ARTICLE - A HAITI FEW WANT TO TALK ABOUT

A HAITI FEW WANT TO TALK ABOUT
(PBS)

On the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, FRONTLINE is airing Tuesday night filmmaker Dan Reed's powerful, provocative portrait of the deep-rooted chronic problems which are jeopardizing the country's stability and the world's efforts to help build a 'new Haiti.'

Here's some excerpts from a conversation with Reed -- the full interview will be published on our Battle For Haiti website Tuesday night:

....How did you come to this story - the decision to focus on the escape of thousands of prisoners the night of the quake?

I hadn't heard about the jailbreak, I don't think, before I went to Haiti. And when I met Haiti's chief of police, Mario Andresol, on day two of my visit, I realized that this jailbreak was clearly a much bigger problem.

Eight of the prisons had been emptied, including the main National Penitentiary which contained more than half of the prisoners in the country. These prisoners were on the loose. A lot were holed up in the slums of Port au Prince. And I hadn't read any reporting on this, so I wasn't aware that it was such a big deal.

So to me this seemed to be an unusual angle on the earthquake. And I instinctively felt that for the anniversary of the quake what I should do was to make a film that was not about the earthquake, but that was about how Haiti was before the earthquake, and why that was making it difficult.

Because as soon as you arrive in Haiti, anyone can see it's a very difficult place to help because of a complete lack of a functioning state. So I started to connect the idea of the absence of a functioning state and the absence of law and order and the absence of rule of law, which is much wider than law and order.

Rule of law involves civil registry and land registry, all these things. These kind of law and order issues are not about policing, they're just about identity. And all of the institutions which allow us to lead a civilized life are absent in Haiti. Law and order, of course, is the first thing to go when there is no rule of law.

And so, the story of the escaped prisoners became an exciting and an unusual way of revealing this underlying chronic problem which is preventing Haiti from arising from the ruins, not just of the earthquake, but of the dictatorships and political turmoil, all of the natural disasters before 2010.

What about MINUSTAH, the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and its focus on security and stabilizing the country?

MINUSTAH is 57 countries trying to police a nation. And Haiti is the kind of place that's so complex that, first of all, you have to speak the language before you can stand a chance.

MINUSTAH can prevent another coup, which is essentially what it's there to do, but MINUSTAH cannot really guarantee law and order, because it cannot work closely enough with the people. That's the Haitian police's job. The Haitian police is struggling. It's much better than it was, but it's really struggling. It doesn't have equipment, it's undermanned, undertrained, under everything. And so, the prospect of Haitians getting security is a dim and distant one.

Was it difficult to find people who would be candid on camera about the situation?

Yes. I met people who told me off the record, "Yeah, this is what's happening..." But they wouldn't go on the record because they said, "I'll lose my job." Or, "I'll be killed." So there's a kind of consensus; a sort of conspiracy of silence amongst the people, the Haitian community and the aid community in particular. "We can't say it quite like it is, because we'll undermine our mission, it will get into the news."

The chronic problems that are revealed quite powerfully in the film seem almost insurmountable, at least short-term. How long can this continue -- the stasis?

I think the stasis can continue forever. And that's a tragedy, because, fundamentally, it's a political problem and the political problem will not get resolved because the UN is there as a buffer. Regime change in Haiti often happens violently.

All the Haitians that I have spoken to -- all of them, without exception -- have said, "What we need is a stronger government which will impose the rule of law. We don't necessarily need democracy."

In fact, you will often find people saying, "We've had too much democracy too fast. We're not ready for it." And also, what democracy has done is it's meant that gang leaders who control large numbers of votes have been able to have leverage now with politicians who need their support in order to deliver those votes.

So, without Cite Soleil, and without Martissant, another big slum area, you cannot win the presidency. You have to go to the gangsters who control those areas, because they will tell people how to vote. Now, that may not be so much the case now, say the optimists - but it certainly was the case three, four years ago. And it still is the case enough to make democracy in Haiti not correspond to what we think it should be. We all think of democracy as people deciding for themselves who they want to be governed by, and expressing their political choice in a free way. And that's not the case in Haiti.

So a lot of people say, "What we want is a strong government to stop the robberies, stop the crime, get the youth back in school" -- all of those basic things to try and create a civil society first. That's what people are desperate for. They want their kids to go to school. They want to work. They want roads. They want clean water. But they can't have them now, because nothing works. You can't go from A to B without getting robbed before you get home.

So, stasis is really the worst thing. But it suits us in the donor countries, because it means we don't have to make difficult choices.