A tougher United Nations embargo and new American threats fail to cow Haiti's rulers
by Linda Robinson
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In a last-ditch effort to force Haiti's military rulers out of power, the Clinton administration last week rattled itssabers some more and pushed another round of sanctions through the United Nations Security Council. Yet the men in tan uniforms in Port-au- Prince are showing no sign of budging, the administration is running out of options and President Clinton eventually may be forced to choose between making good on his threats to use force and abandoning his promise to restore exiled President Jean- Bertrand Aristide to office.
Last Friday, the U.N. Security Council voted 15 to 0 to impose a complete embargo and targeted sanctions against the coup leaders who ousted Aristide in September 1991. In an internationally televised press conference on May 3, Clinton delivered a veiled threat to Haiti's Army, saying: "Given how many people are being killed and the abject misery of the Haitian people ... I think that we cannot afford to discount the prospect of a military option. ... We can't rule it out any longer."
Clinton's threat was undercut, however, by a chorus of opposition from congressmen on both sides of the aisle, including Rep. Lee Hamilton, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole. And since October, when a negotiated agreement to return Aristide collapsed, the Army and its backers have grown increasingly confident that they have won the diplomatic war of wills with Washington.
After Haitian military leader Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras refused to step down last October -- a key step in the July 1993 Governors Island accord that was to have returned Aristide to power -- the United Nations reimposed a fuel and arms embargo against Haiti, which it had lifted after the July pact was signed.
"Kuwait City." The embargo has proved ineffective, however. A four- block strip in downtown Port-au-Prince has been dubbed "Kuwait City" because hundreds of freelance gas peddlers crowd the sidewalk, rushing up to any car that stops with funnels and gallon jugs of gasoline or diesel fuel. All over the city, closed-down Texaco and Shell stations are crammed with black-market-gas salesmen. Anyone who can afford to pay $10 a gallon has no difficulty getting gas, most of which is smuggled across the border from the Dominican Republic.
Herve Black and Mathieu Saint Cyr remain confident that Aristide will never return to Haiti. Black and Saint Cyr are local leaders of an Army-backed paramilitary organization known as FRAPH, an acronym for the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti that sounds like the French verb frapper, which translates as "to hit."
Sitting in the schoolhouse they have taken over as their headquarters in Cite Soleil, the Haitian capital's largest slum, Black claims that their chapter has 5,000 members. After trying to extract a donation for FRAPH before granting an interview, he says: "The U.S. won't invade. Aristide is dead and Clinton knows it." A FRAPH guard, Nicolas Pierre, sits nearby, toying with a hand grenade. "Michel Francois has made the country nice again," Saint Cyr chimes in, referring to Haiti's police chief.
The FRAPH has mushroomed since October, says Colin Granderson, the chief of the U.N.-O.A.S. mission in Haiti. "They have offices all over, in the south, in the Artibonite valley, in the central plateau," he says. In March, U.N.-O.A.S. observers were roughed up by FRAPH toughs in the town of Hinche while Haitian Army officers looked on passively.
Far from being intimidated by the United States, the Haitian military has mounted an increasingly aggressive intimidation campaign of its own. The FRAPH, whose members are issued Army licenses to bear arms, appears to do the bidding of the Army by intimidating Aristide partisans and terrorizing the population. In Cite Soleil, the tap-taps, brightly painted pickup trucks that serve as buses, have been forced to change their destination signs to Cite Simone, the slum's name during the Duvalier dictatorship. FRAPH leader Black proudly claims credit.
Shot down. In the worst of a series of incidents, on April 22 residents of an Aristide stronghold, Raboteau, a fetid slum in the city of Gonaives, were chased to the seashore and shot down by uniformed soldiers, according to one man who said he had been roused from his bed by soldiers pounding at his door.
As he pointed out the waterside graves of two men killed, a white Datsun pickup truck, commonly used by plainclothes military auxiliaries known as attaches, roared up and made a screeching turn, scattering a crowd that had gathered around visiting journalists. A few minutes later, two glowering young men told the reporters to leave the neighborhood. A priest in the region who reports on human-rights abuses estimates that 30 Haitians may have been killed in Raboteau.
In Raboteau and elsewhere, the Army has justified its actions by claiming that armed civilians have attacked military posts. The U.S. Embassy sent a team to Raboteau and found no evidence of any such attack. One U.N. official speculates that the military is targeting grass-roots supporters of Aristide to prevent them from adopting guerrilla tactics.
The expanded U.N. embargo, due to take effect May 21, will ban all trade except for food, medicine, cooking gas and humanitarian shipments. But a non U.S. diplomat is skeptical that these tougher measures will be effective. "As long as the Dominican border is not shut down," he says, "people who can pay will get what they need."
Dominican President Joaquin Balaguer has agreed to invite technical advisers from the United States and the United Nations to suggest measures to stop the contraband. "Balaguer knows perfectly well how to shut down the border trade," scoffs the diplomat, whose country has been closely involved in the effort to return Aristide. "He simply has no intention of doing it."
Assets and visas. In addition to expanding the embargo, the U.N. resolution instructs member countries to revoke the visas of some 600 Haitian officers and coup supporters and recommends that they freeze the military leaders' financial assets. The United States has already taken these steps for officers down to the level of second lieutenant, and a few countries have followed suit. But since most Haitians' ties are with the United States, the effect of this additional step is likely to be modest.
The United States had vowed to tighten the sanctions last January if the coup leaders did not step down, but concluded that more sanctions would only inflict greater pain on poor Haitians. Left unsaid but clearly understood was the risk that tightening sanctions might prompt more impoverished Haitians to take to their leaky sailboats and attempt the dangerous passage to America.
The Coast Guard interdicted 1,152 Haitians in the first four months of this year; a total of 2,324 were picked up and returned to Haiti in all of 1993. Many of the Haitians may be fleeing economic hardship, not political persecution, but administration officials are feeling the heat from lobbyist Randall Robinson's monthlong hunger strike to protest the administration's interdiction policy and from members of Congress who are protesting in front of the White House. Last week the administration resurrected options for defusing the refugee problem it previously had rejected as inadequate or impractical, including the creation of a big screening center for Haitian refugees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba and setting up similar centers aboard U.S. vessels on the high seas.
Pressure. But with Haiti's rulers still thumbing their noses at Clinton and his foreign policy under fire from Bosnia to Somalia to China, the president is under growing pressure to do something decisive, somewhere. Clinton's threats of military action, however, are backing him into a corner. If the tighter U.N. sanctions fail to dislodge Haiti's men
