[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 62 (Wednesday, May 18, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 18, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
               THE PRESIDENT'S MISGUIDED POLICY ON HAITI

  (Mr. LEWIS of Florida asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include 
extraneous matter.)
  Mr. LEWIS of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I want to bring to my colleagues' 
attention one more casualty of the President's misguided policy on 
Haiti--humanitarian missions from the United States.
  A group from West Palm Beach Florida--which has been delivering 
humanitarian supplies to Haiti nonstop for 14 years is now grounded--
caught in a bureaucratic maze.
  When my office calls the Treasury Department--they say call the State 
Department--who says call the United Nations. Our multilateral efforts 
have resulted in a multibureaucratic nightmare.
  Meanwhile the poorest Haitians are going without.
  Worse--scheduled airline flights can still come and go from Haiti--so 
the relatives of the military leaders can go shopping--but a relief 
plane cannot enter to bring food and supplies.
  This week's U.S. News has a great article--which I am submitting for 
the record--about how this administration makes policy without 
understanding--or caring about--the real implications.
  This is embarrassing when it is a policy mistake.
  It is tragic--and inexcusable--when it results in some of the poorest 
people in the world going without food and medical supplies.
  It is time to quit splitting hairs--and to get our priorities 
straight. If we want to help the people of Haiti--our chance is sitting 
on a runway in Florida now.
  It is outrageous.
  Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record an article by Brian Duffy in 
the May 23, 1994, U.S. News & World Report:

   A Question of Options--How the Clinton Administration Has Painted 
                     Itself Into a Corner on Haiti

