By Peter Hallward, HaitiAnalysis.com

PRETORIA, South Africa: Part two of the interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide conducted in French in Pretoria on 20 July 2006 and translated by Peter Hallward, professor of philosophy at Middlesex University.

PH: In the press, meanwhile, you came to be presented not as the unequivocal winner of legitimate elections, but as an increasingly tyrannical autocrat.

Former President of Haiti Jean Bertrand Aristide speaks during an interview in Pretoria last year. AFP PHOTO

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, Gerard 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 -- 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 negres]... 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 -- 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 'chimeres', 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 'chimeres', the people they call chimeres? This is clearly another expression of our apartheid mentality, the very word says it all. 'Chimeres' 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 'chimeres'? 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 Cite 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 -- 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 -- 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 'chimeres', 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 Cite Soleil, they count for nothing. I could go on and on. Thousands have died. But they don't count, because they are just 'chimeres', 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 Remissainthe Ravix and Guy Philippe, about the extent of their long-standing collaboration with the Convergence Democratique, 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 the 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 Gonaives. 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 -- Ambassador Foley, Luis Moreno, and so on -- 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 doing things. 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' Rene Preval, 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 -- 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 negres of Haiti -- and consciously or unconsciously, that's what they see -- 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 Rene Preval 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 [cettre 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.

Editor's 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. 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.