Hait­ian Pres­i­dent René Pré­val said Sun­day that the death toll from the earth­quake could reach 300,000 once all the bod­ies are recov­ered from the rub­ble. We speak to Peter Hall­ward, pro­fes­sor of Mod­ern Euro­pean Phi­los­o­phy at Mid­dle­sex Uni­ver­sity. “Unless pre­vented by renewed pop­u­lar mobil­i­sa­tion in both Haiti and beyond, the per­verse inter­na­tional empha­sis on secu­rity will con­tinue to dis­tort the recon­struc­tion effort, and with it the con­fig­u­ra­tion of Hait­ian pol­i­tics for some time to come,” wrote Hall­ward recently. “What is already cer­tain is that if fur­ther mil­i­tari­sa­tion pro­ceeds unchecked, the vic­tims of the Jan­u­ary earth­quake won’t be the only avoid­able casu­al­ties of 2010.” [includes rush transcript]

Peter Hall­ward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aris­tide, and the Pol­i­tics of Con­tain­ment and a pro­fes­sor of Mod­ern Euro­pean Phi­los­o­phy at Mid­dle­sex University.

Kim Ives, jour­nal­ist with the news­pa­per Haiti Lib­erté, speak­ing from Port-au-Prince

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today with an update on Haiti a month and a half after the mag­ni­tude 7.0 earth­quake hit the Caribbean island nation. Hait­ian Pres­i­dent René Pré­val said Sun­day the death toll from the earth­quake could reach 300,000 once all the bod­ies are recov­ered from the rubble.

PRESIDENT RENÉ PRÉVAL: [trans­lated] You have seen the images. You know the fig­ures. More than 200,000 bod­ies were col­lected on the streets. Count­ing those still found under the rub­ble, the death toll could rise to 300,000. More than 250,000 destroyed or dam­aged homes, more than 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple are sud­denly homeless.

AMY GOODMAN: Speak­ing in a regional sum­mit of Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean lead­ers in Mex­ico, Pré­val urged them to send aid to his dev­as­tated coun­try. The Inter-American Devel­op­ment Bank esti­mates rebuild­ing Haiti could cost as much as $14 bil­lion. Pré­val warned of the approach­ing rainy sea­son and made a plea for emer­gency shel­ter mate­ri­als to assist the one-and-a-half mil­lion home­less Haitians.

On Sat­ur­day, Claudy Tre­vange was one of hun­dreds of Haitians wait­ing in line for water­proof shel­ter mate­ri­als to be dis­trib­uted by the Inter­na­tional Orga­ni­za­tion for Migra­tion, a United Nations agency.

CLAUDY TREVANGE: [trans­lated] We sleep in the street with our chil­dren. We have no money. Our chil­dren catch colds. They sneeze.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more on Haiti, we’re joined here in New York by Cana­dian polit­i­cal philoso­pher Peter Hall­ward. He’s the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aris­tide, and the Pol­i­tics of Con­tain­ment, and he’s pro­fes­sor of mod­ern Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy at Mid­dle­sex University.

We wel­come you to Democ­racy Now!

PETER HALLWARD: Thank you very much, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter, as you watch what has taken place, your book is extremely exten­sive about the his­tory of Haiti. Can you put what has hap­pened after the earth­quake in this his­tor­i­cal context?

PETER HALLWARD: Unfor­tu­nately, very eas­ily, because the his­tory of Haiti really, for the last—particularly the last twenty-five, thirty years—but, in a way, the his­tory of the coun­try really since inde­pen­dence, for the last two centuries—has been about main­tain­ing the con­trol of a small group of very wealthy, priv­i­leged peo­ple in part­ner­ship with their inter­na­tional back­ers. And the prob­lem that they’ve faced has been how to main­tain a sit­u­a­tion, struc­tured in terms of gross inequal­i­ties, par­tic­u­larly in terms of wealth, polit­i­cal power, this kind of thing, in the face of some­thing like a demo­c­ra­tic chal­lenge, where if the poor major­ity, if the major­ity of Hait­ian peo­ple, who live on pen­nies a day, if they were able to form a polit­i­cal move­ment that could press for rad­i­cal polit­i­cal and social changes, you know, how would you stop that? How would you con­tain the threats of that kind of mobilization?