       Haiti is half an island, today something less than a whole 
     country, 6\1/2\ million souls inhabiting a downward spiral of 
     economic misery and political mayhem. Born of a slave revolt 
     190 years ago, the Caribbean nation has seen its unique 
     promise squandered by a nearly unbroken succession of brutal, 
     corrupt and downright bizarre political leaders. For 
     Americans, the place has long been a conundrum. Occupied by 
     U.S. troops early in this century, blessed later by millions 
     of dollars in American aid, Haiti has descended unswervingly 
     into the current maelstrom, with Washington now actively 
     considering the use of military force as a United Nations 
     deadline ticks down before even tougher economic sanctions 
     are imposed. Of no strategic importance, Haiti has somehow 
     managed to confound every recent American president but 
     Gerald Ford, who served so briefly he did not have to deal 
     with it.
       Now it is Bill Clinton's turn. Before he entered the oval 
     Office, Clinton, in discussing Haiti, conjured the sound of 
     trumpet blasts. ``My administration will stand up for 
     democracy,'' Clinton said, denouncing George Bush's ``cruel'' 
     policy of forcibly repatriating Haitian refugees. As for the 
     military junta that forced out Haiti's only elected leader, 
     the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Clinton rejected its claim 
     to leadership, saying he would work to ``buttress democratic 
     forces in Haiti . . . and throughout the Western 
     hemisphere.''
       Things have not worked out that way. An examination of 
     Clinton administration's posture toward Haiti shows policy 
     remarkable at once for the ambition of its goals--and the 
     timidity of its actions. As with other areas of foreign 
     policy, Clinton's episodic attention troubles even some 
     aides. ``It's reacting to domestic politics,'' says a State 
     Department official. ``Now we are all trying to figure out 
     how to make it work.''
       The White House vigorously defends its efforts in Haiti--
     and in other foreign arenas where its policies have come 
     under fire. ``We came in here inheriting three very tough 
     problems--Haiti, Somalia and Bosnia,'' says an administration 
     official. ``They all deal with internal collapses--unlike 
     classic security issues; the rules are harder to define. In 
     Haiti, the most important thing is that we refused to give 
     up.''
       A review of the administration's Haiti policy highlights a 
     number of problems. U.S. News reporters reviewed confidential 
     government cables and memorandums and interviewed more than 
     30 administration officials, diplomats and military and 
     intelligence officers, as well as aides and advisers to 
     President Aristide. The review identifies a handful of 
     critical decisions marred by miscommunication and logistical 
     snafus. Principal findings:
       A series of late-night phone calls between a presidential 
     adviser and an Aristide aide weakened a key deal to forcibly 
     remove Haiti's military leader from power.
       The decision to withdraw a U.S. Navy ship from Port-au-
     Prince, the capital of Haiti, was made without the knowledge 
     of U.S. diplomats, who later cabled Washington saying the 
     ship could have docked if given one more day.
       A State Department cable and intelligence intercepts have 
     questioned the heart of the Clinton administration's policy--
     Aristide's democratic bona fides.
       Although Clinton publicly promised to restore Aristide to 
     office, administration officials were troubled by intercepts 
     of phone calls from Aristide to his supporters viewing 
     vengeance on his opponents after he returned to power.
       While the administration's policy was built on the idea of 
     pressuring Haiti's military rulers to step aside, the 
     CIA consistently warned that the military leader, Lt. Gen. 
     Raoul Cedras, and his cronies could be removed only by 
     force.
       Even before being sworn in as president, Bill Clinton made 
     the first foreign-policy decision of his administration, and 
     it was on Haiti. Clinton's campaign pronouncements about 
     reversing the Bush administration's repatriation policy on 
     Haitian refugees had spawned an orgy of boat building in 
     Haiti's impoverished coastal towns. A wave of Haitian 
     refugees in Florida would be a disaster. Clinton made the 
     announcement: The Bush repatriation policy would remain in 
     effect. ``Once the alternatives were explained to him,'' says 
     Warren Zimmermann, then director of the State Department's 
     Bureau for Refugee Programs, ``it was a decision that made 
     itself.'' What it wasn't, however, was a particularly 
     auspicious beginning.
       Father Aristide was not a congenial partner for Washington. 
     After the Haitian military arranged Aristide's ouster in 
     September 1991, a military adviser raided his medicine 
     cabinet in the presidential quarters and provided a long list 
     of its contents to the CIA. The new Haitian president, the 
     CIA was told, was taking lithium and other drugs for 
     treatment of mental depression. A letter, allegedly from a 
     Haitian neurosurgeon, described Aristide as a ``psychotic 
     manic depressive'' and referred to treatment Aristide had 
     undergone in Canadian hospitals a decade earlier. Many 
     details about the physicians's report and the drugs--none of 
     the vials had Aristide's name on them--were questioned. 
     Today, Aristide's opponents still use the allegations against 
     him and some analysts still question Aristide's reliability. 
     ``He can drive you crazy,'' says a State Department official 
     who has worked closely with Aristide. ``But that doesn't mean 
     he is crazy.''
       Other evidence confirmed, however, that Aristide would be, 
     at best, a difficult partner for the Clinton administration. 
     In a speech days before he was toppled, as his supporters 
     were being killed, Aristide described the practice of 
     necklacing--placing burning tires around the necks of his 
     opponents--as a ``beautiful instrument.'' According to 
     several informed sources, U.S. intelligence agencies also 
     would intercept phone calls from Aristide in the United 
     States pledging violent retribution against his opponents. 
     Much has been made of the CIA's unflattering psychological 
     profile of Aristide, but the more troubling parts of the 
     intelligence community's reporting have to do with the 
     instability that could ensure in Haiti if Aristide were 
     returned.
       President Clinton had been briefed thoroughly on these and 
     other aspects of the Haiti situation before his first meeting 
     with Aristide in the White House on March 16, 1993. Clinton 
     was committed, he said, to ``stronger measures'' to restore 
     Aristide to power. ``I want to make it clear in the strongest 
     possible terms,'' Clinton said, ``that we will not now or 
     ever support the continuation of an illegal government in 
     Haiti.''


