Haiti's Catch-22
An Interview with Patrick Elie
by Darren Ell
The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca

UN occupation troops occupy the Cité de Dieu neighborhood of Port-au- 
Prince during a mass arrest on February 1st, 2008.
Photo: Darren Ell (c)2008

A biochemist by training, 58-year-old Patrick Elie is a political  
activist in Haiti, who has been fighting since the 1980s for the  
right of all Haitians to shape their country's political future. A  
member of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's cabinet in exile following the  
1991 coup d'état, and Secretary of State for Defence after Aristide's  
return, Elie recently and reluctantly accepted President René  
Préval's request to preside a commission studying the question of  
security in Haiti. In this interview, conducted in Port-au-Prince  
four years after the 2004 coup d'état against the Aristide regime,  
Canadian photojournalist Darren Ell asks Elie about the obstacles to  
Haiti's quest for true sovereignty.

What is the connection between Haiti's crumbling infrastructure and  
recent political history in Haiti? I'm thinking in particular of  
Haiti's roads, which are so dangerous to navigate.

Roads in Haiti are difficult to maintain because of our limited  
means, but also because of the topography of the country: mountains,  
running water because of deforestation, and so forth. More  
importantly, the strength of the mobilization we had when Aristide  
was elected in 1990 has been broken twice. During Préval's first  
presidency, there was more interference. We have had no continuity.  
You don't build infrastructure in two days, not even over one  
mandate. It requires a national plan that holds over a quarter or  
half a century. If you get clobbered every time you move forward,  
then you're constantly wasting money. Nothing ever gets finished.

Every progressive government in Haiti since 1990 has found itself in  
the position of trying to fix a collapsing house, while assassins are  
trying to break down the back door. People looking at the house later  
blame the government, but it was busy the whole time keeping the  
assassins-–you guys!-–from breaking in with your machine guns. People  
always leave out that part-–the constant aggression, the constant  
sabotage. You'll hear people say, "Aristide spent 10 years in power  
and he achieved nothing!" It makes me want to laugh and cry at the  
same time. After seven months in government he was overthrown by a  
military coup. He spent three years in exile and they count these  
years in assessing his performance as president at the time. He gets  
a second term of five years, cut short by two years, and the three  
years he had in power were spent managing crises and embargos and  
destabilization campaigns, but they want to count all of that as if  
he had the opportunity to change things. This is a perverse  
assessment of his government.

Don't forget, we're dealing with the consequences of two coup  
d'états, 1991 and 2004, the second one having terrible symbolic  
value: we were trying to celebrate our bicentennial, but instead we  
were humiliated and violated. It does terrible things to your spirit.  
It has created a lot of confusion and despair, which are not assets  
helpful in building a future. Some people said we were set back two  
years. I say we were set back 50 years. Now we do have a legitimate  
president, but the post-coup conditions of Haiti have made him  
obsessed with stability. He is paying more attention to our  
adversaries, both local and foreign, trying to neutralize and woo  
them, rather than taking his mandate from the poor of Haiti who gave  
it to him. Either the president accomplishes the task given to him by  
the poor or we're going to hit some rough water again. It's a  
Catch-22 when you've been made so dependent on the people who threw  
you down in a hole. You want to fight them, but they're holding the  
rope you need to get out.

Canadians benefit from world-class publicly funded education, health  
care, transportation and telecommunications. In Haiti, these crucial  
services are almost completely privatized. Can you put the issue of  
privatization in perspective?

We are probably the most privatized country in the world, but they  
want to weaken the state even more. People in Canada and the US  
probably think we have a strong government, a Cuban-style state, and  
that we need to liberalize our economy. The reality is that 84 per  
cent of kids go to private schools. This has tremendous and terrible  
consequences. It's the same for public transportation: it's totally  
private. Water distribution is privatized. Health care is almost  
totally private. If you go to the General Hospital, the main public  
hospital in Port au Prince, you will find it completely surrounded by  
private clinics and drug stores, all run by the doctors working in  
the hospital. What interest do they have in providing good health  
care in the hospital? Security is increasingly privatized. There are  
6,000 police officers in Haiti, but 15,000 private security agents.  
Everything that should be in the hands of the state has been taken  
away by business interests or by the plague of NGOs. NGOs are being  
used to slowly remove all the flesh from the state. Unless we react  
to this invasion, it could be the thing that finally vanquishes us.

Look at the matter of Teleco, our once-public telephone company. Any  
serious government in Haiti should go back and arrest every general  
director of Teleco. Telecommunication represents a huge market in  
Haiti. Teleco used to be our only telecom. It was publicly owned, it  
had a huge head-start and it was the first one to start a wireless  
service. But it was deliberately ruined and undermined so that  
Digical and other private firms could come in and rob Haitians of  
profits that could have been reinvested by the state for their  
benefit. As it is, it's simply making rich people richer.