And the main strat­egy has been to deflect polit­i­cal ques­tions away from the polit­i­cal field itself and put them onto more like mil­i­tary ter­rain, where you can struc­ture these ques­tions in terms of secu­rity issues, crime, prob­lems that basi­cally not a polit­i­cal gov­ern­ment but an army can solve. And that’s been the main dri­ving thrust, I think, of the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in Haiti for the last—certainly for the last—since really since 1990, when Aris­tide was elected for the first time.

So what I think has hap­pened with the earth­quake is another phase in this gen­eral ten­dency towards turn­ing Haiti into a kind of—a sort of police pro­tec­torate, really, where the key locus for polit­i­cal power is in the army or some­thing like the army. In this case, the Amer­i­can army, the United Nations army, even­tu­ally per­haps a new ver­sion of the Hait­ian army, some­thing like that.

AMY GOODMAN: Where is the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment in all of this?

PETER HALLWARD: Well, the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment basi­cally is the—does what it’s told, largely. So, I think it’s going too far to call it a pro­tec­torate, because there is still a thriv­ing grass­roots demo­c­ra­tic tra­di­tion there. And when—with the last elec­tion in Haiti in 2006, there was a real mobi­liza­tion of peo­ple to get René Pré­val, the cur­rent pres­i­dent, elected, very largely, I think, on the basis of the fact that he’s remem­bered as Aristide’s first prime min­is­ter. He was elected when Aris­tide stood down after his first elec­tion in 1996. And so, he’s some­one who’s perceived—you know, if he’s widely called the “marassa d’Aristide,” the twin brother of Aris­tide, he’s seen as some­one who is in that tra­jec­tory, the Lavalas move­ment, basi­cally. And so, when he was—when he stood for office, late in the day, as it hap­pens, in 2006, there was a real mobi­liza­tion of peo­ple to get him elected and essen­tially to try and undo the coup that over­threw Aris­tide in 2004.

So there is a real popular—there is still a gen­uine grass­roots demo­c­ra­tic force in Haiti. The prob­lem is that there’s a real dis­con­nect between that grass­roots mobi­liza­tion and what the gov­ern­ment itself can do. The gov­ern­ment is very, very con­strained. Their fund­ing is depen­dent almost entirely on inter­na­tional sup­port. There’s a lot of pres­sure around issues like keep­ing min­i­mum wages low, adher­ing to neolib­eral reforms, as they’re called, which essen­tially open the coun­try up to inter­na­tional invest­ment and have locked the coun­try into a kind of sys­tem­atic cycle of dis­em­pow­er­ment and impoverishment.

And Pré­val has basi­cally gone along with that. If you look at the things that he’s done in the last year, he vetoed a move to increase the min­i­mum wage to $5 a day, so it’s locked down at $3 a day, roughly. He con­tin­ued to push through a really dis­as­trous pri­va­ti­za­tion pol­icy that’s, as we speak, is in the process of break­ing up the phone com­pany and sell­ing that off. There’s pres­sure to sell off the last remain­ing pub­lic resources that Haiti has, the ports and other things. And he blocked the most pop­u­lar polit­i­cal party in the coun­try, Fanmi Lavalas, from par­tic­i­pat­ing in elec­tions last spring and that were—another set of elec­tions, more impor­tant elec­tions, that were due to hap­pen this month, which will be post­poned now, of course. So he’s some­one who has really cut him­self off, in fact, really from the begin­ning, from any­thing like a mass-based pop­u­lar mobi­liza­tion. And as a result, I think he doesn’t have a great deal of sup­port among at least ordi­nary peo­ple in Haiti now.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, I mean, the palace was seri­ously devastated.

PETER HALLWARD: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, just dri­ving along the roads in Port-au-Prince, one min­istry after another just in rubble.

PETER HALLWARD: Yes. So, that, of course, that doesn’t help him. You know, that doesn’t help, of course. But—

AMY GOODMAN: And many of the gov­ern­ment offi­cials killed.

PETER HALLWARD: Yes. And so, these—of course, that would cause very, very sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems, no mat­ter what the sit­u­a­tion was.