                        the fly in the ointment

       The next step seemed pretty straightforward. Since the fly 
     in the Haitian ointment was the military, the thing to do was 
     remove it. Working closely with Lawrence Pezzullo, then 
     Clinton's special envoy to Haiti, a Pentagon team lead by a 
     charismatic Marine lieutenant general named Jack Sheehan, who 
     first set foot in Haiti in 1964 and knew it well, would take 
     on the job of remaking Haiti's military. Their plan called 
     for a United Nations team to transform Haiti's 7,000-man 
     military into a smaller force that would concentrate on 
     rebuilding Haiti's shattered infrastructure and patrolling 
     its long border with the Dominican Republic on the island of 
     Hispaniola. Canadian authorities would take the lead in 
     building a new civilian Haitian police force.
       Things began lurching ahead. The ``transformation'' plan 
     for the Haitian military was approved by then-Secretary of 
     Defense Les Aspin. President Clinton announced tougher 
     sanctions against the Haitian military in June 1993. Soon, a 
     deal seemed in prospect. Aristide had two principal demands. 
     Unlike the Clinton administration, which had adopted its 
     predecessor's gradualist approach on tightening economic 
     sanctions. Aristide wanted the toughest sanctions possible 
     imposed--but for only a short time. More important, 
     Aristide was convinced that General Cedras and his 
     colleagues would never relinquish power unless they were 
     forced to do so. Oddly enough, the CIA's Haiti analysts 
     were predicting the same thing.
       Clinton understood the problem, but his aides believed the 
     two sides had to negotiate. Anthony Lake, Clinton's national 
     security adviser, was the godfather of the scheme. Larry 
     Pezzullo was assigned the job of making it happen. The result 
     was an accord reached between Aristide and Cedras. The two 
     never met face to face, but the deal was hatched in a 
     comfortable building on Governors Island in New York Harbor. 
     The date was July 2. By this time, the United Nations had 
     imposed an embargo on shipments of oil and arms to Haiti. The 
     financial assets of Cedras and his aides had been frozen in 
     accounts overseas.