The idea that the state cannot manage things correctly is pure  
hogwash. Cuba is an example of a country functioning much better than  
Haiti and other countries I won't mention. It's nonsense that a state  
can't run something efficiently. You simply have to extirpate  
corruption. That is entirely possible to do. Rather than selling  
state-owned enterprises to private interests and giving control to  
unelected, unaccountable people--which will not solve the problem of  
corruption--the answer is to clean up corruption. Because the people  
financed the creation of these companies, they belong to the people.  
The people need to be mobilized into this fight by showing them what  
they are losing because of corruption and by showing them what they  
lose when these companies are simply given away. Privatization is not  
the way forward. We've already seen what happened because of the  
privatization of water resources in Latin America. We've also seen  
how the USSR has gone from a superpower to a Third World country by  
giving away what the state owned.

What are the challenges facing the agricultural sector of the Haitian  
economy, the peasantry?

There are many important issues facing peasants, and they're  
important for the whole country. The price of fertilizer is one; the  
availability of irrigation water is another. If the Artibonite Valley  
alone could be given what it needs to produce, Haiti could be  
exporting rice rather than importing 340,000 tons per year. This  
wouldn't require big changes in our policies. But we would run afoul  
of the US policy of subsidizing rice from South Carolina and dumping  
it into Haiti. This all began with Jean-Claude Duvalier, when  
licences to import rice were given to friends of the president. It  
hit full-stride under the post-Duvalier dictators, who totally  
liberated rice imports. Now we only produce 60,000 tons of rice, but  
we need 400,000 tons. It's destroying the peasants. But there's a lot  
of money being made on those 340,000 tons and the Americans will  
react if we try to turn that policy around.

It's a conspiracy. Haitian peasants used to have pigs completely  
adapted to our environment. The US, with the complicity of the  
Duvaliers, completely wiped out Haitian pigs on the pretence of swine  
flu, then destroyed Haitian pig production by introducing a species  
of US pig that eventually died because it couldn't adapt to the  
environment. Then the peasants were even more vulnerable. The pig was  
like a "piggy bank" for the Haitian peasant. He had a few mango  
trees, a couple of avocado trees and a pig. Selling mangos and  
avocados covered regular expenses, but when it came time to send a  
child to school or pay for a doctor, he butchered and sold a pig and  
the money was there. Once the pig was gone, he had nothing left to do  
but chop down his trees and sell the wood. It was devastating to the  
peasants. There are policies behind all of these problems.  
Unfortunately, these policies have found partisans in Haiti.

In Canada, everything from speed limits to water quality is carefully  
regulated by the state in order to protect the public. Talk about the  
question of regulation in Haiti.

There are few regulations here. Those that exist are outdated or not  
applied. You can do whatever you want in Haiti. Private water  
companies are not required to test their water. If you want, you can  
get a building and some tools and start a treated-water vending  
operation. If you have enough money, you can buy land and turn it  
into a dump or set up a disco in the middle of a residential area.  
You can do whatever pleases your fancy unless you step on the toes of  
somebody powerful. The state doesn't impose rules on schools. There  
is no regulation regarding the number of students in a class, nothing  
about student evaluation, teacher qualifications or the curriculum.  
People send their kids to schools run by a French organization and  
their exams are graded in France. You can open a two-room building  
with one teacher and call it a university. Nobody will come and look  
at what you're doing. You can call anything an "institute." You can  
put up a sign saying that you are a doctor curing AIDS and no one  
will ask you any questions. That is the situation. That is why we  
need to strengthen the Haitian state, not weaken it.

If 50 per cent of Haiti's federal budget comes from foreign aid and  
85 per cent of its services are provided by foreign charities and  
NGOs, is Haiti really a sovereign nation?

The sovereignty that Haiti won with so much blood, courage and daring  
in 1804 was lost when Haiti accepted to reimburse France for property  
lost during the revolution. Even though we had the appearance of  
sovereignty, Haitian peasants were breaking their backs to make the  
French bourgeoisie rich. It became more blatant when the US invaded  
Haiti in 1915, making sure to leave behind an occupation army in its  
place. Things since have gone from bad to worse. Haitians are very  
jealous of their sovereignty, but they're not always realistic about  
what constitutes sovereignty. We're not sovereign by any stretch of  
the imagination and if we don't react intelligently with a strategy  
in mind, we will lose every last piece of our sovereignty. It is only  
getting worse every day with the NGOs being given more and more  
power, with the UN military occupation and with a foreign  
administrative occupation trying to dictate the politics in Haiti. I  
believe we can win the battle because the odds we face are no worse  
than what Haitians faced in 1791 when they went beyond freedom to  
sovereignty. It's a formidable, but not an impossible challenge.

To what extent do you blame foreign interference for the problems  
Haitians face today?

Foreign interference in Haitian affairs dates to the birth of Haiti.  
There has always been a strong will to make Haiti fail. I'm not  
saying Haitians weren't partly responsible. But if I have to point a  
finger at Haitians, I'll point the same finger as Frederick Douglas  
did in 1893 when he said that the curse of Haiti was not the ignorant  
masses, but the educated and wealthy minority. They're the ones who  
destroyed the country through greed, believing themselves to be a  
European tribe in this land, different from the poor peasant masses  
they exploited so blatantly, then by getting in cahoots with the  
enemies of Haiti.