But I think the more—in the longer term, at least, the more impor­tant fact is that the gov­ern­ment was already very weak, largely because of inter­na­tional pres­sure, the pres­sure to cut pub­lic spend­ing; to lay off pub­lic ser­vants; to fun­nel all inter­na­tional invest­ment, or at least the vast major­ity of it, into—not into state-based enter­prises or state-based invest­ment, things like a national health ser­vice or a national edu­ca­tion sys­tem, that kind of thing, but instead into frag­mented NGO-type projects that, in many ways, com­pete and some­times replace what should be a pub­lic ser­vice, I think. So there’s been, sys­tem­at­i­cally, a whole set of poli­cies that have weak­ened the gov­ern­ment, deprived it of any real capac­ity, for exam­ple, to col­lect any­thing like the tax rev­enue that it should, deprived it of a capac­ity to invest in the pub­lic ser­vices, even basic infra­struc­ture like water, rub­bish removal, that kind of thing.

These things have never hap­pened, and they haven’t hap­pened since the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity has been essen­tially rul­ing Haiti, more or less directly since 2004. You had this huge UN force there, you know, with a bud­get of $600-plus mil­lion a year, and they spent almost all of that money on mil­i­tary mea­sures to main­tain social con­trol, polit­i­cal con­trol, to pacify a pop­u­la­tion, basi­cally, after a coup that over­threw one of the most pop­u­lar gov­ern­ments in the world, a gov­ern­ment that had been elected with 70, 75 per­cent of the vote, that was happy to orga­nize a new set of elec­tions with its oppo­si­tion, and the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity and the small clique of une­lec­table polit­i­cal manip­u­la­tors in Haiti refused to go along with this. And the result is a mil­i­tary solu­tion to a polit­i­cal prob­lem, hav­ing this huge UN force whose only real con­tri­bu­tion has been to main­tain a ver­sion of order in the streets of Port-au-Prince.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talk­ing to Peter Hall­ward. He is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aris­tide, and the Pol­i­tics of Con­tain­ment. We’ll come back to this con­ver­sa­tion in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are talk­ing to Peter Hall­ward. He is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aris­tide, and the Pol­i­tics of Con­tain­ment.

When we were trav­el­ing through Port-au-Prince and on to Car­refour, Gressier, to Léogâne, after the earth­quake, the word was com­ing down that the UN and US were not going to move out into what was really the epi­cen­ter of the quake until secu­rity was guar­an­teed, which we found shock­ing, because peo­ple were just cov­ered in cement ash, scratch­ing at the rub­ble, dig­ging, try­ing to find their grand­par­ents and their chil­dren and their neigh­bors. What about this issue of security?

PETER HALLWARD: It’s unbe­liev­able. I mean, and your report that you filed from the hos­pi­tal, you know, what was it now, ten, fif­teen, more like two weeks ago, it was an incred­i­ble sit­u­a­tion. Basi­cally, any­thing that couldn’t be cor­doned off behind a secu­rity perime­ter was left to—was sim­ply aban­doned. Peo­ple were sim­ply left to die. So Car­refour, you know, very close to the epi­cen­ter, very poor neigh­bor­hood, as you know, packed with peo­ple, was basi­cally just left to its own devices for—I don’t think any aid of vir­tu­ally any descrip­tion arrived for ten days after the earth­quake. So, you know, very cyn­i­cal, you know.

And this hap­pened at every level. It hap­pened in terms of where the res­cue teams went. They went to a few places like the Mon­tana Hotel, the Caribe super­mar­kets, the UN head­quar­ters, where you had a secure perime­ter, where mainly wealthy peo­ple were among the vic­tims, and where you could work, you know, in a secure envi­ron­ment. And pretty much every­where else was sim­ply aban­doned. And it hap­pened with the hos­pi­tals. It hap­pened with the dis­tri­b­u­tion of aid. I mean, and, you know, also it hap­pened in terms of what the inter­na­tional response was ini­tially. Rather than send the help that was needed, they instead secured the air­port. They sent thou­sands of troops, who basi­cally did vir­tu­ally nothing.

