Claude Joseph: Can Haiti be saved?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2022
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Haiti is one of the world’s most broken nations, and internal fractures are tearing the country apart. Last summer, the president was assassinated, and the perpetrators still haven’t been brought to justice. Elections have been shelved, and Haitians live in grinding poverty amid gang violence and international indifference. Stephen Sackur speaks to Claude Joseph, Haiti’s former foreign minister and briefly acting PM. Can Haiti be saved?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is the product of one of the world's most unequal societies, Haiti, where the majority of people live in grinding poverty with no access to running water or a decent education, while a small elite dominate the economy and send their kids abroad for schooling. |
| 0:23.9 | Claude Joseph is one of the lucky ones. He studied in the United States, spent years as an |
| 0:29.9 | academic in American universities, before coming back to Haiti and being fast-tracked into the |
| 0:36.0 | post of Foreign Minister under the presidency of Juvenal Moise. |
| 0:40.3 | Last summer, Moise was assassinated in his home. |
| 0:44.0 | Joseph was by then acting Prime Minister, and he stayed in that post for two more weeks |
| 0:49.8 | before being replaced by Ariel Henri. Since then, Haitian politics has been a cauldron of suspicion, |
| 0:58.5 | backbiting and manoeuvring. Henri is still PM. There is no new president, and all of the |
| 1:05.0 | country's problems, desperate poverty, corruption, gang violence and institutional collapse seem to be getting worse. Can Haiti be saved? |
| 1:15.6 | Well, Claude Jazef joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thanks for having me. |
| 1:20.9 | It's a pleasure to have you. It is eight months or so since President Mouise was brutally |
| 1:26.9 | gunned down, assassinated in his own home. Haiti today is |
| 1:31.0 | still in chaos as a result of that. Why is it still in chaos? One of the reason is because the current |
| 1:40.2 | Prime Minister, Prime Minister Henry, is still in comment. And we do know that according to |
| 1:47.6 | national and international investigators, he was involved in the assassination. His implication, |
| 1:57.0 | I should say, was well established by international men. |
| 2:02.0 | If we look carefully at what has happened since that assassination, we do not know that Prime |
| 2:08.4 | Minister Henri was involved. He has adamantly denied any involvement. We know that prosecutors |
| 2:15.4 | have looked at his situation alongside many others, but beyond that, |
| 2:20.1 | nothing is clear at all. I mean, I think so many things are pretty clear. First, he has been |
| 2:26.6 | obstructing justice. He fired the chief prosecutor. He fired a former minister of justice. So as I said, it's not personally myself that |
| 2:39.5 | actually implicate him. The Haitian National Police Report clearly says that he spoke with the guy |
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