                              deal breaker

       Cedras, presumably, had incentive to talk. Aristide, for 
     his part, demanded that Cedras, other members of his high 
     command and Col. Joseph Michel Francois, the head of Haiti's 
     repressive police force, be required to resign their posts as 
     a condition of any deal. Aristide had already agreed, 
     reluctantly, to a delay of four months. At 3 a.m. on July 3, 
     the terms of the deal seemed solid. Michael Barnes was a 
     former congressman whose law firm was representing Aristide's 
     government-in-exile. He got a call in his hotel room from 
     Tony Lake. Cedras & Co. would leave. Four hours later, 
     Barnes's phone rang again. This time it was a State 
     Department official named Charles Redman. Somehow the terms 
     of the deal had changed. Only Cedras would be required to 
     leave the Army. His aides could assume Army assignments 
     outside the high command. Barnes phoned Lake in a fury: 
     ``This is a deal breaker,'' he shouted.
       But it wasn't. Twelve hours later, after U.N. guarantees 
     that would force Cedras's aides to either retire or assume 
     military posts outside of Haiti, Aristide relented. At the 
     United Nations Plaza Hotel late in the morning of July 3, 
     Aristide was confronted with the tearful entreaties of 
     friends and supporters; still he held firm. With a grim 
     smile, he affixed his signature to the Governors Island 
     accord. ``I signed it,'' Haiti's exiled president said. ``I 
     will keep my word.''
       One of the stranger things about the Governors Island 
     agreement was that both Cedras and Aristide, having rejected 
     the earlier plan for the ``transformation'' program for 
     Haiti's military, were demanding it now: Details of the plan 
     were specified in Paragraph 5 of the accord. At the Pentagon, 
     General Sheehan prepared to make things happen with the 
     Haitian military. Simultaneously, Dante Caputo, the United 
     Nations special negotiator for Haiti, moved to Port-au-Prince 
     to begin laying the groundwork for both the police and 
     military missions. Within a month of the signing of the 
     Governors Island accord, the first American service personnel 
     began showing up in Haiti to survey the job at hand. The 
     personnel were dispatched from the Atlantic Command in 
     Norfolk, Va. Since the ``transformed'' Haitian Army was to be 
     largely an engineering force, many of the earliest Pentagon 
     personnel dispatched temporarily to Haiti were Seabees, 
     specialists from the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps. Things were 
     beginning to accelerate.
       But trouble was also brewing. For one thing, many of the 
     newly arrived military personnel were shocked by life in 
     Haiti. The place is brutally poor, and even before the ouster 
     of Aristide, political violence had become something of a 
     way of life. By early September, although unarmed human 
     rights monitors roamed the country without serious 
     incident, many of the military specialists from the 
     Atlantic Command were phoning back to Norfolk with horror 
     stories: There was gunfire every night, and bloodied 
     corpses were turning up daily in the streets. Within 
     weeks, the phone calls from Port-au-Prince to Norfolk 
     constituted a separate but very real intelligence network. 
     Coincidentally, the reports to Norfolk jibed with 
     reporting by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency 
     about increasing violence in Haiti. The violence was among 
     Haitians, however; foreign aid workers and diplomats were 
     seldom even bothered.
       Within the Pentagon, there were growing concerns. Adm. 
     David Jeremiah, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
     Staff, would soon become chairman, following Gen. Colin 
     Powell's retirement. Jeremiah was worried about two things. 
     One was the increasing violence in Haiti and growing reports 
     that Cedras might renege on the Governors Island deal. The 
     second concern was more prosaic but also more real. The USS 
     Harlan County was due to depart for Port-au-Prince any day 
     with 600 trainers and engineers on board, but there were just 
     a fraction of the anticipated 500 Canadian police trainers on 
     the ground in Haiti. ``Our force protection would be 
     underpinned by the police,'' says a senior Pentagon official. 
     ``The groundwork wasn't prepared.''
       Jeremiah expressed these concerns to Secretary Aspin, who 
     was in Norfolk on October 1 to speak to the newly reorganized 
     Atlantic Command. Aspin asked the commanding admiral. Paul 
     David Miller, about the situation in Haiti. Miller was not 
     encouraging. The next day, Jeremiah, at a White House 
     meeting, outlined conditions for the Haiti mission. The day 
     after that, halfway around the world in Somalia, 18 U.S. Army 
     Rangers lost their lives in a vicious firefight. In 
     Washington, the jitters over Haiti turned to shakes. Some 
     Pentagon officials say the nervousness was justified by the 
     news coming out of Haiti. Lawrence Pezzullo, the 
     administration's diplomatic point man, was skeptical. ``All 
     of a sudden,'' Pezzullo said, ``Haiti became Somalia.''
       Smaller issues intervened. The Harlan County was supposed 
     to arrive in Port-au-Prince on October 11. Terms of the 
     transition plan called for Pentagon personnel to carry side 
     arms into Haiti as protection. Somehow, in translating from 
     English to French to Creole, ``side arms'' turned out as 
     ``pistols.'' There was one problem with that: Seabees and 
     others among the 600 people on the Harlan County didn't carry 
     pistols; their personal side arms were M-16 assault rifles. 
     With the Harlan County steaming toward Port-au-Prince, 
     Pezzullo hurried to inform Robert Malval, Aristide's 
     increasingly unhappy prime minister. Reluctantly, Malval 
     agreed to the last-minute change; Cedras and the military 
     were not to be informed. This might have been fine except for 
     one unfortunate gaffe. On a Sunday morning television talk 
     show, a day before the Harlan County would steam into Port-
     au-Prince harbor, Secretary Aspin was being grilled about the 
     tragedy in Somalia when the questioning turned to Haiti. 
     Would the 600 Pentagon trainers and engineers be unarmed. 
     ABC's Sam Donaldson asked Aspin. Not at all, Aspin replied. 
     ``They'll have M-16s.'' Within an hour, the news had 
     ricocheted around Port-au-Prince. The response from Cedras 
     was predictable: double-cross. Says Pezzullo: ``That blew it 
     for us nicely.''
       The wind was calm and the skies fair when the Harlan County 
     arrived at the lip of the Port-au-Prince harbor shortly 
     after noon on October 11. Several dozen unarmed thugs were 
     waiting at the dock; earlier that morning, they had 
     jostled an embassy car carrying the charge d'affaires, 
     Vicki Huddleston. To Huddleston, Pezzullo and Dante 
     Caputo, the U.N. envoy waiting for the ship, the 
     demonstration was annoying--no more. Cedras, reached by 
     phone, told Huddleston he knew nothing of the little 
     demonstration. An impasse ensued. Later, on the water, two 
     tiny Haitian patrol boats menaced the Harlan County, and 
     the ship's captain ordered the boats tracked with a radar-
     fitted Gatling gun. The patrol boats departed. In Port-au-
     Prince early that evening, the Harlan County cast a tall 
     silhouette against the darkening tropical sky.
       In Washington, the secure phone lines from the White House 
     purred quietly. Details remain unclear, but Anthony Lake 
     spoke with Les Aspin, and the president was briefed: The 
     Harlan County would be ordered back to Norfolk. The decision 
     was clearly one with which several administration officials 
     felt uncomfortable. At a meeting the next morning in the 
     White House Situation Room, Pezzullo called the demonstration 
     on the dock in Port-au-Prince ``a bit of theater, no 
     more.'' CIA Director R. James Woolsey disagreed, and 
     Pezzullo rose to try and refute the argument. Lake cut him 
     off: ``The decision has been made, Larry.'' The Harlen 
     County weighed anchor soon after. Aristide heard about it 
     still later--on CNN.
       The decision, even many administration officials now 
     concede, was a fiasco. A State Department cable reports that 
     the demonstrators on the Haiti docks ``never had any 
     expectation that they would in fact be successful in 
     prompting the departure of the vessel.'' A study of the 
     incident by the U.S. Army War College delivers a more 
     scathing indictment. ``The decision to withdraw the ship from 
     Haitian waters was taken without consultation with or even 
     notification of the United Nations, President Aristide or 
     Prime Minister Malval. It left the impression that the United 
     States had cut and run . . . frightened away by a few unruly 
     thugs.'' From the Harlan County incident in October until 
     March of this year, Washington's Haiti policy would be marred 
     by similar dramatic episodes, each side shooting down new 
     initiatives to get them back together. ``After Harlan 
     County,'' Pezzullo sighs, ``it was like trying to put Humpty 
     Dumpty together again.''