You have a sit­u­a­tion where what is urgently required is to enlist Hait­ian peo­ple to dis­trib­ute, you know, essen­tial supplies—water, food and so on. Instead, you have thou­sands of Marines, hanging—you know, patrolling the city, with armed to the teeth, you know, for no pur­pose. It’s incred­i­ble. And it’s grounded in, unfor­tu­nately, in one of the fun­da­men­tal struc­tural ten­den­cies of Hait­ian polit­i­cal life, par­tic­u­larly in last twenty-five years or so, when you’ve had a polit­i­cal mobi­liza­tion of peo­ple that can only be solved, from the elite’s per­spec­tive, with mil­i­tary means.

And this goes right back to the his­tory of Haiti, as, you know, it was estab­lished as a colony designed to extract a max­i­mum amount of wealth from slave labor. And it was extremely suc­cess­ful at that. It was more prof­itable than the whole of the United States com­bined at the time of Amer­i­can independence.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that.

PETER HALLWARD: So, it was gen­er­at­ing, you know, more than half—it was, by far, the largest sup­plier of cof­fee, sugar, you know, the big com­modi­ties at the time, also hard­woods, var­i­ous other things. And it gen­er­ated more rev­enue for France in the 1780s than all of the North Amer­i­can colonies com­bined. So it was really an extra­or­di­nar­ily lucra­tive, very con­cen­trated wealth gen­er­a­tor in the eigh­teenth century.

And it worked because you had a very bru­tal sys­tem of exploita­tion. Five—about five—almost half-a-million slaves, a very small num­ber of white plan­ta­tion own­ers, a few peo­ple in the mid­dle. And this sys­tem worked to extract just vast amounts of prof­its. It was really excep­tion­ally bru­tal by—even by colo­nial stan­dards. It meant—the death rate was so high that by the time the Hait­ian slaves rose up against the sys­tem in 1791, most of the slaves that par­tic­i­pated in that rebel­lion were born in Africa. You know, they never man­aged to cre­ate a sys­tem like they did in the south­ern United States, where the slave econ­omy was self-replicating, where you could basi­cally grow your own slaves locally. And this meant that the orig­i­nal secu­rity prob­lem in Haiti, the plan­ta­tion sys­tem, where you main­tain order by, you know, sim­ply mas­sive, bru­tal lev­els of vio­lence, had to be redesigned after the rev­o­lu­tion, because the rev­o­lu­tion was suc­cess­ful and the peo­ple who won that rev­o­lu­tion were deter­mined to avoid a return to the plan­ta­tion system.

So in Haiti, really unlike most other places in the world, cer­tainly among like most of Latin Amer­ica, the ten­dency towards the con­cen­tra­tion of big farms and the expro­pri­a­tion of small hold­ings and of peas­ant farms didn’t really hap­pen in Haiti, which meant that small farm­ers were able to hold onto their farms, resisted ten­den­cies that pushed them—that would have pushed them in other places into slums in the cities, where they would have been exploited, basi­cally, in fac­to­ries and so on. That hap­pened much later in Haiti, and it only hap­pened to a rel­a­tively lim­ited extent.

So you then have to look at, well, how did that—and basi­cally, in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, there have been a cou­ple of key episodes that allowed that process to accel­er­ate a lit­tle bit and gen­er­ated new secu­rity problems.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to inter­rupt, because we’ve reached Kim Ives in Haiti. Kim Ives is a jour­nal­ist with the news­pa­per Haiti Lib­erté. He’s join­ing us on the line from Port-au-Prince.

Wel­come back to Democ­racy Now!, Kim. You’re return­ing now for the sec­ond time after the earth­quake. What have you found?

KIM IVES: Well, things have changed a lot since we were here, Amy. There is the massive—the mas­sive destruc­tion that we saw, but it has begun to be cleaned up. It’s a real tes­ta­ment to the resilience of people.

The vul­tures are arriv­ing, how­ever. They are mostly in the form of secu­rity forces who are dri­ving around with the main­stream media, with [inaudi­ble] con­struc­tion com­pa­nies from the US, which are look­ing to set up.

I’m get­ting tremen­dous feed­back. I’m not sure if there’s any­thing that can be done to resolve it, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re try­ing to fix it, to turn off the feed­back back to Kim. But Kim, just keep talk­ing. We’ll try to do this as long as we can. It’s been almost impos­si­ble to reach you this morn­ing. We can hear you pretty well.

KIM IVES: I know. That’s the—OK, very good. I’ll do my best. That’s the prob­lem here, is a lot of the infra­struc­ture is not in place. The phones are still spotty and difficult.

