The House is considering military action in Haiti to remove the leaders of the coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, government officials have told U.S. News. But the use of military force is a troublesome option, defense officials say, and it is unlikely before the expiration of a 15-day United Nations deadline requiring the leaders of Haiti's military dictatorship to resign and leave the country. The U.N. resolution, proposed by the Clinton administration, is to be voted on this week.
The president's decision to consider using force came within days of the resignation of the special envoy to Haiti, which is plagued by widespread hunger, political torture and murder. In a tartly worded letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Lawrence Pezzullo issued a dire warning against using force in Haiti. The letter was obtained by U.S. News. "As I take my leave," Pezzullo wrote, "I wanted to express my grave concern that we are heading irrevocably down a path toward unilateral military intervention in Haiti. That would be a terrible mistake."
Under fire. Clinton's foreign-policy team is under growing political pressure to do something bold, somewhere. Weeks of indecision in Bosnia have led to embarrassing standoffs between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Bosnian Serbs, for instance. The Haitian tragedy, unlike Bosnia, has clear political implications for the president domestically. Randall Robinson, the leader of a lobbying-and-research group called TransAfrica, is in the third week of a hunger strike to protest Clinton's policy toward Haiti. On Capitol Hill, many of the president's allies, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, have pressed the administration to get tough in Haiti. In considering the military option seriously now, President Clinton appears to be bending to these forces.
Many details are unclear, but a U.S. force would strike quickly -- and alone. A peacekeeping mission by the U.N. and the Organization of American States might follow U.S. action, but no arrangements have been made.
There appears to be considerable division within the administration on the use of force in Haiti. Events there have caused the Pentagon to order the ready reaction forces of the 82nd Airborne to be placed on alert twice in recent months, but senior military officials remain opposed to action. One concern is whether the United States should act unilaterally. Another is the wisdom of reinstalling Aristide as president. U.S. intelligence officials have criticized him as mentally unstable and unfit to lead. For different reasons, Secretary of State Christopher is said to be wary of the use of force, favoring tougher sanctions instead.
Sanctions are unlikely to succeed, however, and they could heighten the crisis. The problem is that sanctions harm Haiti's poorest people while leaving the military leadership untouched. Pushing hardest for the consideration of a military option, sources say, is national-security adviser Anthony Lake.
Armed intervention is not a quick fix. Although the tiny Haitian military is likely to crumble quickly under any U.S. show of force, the danger is in what happens next. "Sure, you can take that Army down quickly," says a U.S. official. "But then there's no one else to provide internal security but us. We can't leave and let everybody start massacring each other. They are fooling themselves if they think this is going to be easy." Handing off to a multinational peacekeeping force poses other problems. "This in- and-out idea is a total fantasy," says a U.S. official, who notes that Haiti's well-armed military and police forces, if leaderless, could run amok as did the warring clans of Somalia. "The underlying problem," says another American official, "is that the Army is a big bunch of thugs and killers." Besides the Army, though, paramilitary forces now organized under the banner of a group called FRAPH could unleash a murderous rampage in the capital of Port-au-Prince as well as in the surrounding countryside.
"Civil war." Threats or actual use of force could have unforeseen consequences in Haiti. "More pressure will just strengthen our feeling that what the international community is doing is unjust and illegal," said Mireille Bertin, a lawyer working with the Haitian military in Port-au-Prince. "It just gives us more will to resist this injustice. If the U.S. is looking for civil war, this might be the right path."
The Aristide factor remains just another of the imponderables in what even the president and his aides call a policy fiasco. In his letter of resignation, special envoy Pezzullo ticked off some of the low points in the Haiti drama. The USS Harlan County was to have landed a U.S.-Canadian "buffer force" in Haiti last October to secure Aristide's return; U.S. officials ordered the ship not to land after armed Haitians at the dock threatened violence. "Perhaps if I had had your full support in landing the Harlan County last October," Pezzullo wrote Christopher, "in seeking comprehensive sanctions in January, and in pressing President Aristide harder to work together with his own democratically elected parliamentarians, we might have succeeded in overturning the coup and restoring President Aristide despite the odds. Now ... we have unwittingly taken on full responsibility for Haiti's future. This is no favor to President Aristide, the Haitian people or the Americans who will be sacrificed in the attempt."