                               Dithering

       The Harlan County episode may be the most embarrassing in 
     the Clinton administration's handling of the Haiti account, 
     but it is not the most troubling. The yearlong display of 
     dithering and direction changing has come with a price, a 
     high one. Today, having declared his own Haiti policy a 
     failure and ordered his aides to conduct a full-blown review, 
     President Clinton increasingly finds himself confronting two 
     unpalatable choices: dumping Aristide or intervening with 
     force. A confidential 11-page State Department cable reflects 
     the ambivalence within the administration about Aristide: 
     ``If the U.S. and the U.N. choose to remain engaged with 
     Aristide, they must also remain engaged in human rights 
     monitoring and institution building in Haiti, otherwise 
     Aristide will continue to use lawlessness in Haiti to force 
     his own agenda of intervention.'' Aristide disputes the 
     cable's conclusions--and worries that even if Clinton is 
     serious about returning him to Haiti, many of his key aides 
     don't support the tough measures that may be necessary to 
     make it happen.
       That agenda, which could well result now in the deployment 
     of American troops in a unilateral or multilateral invasion 
     of Haiti, may satisfy Clinton's growing number of critics on 
     Capitol Hill. Indeed, Clinton's decision this month to begin 
     processing Haitian refugees aboard ships in the Caribbean 
     instead of sending them back to Haiti immediately had the 
     effect of ending a popular activist's hunger strike against 
     the administration's Haiti policy.
       But it is hardly a solution. Nor is the option of increased 
     sanctions. The U.N. deadline for Cedras and his aides to 
     leave Haiti will expire later this month, when the tighter 
     economic sanctions will take effect. No one expects them to 
     work; but they could well result in a new wave of Haitians 
     taking to the high seas in boats, which would only compound 
     the administration's problems. So barring the unexpected 
     departure of Cedras and his colleagues, the only option left 
     to President Clinton may be the one he relishes least--the 
     use of military force.

                          ____________________