But I should just say, Amy, that the hor­rors con­tinue, as yes­ter­day out at Saint Ger­ard in the Carrefour-Feuilles area, there was a tremen­dous hole in the ground where they buried 240 peo­ple. It’s not cov­ered. The stench com­ing from it is tremen­dous. A young boy at Saint Ger­ard explained how the school had fallen down on his class­mates, killing forty of them. And the Uni­ver­sity of Saint Ger­ard across the street had fallen, killing 200 stu­dents. It’s a horror.

And at the same time, the peo­ple are return­ing to com­merce. Restau­rants are open­ing, and air­lines have started to fly again. Elec­tric­ity is back on. Peo­ple are try­ing to sur­vive, Amy, through scav­eng­ing, mostly. You see the National Coun­cil of Equip­ment is dis­trib­ut­ing lots of sites, mostly schools, is what they’re start­ing with. You see peo­ple all over try­ing to get the rebar, alu­minum. Cop­per wire is par­tic­u­larly prized; that sells for a dol­lar a pound. The alu­minum sells for about seven cents a pound. So you can see—yet when we were out two days ago watch­ing the TeleCo build­ing being raised, the TeleCo secu­rity peo­ple came out, began to chase away the scav­engers with guns, whip­ping them, beat­ing them. It was a very tense scene. Nobody was shot.

AMY GOODMAN: Kim, we’re having—Kim, we’re hav­ing trou­ble under­stand­ing you. Kim, if you could go as close as you can to the micro­phone on your com­puter. We haven’t been able to reach you by cell phone or any other way, and we’re try­ing this by audio Skype, but you’re com­ing in and out. Maybe if you go as close as you can to the com­puter micro­phone. Kim?

KIM IVES: OK, well, I’ve got the mike right to my face now. Can you hear me OK now?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, a lit­tle better.

KIM IVES: I think it’s the [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: No, that was—

KIM IVES: I think it’s the inter­net, which has—again, is very—which is very [inaudi­ble]. In any case, the other ele­ment you should be aware of is the response of the pop­u­la­tion, the hos­til­ity of the pop­u­la­tion [inaudi­ble] NGOs which have come here. You see graf­fiti every­where [inaudi­ble] their pres­ence in the coun­try [inaudible]—

AMY GOODMAN: Kim, we’re going to have to try this tomor­row, because it’s just not audi­ble enough. We some­times hear you, and we some­times don’t. But what we do hear is very inter­est­ing. We’re going to try to get com­plete sen­tences out tomor­row. Kim Ives is a jour­nal­ist with the news­pa­per Haiti Lib­erté, join­ing us online from Port-au-Prince. Very dif­fi­cult still to get through.

We’re also joined by Peter Hall­ward. His book is called Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aris­tide, and the Pol­i­tics of Con­tain­ment. He talked about the vul­tures. He talked about con­trac­tors that are now com­ing in, this whole issue of who devel­ops Haiti, and going back to what you were say­ing about how—the riches that Haiti brought to France. And inter­est­ingly, that’s what increas­ingly depleted Haiti right through World War II. The Haitians, after declar­ing a repub­lic in 1804, ulti­mately they agreed to pay reparations—

PETER HALLWARD: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —to Haiti—to France.

PETER HALLWARD: Well, “agreed” is one way of putting it. The French sent their entire Atlantic fleet and put it out­side Port-au-Prince, guns ready, and said, basi­cally, “Pay up or face the con­se­quences.” And what were—what did Haiti—what choice does he have?

And in the war of inde­pen­dence, one of the most extra­or­di­nary national lib­er­a­tion strug­gles ever fought, lasted for thir­teen years, and it ends in the end of 1803, kills a third of the pop­u­la­tion, destroys the entire coun­try. All the cities are destroyed, the plan­ta­tions wrecked. And the coun­try is then locked in this quar­an­tine, not able to trade. It’s not able to gen­er­ate any rev­enue that would allow it to rebuild. The lit­tle resources that it does have, it spends on build­ing for­ti­fi­ca­tions to block the French from return­ing. And twenty years of this, and the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment is pre­pared finally to sign an agree­ment to pay a huge amount of money, I mean, three—more than three times, around three times the amount of money that France charged the United States when it sold Louisiana in 1803, as repa­ra­tions for them­selves, basically.

