Aristide vows to return to Haiti, but not to politics

Former president of Haiti Jean-Bertrand Aristide said that he would return from exile from South Africa “once the conditions are right.” In an interview published in this month’s London Review of Books, Aristide also mentioned that he would like to return to teaching “from outside the structure of the state” should he go back to Haiti.

Here are several quotes by Aristide on leadership, democracy, and the coups that forced him out of power:

• Liberation theology can itself only be a phase in a broader process…(which) carries us a long way from paternalism, from any notion of a ‘saviour’ who might come to guide the people and solve their problems.
• Don’t underestimate the inferiority complex that still so often conditions these relationships. You are black, but sometimes you get to feel whiter than white, if you’re willing to get down on your knees in front of the whites.
• (The coups on 1991 and 2004) could easily happen again soon, so long as the oligarchy who control the means of repression use them to preserve a hollow version of democracy. This is their obsession: to maintain a situation that might be called ‘democratic’, but which consists in fact of a superficial, imported democracy imposed and controlled from above.
• 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
• We never had any illusions that the Americans shared our deeper objectives. But without them we couldn’t have restored democracy.
• 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.
• (The presidential elections in) February 2006 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.

Links- South Florida Sun-Sentinel, London Review of Books

Image- CNN (Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004)