Foreign powers have played a great role in putting us in that  
situation, but they're not alone. They have their accomplices here.  
Take very recent history. I don't believe the US, Canada and France  
would have had the pretence to intervene had the Group of 184 and  
others not opened the door for them, had they not pleaded for an  
intervention and made it palatable for the average Canadian or  
American to think that it was their right to intervene, that it was  
their "responsibility to protect." I'm confident that 95 per cent of  
Canadians believe that Canada came here to protect Haiti, but none of  
them have asked themselves why Canadians and French and Americans  
weren't protecting Kenya or Chad or any other dozen countries in the  
world that had a worse situation in 2004. Rather than help us toward  
a negotiated settlement-–Aristide had bent over backwards to obtain  
this-–why did they send their paratroopers and marines? We have to  
constantly raise this question. Aristide was kidnapped and dumped in  
the Central African Republic, a country in a state of permanent war,  
but I don't see any expeditionary force going there to re-establish  
peace, kidnap a president and so forth. Sri Lanka, which has a full- 
scale civil war in its midst, is sending soldiers to teach us about  
peace. Guatemalans are teaching us about democracy and human rights.  
It's so obvious to me that you've been lied to, but you've grown  
accustomed to those lies.

The Haitian army has always been a tool of internal repression in  
Haiti. You are overseeing a commission studying the question of  
security in Haiti. What is being said about this issue?

First of all, the army was never a real army and it was certainly  
never Haitian. In 1915, US marines invaded Haiti and imposed US rule  
on Haiti. Early on, during the occupation, after disbanding the army  
that was there, they created a core of locals to help them fight the  
Haitian patriots, the peasant resistance. That's the birth of the  
monster. It was created as a monster, as a group of armed locals  
working under direct orders from US officers to kill Haitians opposed  
to the pacification of the population. When the marines left, they  
left the monster with us, with the same mission: to repress its own  
people and occupy the country. After that, Haitian dictators used the  
army to protect their own power. It remained a tool of internal  
repression and as a tool for use by the foreign powers that created  
it. It happened all over Latin America. It's a recipe that's been  
applied everywhere the US or any other colonial power has left their  
mark.

Today, the Haitian state is unable to guarantee the security of its  
borders-–land, sea or air-–and it has to be able to do that. It will  
need some force to do that, but the idea of such a force conforming  
to the model that we had is intolerable. We have a chance for the  
first time in decades to define our own national security strategy  
and philosophy. I've accepted to head the commission looking at this  
problem, but it isn't going to be easy. Forces within this country  
will oppose the vision of a security force whose mandate is to  
protect the country and the nation rather than to crush the people's  
will. Of course, opportunistic foreign powers will resent this vision  
as well because a new army should not only protect the land, but also  
the political regime that the people have chosen. This is also the  
role of national security forces. They have to protect what the  
people choose. Already there are major efforts to turn the Haitian  
National Police into what the army was, a tool of repression and a  
referee of political life, something to be used to put pressure on  
certain politicians or to overthrow others.

What do you see as key solutions in Haiti's ongoing struggle?

You build a country from the bottom up. In Haiti, that means the  
peasants, the Haitian countryside. Once that is the priority, the  
rest will follow. With cheaper fertilizers, better irrigation and  
modern tools instead of hand-held hoes, production would increase.  
The exodus to the slums would slow down. That's the way to go.  
Building electric plants for 24-hour electricity should not be a  
priority now. Port-au-Prince is sucking the country of its people. It  
started with the US occupation. The Americans centralized the  
administration of the country. Port-au-Prince became the centre.  
Prior to that, there were only regions. The US closed all the ports  
in other regions. Everyone started going to Port-au-Prince for  
opportunities even though there were none. This country has been  
living on the backs of Haitian peasants since the era of slavery. The  
wealth of the country has always come from the countryside, but we've  
never sent anything back to the peasants. This is one way to reclaim  
our sovereignty, by regaining control of our stomachs. It will build  
national cohesion.

What message would you like to pass on to Canadian and American  
readers? In your view, what should they be thinking about if they  
want to help Haiti?

Become citizens in your own countries. You're nothing but consumers.  
You've lost control of your governments. Open up your eyes and ears  
to the lies you're being fed about other countries. Also, Canada  
should stop robbing, literally looting Haiti of its better minds that  
are so needed here, especially in the last five or 10 years. I've  
heard French President Nicolas Sarkozy speak about "chosen  
immigration,” but Canada has been doing it for years. I think the  
reason Canada is "involved" in Haiti is because it gets finished  
products without having invested in them; that is, Haitian minds:  
technicians, doctors and engineers. If you do the math, you'll see  
that Haiti has helped Canada much more than Canada has helped Haiti.  
It costs money to raise a kid, send him to school, then have someone  
grab that finished product for free and start using it. Please tell  
the Canadian government to stop baiting our kids. And stop  
destabilizing our country because it just makes it easier to entice  
and extract our most talented people.

Darren Ell is a photographer, independent journalist and MFA student  
at Concordia University. He has been working in Haiti since 2006.