It’s repa­ra­tions for lost—for the lost colo­nial and slave prop­erty to France. And yes, the money—the sim­ple inter­est pay­ments on this French debt by the end of the nine­teenth cen­tury was con­sum­ing the bulk of the Hait­ian bud­get, about 80 per­cent of the Hait­ian bud­get. And these pay­ments went on, as you said, until 1947.

So, that alone—I mean, when we talk about Hait­ian debt, the cru­cial debt is the debt that is owed to Haiti. And this is a point Aris­tide always made. He made it in his early speeches in the 1980s. He made it in his speeches as pres­i­dent in the early ’90s. And then he said it again, very emphat­i­cally, in the run-up to the bicen­te­nary of Hait­ian inde­pen­dence in 2004, that France should pay this money back and that the United States should pay some of the money that it owes Haiti. After it took over the bank, when it occu­pied the coun­try in 1915, it expro­pri­ated land from tens of thou­sands of peas­ants. It rav­aged the econ­omy for twenty years. It did the same again in dif­fer­ent ways more recently, by con­tribut­ing to these two dis­as­trous coups, in 1991 and again in 2004.

So the debt that France and the United States and Canada also owes Haiti is immense. It would be bil­lions and bil­lions of dol­lars, not as char­ity, but sim­ply debt. And Aris­tide had the temer­ity to demand this as head of state. It was a pol­icy not by a kind of fringy NGO that can make, you know, ide­al­is­tic speeches and demands, but of a well-documented, seri­ous demand by a head of state to another sov­er­eign power that was very, very uncom­fort­able. France was clearly rat­tled by this. Chirac said, you know, “The Hait­ian pres­i­dent should con­sider the impli­ca­tions of what he’s say­ing more care­fully.” And it’s very clear, I think, that this demand was one of the key fac­tors that led to the French involve­ment in the coup in 2004.

AMY GOODMAN: And the coup in 2004, the United States and France push­ing Aris­tide and Mil­dred Aris­tide, the First Lady of Haiti, out of Haiti on a US mil­i­tary jet—

PETER HALLWARD: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —to the Cen­tral African Republic.

PETER HALLWARD: That’s right, in the mid­dle of the night. So here’s a sce­nario where the gov­ern­ment is elected with 70 to 75 per­cent of the vote, has a mas­sive major­ity in Par­lia­ment, seventy-two out of eighty-three seats in Par­lia­ment, has all but one seat in the Sen­ate. Aris­tide has dis­banded the army at this point, which had been tra­di­tion­ally the mech­a­nism of con­trol, which had over­thrown his gov­ern­ment back in 1991. So you have a sit­u­a­tion here for the first time where you have a pop­u­lar move­ment that’s still rel­a­tively strong, despite all the vio­lence that it had sur­vived in the mid– and early ’90s. It has a pop­u­lar pres­i­dent. It has clear lead­er­ship. It has a clear pro­gram. It has a mas­sive major­ity in Par­lia­ment. There’s no extra-political mil­i­tary mech­a­nism wait­ing to over­throw it. And it’s at that point that this mas­sive inter­na­tional cam­paign starts to desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment, to mis­rep­re­sent it, to starve it of funds, to push it into the cor­ner that even­tu­ally, as you say, leads to this coup d’état at the end of Feb­ru­ary 2004.

AMY GOODMAN: What would it mean now if Aris­tide were to return? He has said he wants to return from South Africa. The reports are he almost—it’s almost as if he was in Bangi. While it’s a friendly gov­ern­ment, that the pres­sure is on for him to stay there.

PETER HALLWARD: Well, clearly. He’s been—he said this—he’s been say­ing this for five years or six years vir­tu­ally now, that he’s ready to come back. And it’s—the first thing it would do, it would estab­lish some con­ti­nu­ity. So we’ve heard any num­ber of calls for “let’s make a new start,” you know, a new Haiti, etc. This is not very help­ful, I think. It’s not what peo­ple want. What peo­ple want is some con­ti­nu­ity with its remark­able polit­i­cal mobi­liza­tion that has had the courage to face off and, in fact, over­come mil­i­tary pressure.

