 I'm joined by Mr. Mark Schneider. He's a distinguished expert in many, many fields that are relevant to our discussion, but most importantly, he's an expert on Haiti, and we're going to talk today with him about the manifestations of fragility in Haiti. Thank you. As you know, we're here looking at Haiti and trying to understand the manifestations of fragility in Haiti, just exactly how the particular drivers of fragility manifest in the country, and how we got here from historical, political, socioeconomic perspective. Please, could you give us your views here? I think you have to begin, in terms of where we are today, in recognizing that the 2010 earthquake essentially decapitated the Haitian state, that virtually all of the senior and middle officials of the Haitian government in Port-au-Prince were killed or severely injured. All of those buildings, and I was there about three weeks afterwards, were simply rubble. And so a very weak state previously now disappeared. The police station, the national police headquarters, again rubble. So you have to understand that in the 10 years since, you really haven't had, and 12 years now, you really haven't had the rebuilding of an effective government. What you've had is you've had deals between a rent-seeking elite and certain key elements of the political process who were willing to make bargains with them, mostly corrupt. And that included corruption in the way of allowing gangs to establish themselves, use the gangs during elections, and essentially make bargains that were aimed again at securing the level of profits that they could from the economy. And so you get to the situation where you are today, after the assassination of Moisa a year ago, where the gangs now are no longer just the supported by or directed by some parts of the political elite. They are themselves now the dominant force in Port-au-Prince particularly. And so they have territorial control that is totally illegitimate and is based on rape and murder and kidnappings. You have to understand, even today there are about seven kidnappings a day in Port-au-Prince. The UN last week said that during one week in July, there had been 471 people, mostly Sitesole, killed, injured, or disappeared. Between January and June, there were something like 970 killings, 780 kidnappings. God knows how many rapes. So the levels of security are enormous. The gangs control the access to the port, which is the way most food comes into the country. They control the roads that take food, anything else, out of Port-au-Prince to the south or the north. And increasingly, they have checkpoints between the airport and the neighborhoods in Sitesole. And that's where people get robbed, people get killed, people get kidnapped. So the current situation is fragile in every possible way. It's fragile in terms of security. It's fragile in terms of access to the basic needs of a population, whether that's health or education or food. And just on that, about 20% of the kids in Port-au-Prince are currently in danger of dying from lack of food, according to the UN. And so now the question is, how do you move away from this? And that's where the absence of a legitimate state is crucial. So since the assassination of Moise a year ago, you have the person that he named a few days earlier as Prime Minister, who's never confirmed because there is no Senate. Only 10 of the 30 senators have been elected, and those terms ran out as well. And none of the members of the assembly, like our House representatives, none of them, their terms expired two years ago. So he essentially is trying to govern without very much credibility. So you have to figure out what do you do now. And I think that there you have to have some level of political consensus that allows decisions that are made from the government to be accepted by the population. And you don't have that. And that's also needed, I think, to overcome the reluctance of Haitians to allow an international police force of any kind to come in to back up the current Haitian National Police, which has demonstrated by what's happened in the past year or two that it doesn't have the capacity to confront the gangs and to provide citizens with safety. I mean, people can't take their kids to school. The teachers can't get to school. It's hard even to get to a market. So you need to have sufficient level of political agreement so that you can get the kind of support for the Haitian National Police, which I personally convinced means a very robust international, call it what you will, SWAT team, strike force, something that will back up the police so that they can credibly block the gangs from their current territorial control. You have to break that territorial control of the gangs. And I don't think you can do it without international help. And how do you think the public sentiment is towards an international support like that? That's how you mention it, how you phrase it. If you say we're going to bring back Manusta, forget it. There are scandals on the cholera, scandals on sex, et cetera. That doesn't work. But if you say we're going to bring in an international force that's going to back up the Haitian National Police to take on the gangs, that's different. You get a lot of support for that. But in order to do that, the internationals have to have the belief that they have political support from the Haitians. And I think that that's probably what's required in order for the internationals to say, I see an exit strategy down at the end of this process. And I don't think you can get there just with Arielle Henri right now. And that's why I think the first step has to be a political consensus between Henri and the major civil society organizations, which is probably the Montana group, and probably some of the business community as well. But that needs to be done. And where do you think elections would fit into this sort of iterative process that you've outlined? I think elections are way down the road. The first thing you need to do is get a political consensus. That's going to take some time. But I think it has to be done urgently, given what's happening in this neighborhood before the prince. So let's assume, if I were to say, in the next two weeks you would have a political serious political negotiation. You would agree on certain steps, one of which would be bringing in an international support force, what do you call it, strike force. Then over the next several weeks you would engage with people around the country on what the political process would be. Is the current constitutional and legal framework good enough to get you through to the elections? Good enough is the right phrase. I think so. I think you'd want to put into the political transition negotiations that take place, along with the dialogue, national dialogue, an agreement on how you're going to amend the constitution going forward. But that doesn't have to be done before the elections. And as far as the security, is there a regional element of regional entities, regional bodies that could be more palatable perhaps than UN? What's been agreed to rhetorically by both the Henri and the Montana group is to have representation from Secretary-General of the UN, the OAS, CARICOM, and the Francophone. They would name some distinguished senior person to be part of the negotiations like a... Contact groups. Well, my preference would be mediation, but I don't think you're going to get there. But it could be a contact group, but it's definitely got to be an observer of the process to be able to bridge the gaps between the proposals of the two sides in the short term. You've painted this picture of the sort of immediate concerns, I mean, the very, very immediate needs of the people of Haiti, and then the short, medium term. What do you think for the long term, ten years out? Well, at the ten-year period, as you know, is what the Global Fragility Framework has talked about. I think it's absolutely essential to have that kind of perspective on issues like education. You know, in Haiti, about 85% of, and maybe more, even when things were good, the students were not in public schools. They were in privately run schools by the churches, by others, and they were not necessarily getting quality education. So I think, you know, education over a ten-year period, that's essential. Health care, obviously. I think that there's, you have to think about the Haitian economy in terms of the rural sector, in terms of food. Just the way that Haiti was structured after, let's say, after Duvalier, the rural sector was simply not invested in. And so all of the investments were made in factories, you know, apparel, baseball gloves, baseball, baseballs, but not in strengthening and protecting the rural areas. Small farmers, they're still the bulk of the Haitian rural land and labor force. And that also links up to Haiti's problem with respect to climate. And so you need to have a ten-year program that focuses on at least preventing further deforestation, protecting the water sources that exist, trying to do something about being prepared for the next climate crisis, the next natural disaster. All of those things are ten-year programs. Mr. Scheiner, thank you so much for being with us today for that very insightful analysis. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me.