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                                                                                WORLD, Page 32

THE CARIBBEAN

Bad to Worse


As the political standoff drags on, Haiti's people descend deeper
into misery and the U.S. gropes for a way to handle the refugee
flow

By JILL SMOLOWE -- Reported by Bernard Diederich/Port-au-Prince
and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington


    For Haiti's poorest citizens, the term "quality of life"
is a cruel mockery. Since the Sept. 30 military coup that
deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and precipitated a
hemisphere-wide economic embargo, malnutrition and disease have
spread at a rate well beyond the usual disquieting norm. In
rural areas, hungry peasant farmers eat the seeds they should
be planting. Twenty miles from the capital, immunization
programs have been curtailed, a casualty of government efforts
to conserve fuel that make refrigeration of vaccines impossible.
As a result, children are dying of measles. Yet in the slums,
people do not complain of physical hardship; they speak instead
of spiritual malnourishment. ``Titid gave us dignity and hope,"
says a barefoot man, referring to Aristide by his popular
nickname. "Keep the embargo. We are ready to suffer if it means
Titid will come back." A moment later, he implores, "He will
come back, won't he?"

    Despite the persistent efforts of the Organization of
American States to settle that very question, Haiti's political
crisis appears no closer to resolution now than it did in the
bloody days after the coup. Every attempt at a political
compromise that might allow the populist hero Aristide to return
in some restricted capacity has met with fierce resistance from
military hard-liners and their Big Business allies, as well as
grumbling from many in the middle class and the government
bureaucracy. As if sensing greater misery ahead, record numbers
of Haitians fled by sea last week to U.S. shores. Officials in
Washington question whether all of the boat people have a
"well-founded fear of persecution," the international standard
for political asylum, and refuse to grant the newcomers
protection even temporarily. People closer to the action
describe conditions that argue for at least short-term refuge.
Rene Theodore, Haiti's Prime Minister-designate, is worried that
the country "is being held hostage by thugs."

    Theodore's own experience is telling. Having received the
OAS-brokered endorsement of Aristide and the army's nominal
commander in chief, as well as a tentative nod from some
segments of the armed forces, he was expected to head a new
government. But on Jan. 25, seven plainclothes policemen bearing
assault rifles burst into Theodore's office as he was meeting
with political party leaders. According to Theodore, he and his
guests were marched single file out to the driveway, then
ordered to lie face down on the pavement and surrender their
weapons. "One of the policemen began to kick us as we lay
there," he says. "I received a kick in the face, just under the
eye." Theodore's bodyguard and friend, Yves Jean-Pierre, was
killed by gunfire. "I didn't see Yves shot," he says, "but
others did." One of the policemen, he continued, "suggested they
finish us with a grenade." Just in time, uniformed police
ordered the plainclothesmen to put their weapons on safety.

    The incident, pointedly designed to thwart attempts at
political compromise, enraged the Bush Administration, which
recalled its ambassador from Haiti last week. Beyond that swift
reaction, Washington's Haitian policy is gridlocked by poor
options. On the one hand, frustration over Haiti's deteriorating
political and economic situation is running so high that in
interviews last week with the New York Times, officials raised
the remote prospect of military intervention. Yet at the same
time, the Administration was petitioning the federal courts for
permission to forcibly repatriate most of the boat people, who
are currently residing in tents, ships and a huge aircraft
hangar at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The
Supreme Court gave its assent Friday night. A State Department
spokesman said the government "will begin immediately
repatriating Haitians."

    While awaiting the court's ruling, the State Department
unveiled a new policy: Haitians will now be permitted to apply
for asylum at the U.S. embassy in the capital city of
Port-au-Prince. Unless the rules are eased, the program will be
restricted to just 300 Haitians over the next eight months, and
it will confine admission to former political prisoners and
applicants who are in "imminent danger" of persecution.

    The new policy is unlikely to have much impact on the
boat-people traffic. (In its petition to the court, the
government claimed improbably that 20,000 Haitians stand poised
to flee.) "While a positive development, it has to be seen as
an in-house rescue program for a select few," says Arthur
Helton, director of the refugee program run by the Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights in New York City. It also remains
uncertain how an embassy operating with only a skeleton crew --
most staff members have been withdrawn since the coup -- will
process all of the claims.

    Thus caught between its commitment to restoring democratic
rule in Haiti and its determination to cork the outpouring of
boat people, the Bush Administration weighed several
unsatisfactory steps. One possibility was to end the embargo,
which has hit poor Haitians the hardest. Such a reversal of
policy, however, could prove messy for Bush in an election year.
A military intervention in a country that poses no threat to
international peace and security would be all but impossible to
justify; last week the State Department quickly denied that any
military option was being considered at present. The likeliest
option was a three-pronged approach: tighten up refugee
controls; target individuals connected with the coup by freezing
their American bank accounts; and ease the toll on Haitians by
loosening the embargo on plants that assemble goods for U.S.
companies, restoring as many as 40,000 jobs.

    The question now is how many of the boat people at
Guantanamo will be returned to Haiti -- and how fast. Since Jan.
19, the Coast Guard has hauled 6,235 boat people to safety,
bringing the total number of post-coup Haitian refugees to
14,610. Of those, almost one-quarter have been found by officers
of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to have a
"plausible claim" for asylum, which means they will be permitted
to enter the U.S. and present further evidence. Among the most
recent boat people, almost three-quarters made the cut.

    Refugee experts believe the new leniency reflects a
combination of factors: better-trained INS interviewers,
stronger refugee protections during the screening process and
a deepening climate of intimidation in Haiti. "I'm hearing about
more violence," says Rolande Dorancy, executive director of the
Haitian Refugee Center in Miami. "Last week was a week of
terror." These complaints dramatize figures released last week
by Amnesty International, the human-rights organization, which
estimates that there have been 1,500 killings and 300 arrests
since the coup. Human-rights workers in Haiti say that in
addition to stepped-up military and police attacks, assaults by
ordinary and notorious criminals -- most notably the former
Tontons Macoutes -- have quickened since a Christmas pardon
issued by the provisional government shrank the population of
the National Penitentiary from 1,000 to several dozen.

    Human-rights activists also contend that the embargo is
missing its mark. Until three ships broke the embargo and eased
the gasoline crisis, military leaders profited handsomely from
black-market fuel dealings. Citizens, by contrast, have only
suffered further. Some 160 assembly plants have collapsed or
relocated. The resulting unemployment, coupled with the toll in
the service and industrial sectors, has caused the loss of
120,000 jobs, according to U.S. embassy estimates. Moreover,
because postal mail is included in the embargo, contributions
from relatives living in the U.S. -- which totaled $300 million
annually -- have dried up.

    The environment has taken such a brutal beating that Haiti
may have already mortgaged its future. To make up for the
dearth of propane gas and kerosene, peasants have slashed away
at trees, even mangoes, windbreaks and the mahoganies that shade
the coffee crop. Thus, even in the unlikely event that Haitians
settle their political differences soon, they will be living in
the unrelieved glare of the current crisis for a long time to
come.