You know, this is a pop­u­lar move­ment that began in an upris­ing against the Duva­lier dic­ta­tor­ship, that was strong enough to over­throw the Duva­lier dic­ta­tor­ship and, in par­tic­u­lar, to uproot, as they put it, the Macoutes, the para­mil­i­taries that had con­trolled that coun­try for decades, pow­er­ful enough to over­come that then in 1986, ’87, pow­er­ful enough then to over­come the army directly when it tried to run the coun­try. And the cru­cial thing for many peo­ple in Haiti is to main­tain a kind of con­ti­nu­ity with that tra­di­tion and to remo­bi­lize it, to reen­gage those—you know, that legacy of hope and per­se­ver­ance and courage.

Aris­tide rep­re­sents that, fun­da­men­tally. He’s the spokesper­son for that move­ment, for that moment in Hait­ian his­tory. So, for him to return, I think, would be, first of all, a kind of an acknowl­edge­ment that this has indeed been the fun­da­men­tal fact of Hait­ian polit­i­cal life in the last thirty years and that this is what has to be the pri­or­ity, is to empower and enable Hait­ian peo­ple with their own lead­er­ship and their own pri­or­i­ties to set the agenda and to force the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity to do what it is told, rather than the oppo­site. So, Aristide’s return would be to return the most force­ful, the most inspir­ing, the most pow­er­ful voice in Hait­ian pol­i­tics where it belongs, back where he belongs, not to run the coun­try, not to be the sav­ior who comes with all the solu­tions, but to be the some­one who can be a spokesper­son for pop­u­lar empow­er­ment. That’s what I think it would represent.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think it would take for him to return?

PETER HALLWARD: A lit­tle bit of polit­i­cal will. A lit­tle bit of—I mean, one phone call is what it would take. The thing is, what would it force—what would it require to force that? And what that would require, unfor­tu­nately, is a mas­sive amount of effort from peo­ple like you and me and the peo­ple in the coun­tries, par­tic­u­larly the United States, Canada—

AMY GOODMAN: Is it more impor­tant what’s on the ground in Haiti?

PETER HALLWARD: Yeah, it is, but—of course, it is. The cru­cial thing is the—I think, to facil­i­tate some­thing like a gen­uine col­lec­tive mobi­liza­tion. But Aris­tide has his place in that. He’s one of many peo­ple who could con­tribute to that. But he is the most impor­tant per­son, I think, the one who has the high­est pro­file, the per­son who is—who was able, has been able to do this time and time again, to find the right words to say what has to be said. This is what peo­ple appre­ci­ate about him, and to do it in ways that are not def­er­en­tial. You know, one of the things that peo­ple appre­ci­ate him is that he stood up to pres­sure and that he stood up for people’s right to con­front mil­i­tary pres­sure, for exam­ple, and to defend them­selves. So he’s been a very artic­u­late spokesman for that, for jus­tice and for empow­er­ment. So he’s impor­tant because of that, not because of he’s an indi­vid­ual, he would come and have all the solu­tions [inaudi­ble]. I’m sure he’d be the first to say that’s not the case.

But that the empow­er­ment of Hait­ian peo­ple, as a whole, and in mean­ing­ful ways, not in the kind of triv­ial ways that every­one will say, it has to be dri­ven by the Hait­ian peo­ple. What does that actu­ally mean con­cretely? And I think, con­cretely, in terms of orga­ni­za­tion, in terms of hav­ing some­thing like a pro­gram for national change, it’s been Fanmi Lavalas, the mobi­liza­tion around Fanmi Lavalas, that has been the most impor­tant devel­op­ment in Hait­ian pol­i­tics since the mid-‘90s. So, to main­tain a kind of con­ti­nu­ity with that, to allow it to go for­ward, to allow the orga­ni­za­tion to reestab­lish itself, to reor­ga­nize itself—it suf­fered a great deal, you know, under the pres­sure of the last six years, in particular—would be a very impor­tant way for­ward. It’s sim­ply allow­ing the Hait­ian peo­ple to use the resources that they’ve got, rather than main­tain­ing them in a sort of state of pas­sive, def­er­en­tial docility.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there. Peter Hall­ward, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Damming the Flood is the name of his book, Haiti, Aris­tide, and the Pol­i­tics of Con­tain­ment.