Haiti Hopes For More Help From Taiwan On Its Security, Ambassador Says

TaiwanPlus News

TaiwanPlus sits down with Haiti's ambassador to Taiwan, Roudy Stanley Penn, to discuss relations between the two countries. You can watch the full interview on an upcoming episode of Zoom In Zoom Out.

Transcript

00:00This is your second term. Can you talk about some of your top goals for this term?

00:03What is the need of Haiti currently? Actually, it's security. So I think in the short term,

00:12what we need now is to find a way to cooperate with Taiwan and security to help solve the problem,

00:21this problem in Haiti. And then after, there are other important goals, like since I left for my

00:33first term, one of the projects that I had is to see with the government of Taiwan what we can do

00:40to have a science park in Haiti. So I think this is one of the things because we have achieved a lot

00:45of thing. But now I think this is the moment to bring to the floor some technological important

00:54project that can help Haiti not only solve the poverty problem, but also the prosperity goal.

01:02I guess, do you see any challenges in Haiti-Taiwan relations right now?

01:07Difficulties, I won't say that. But we need to know that it's politics. The relation as well

01:13depends on what the political elite they pursue. They understand the relationship because we need

01:24to know in Haiti, it's not like all the population, they are all for Taiwan. We have also some political

01:34leaders who believe that we should have relation with other countries instead of Taiwan. But

01:43mostly our political elite, our political class, they believe, and it's because this is what it is now,

01:54that having relation, diplomatic relation with Taiwan, it's not only a transactional relation, it is a relation

02:04based on democracy, a relation based on freedom, sovereignty, and the pursuit of dignity.

02:17And so did you say some people within Haiti might think that Haiti should have relations with China?

02:23Definitely, as it is in all the countries around the world. Even in the countries which don't really,

02:31don't have like diplomatic relation with Taiwan, you will find people who believe that

02:38their country should have diplomatic relation with Taiwan instead of China, even though it's a minority

02:44or a majority. But when you are in a democracy, people are free to believe in what they want to believe to even

02:54they just have to have their reason for this belief.

02:59I've seen just a couple of reports, not recently, but in 2019, the head of China's Office of Commercial

03:07Development in Haiti said to a Haitian newspaper that it could offer Haiti interest-free loans and direct

03:13investment in areas like infrastructure if Haiti upheld the one-China principle. I guess, do you consider

03:19that pressure? Consider that as a pressure? I won't say that. They are doing politics. For me, it's normal.

03:30They would love to have a country like Haiti as a diplomatic partner. Maybe we even suffer from that.

03:39Maybe they could offer more. So they are giving a lot of or doing a lot of propositions. But what we need to know is

03:52even though they are present in Haiti, Haiti is still a sovereign state, a sovereign country. We do what

04:01we want and we do it on behalf of our people. And our people now stand for democracy and stand as our long past

04:12and history of democracy stand for Taiwan because we want, we support the dignity, the freedom and the

04:21sovereignty of Taiwan as a small state as we are.

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