Interviews
Charles Arthur Interview
By Not For Profit News Staff
Apr 18, 2004, 16:16

Transcription By Mario Gudmundsson.
Intro
Dr. Fred Schiff:
We’re talking with Charles Arthur, a writer on Haitian affairs and head of the Haitian Support Group based in London. He went to Haiti in 1993 with the UN as a human rights observer and returned in the year 2000 to observe the elections for the organization of Americans

FS:
The Bush Administration has sort of said that he needed to be removed for a number of reasons, and the ones that I have seen are, one, that there’s a question about the election, and two, corruption in his regime and three, human rights. Could you speak to those things?

Charles Arthur:
The estimate of the turnout, I think was in the region of 80 percent of registered voters, and the actual result was 67 percent to Aristide and his closest rival was Marc Bacin who scored 13 percent.

FS:
When you say that Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected by an overwhelming majority, what was the percentage of turnout, and/or the percentage that he won by?

CA:
The overwhelming sense of all objective and impartial observers was that the landslide victory for the Lavalas family was an accurate representation of the will of the majority of voters.

FS:
Could you put it in context of the human rights violations that more or less substantiated during his period of presidency from, I guess, late 2000 to 2004?

CA:
The comparison is, in my view and in the view of most impartial observers, that while there were very many human rights abuses and some quite awful things happening under the Aristide administration of 2000 to 2004, they in no way were in any way as bad as what was happening in those earlier periods under the military and under the dictatorship.

Not as bad at all, comparing it to what is happening now. Well,(it is a) very sad thing to say, if the human rights situation was disappointing under Aristide, it is equally disappointing if not worse under the government that has replaced him -- this interim government.

FS:
What was the role of the United States as opposed to, or in conjunction or however, with these armed irregulars?

CA:
It’s pretty clear to me that the United States did whatever it could to force Aristide out of office prematurely. The United States did nothing to save the Aristide Presidency and everything they could to undermine it.

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