[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 86 (Thursday, June 30, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 30, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
               THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO THE STORY IN HAITI

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I want to make just a few comments 
because I know how deeply the gentleman cares about Haiti and that 
tragedy, and I feel also very deeply about Haiti and the tragedy.
  But I think part of the problem is no one is quite sure what to do. 
It is easy to throw rocks and it is easy to scream at the 
administration, but I have not seen anybody here put a proposal on the 
table. I kind of think, before we attack, we should have some proposals 
to propose.
  The gentleman was saying how terrible it was that we had stopped the 
relief flights going into Haiti because many were now starving. Well, I 
certainly am not for people starving anywhere. I agree with that.
  But on the other hand, the gentleman also conceded that one of the 
reasons we stopped the relief flights was that the military was taking 
all the food and selling it on the black market.
  Now, I think had we not stopped the relief flights, then people would 
have been attacking us because we were sending food into the military 
to sustain itself and the people who were starving would still be 
starving. Whether we sent in the relief food or not, the relief would 
have really been for the people in power more than for the people that 
we are really concerned about.

                              {time}  1050

  There has been great criticism about the number of Haitians getting 
on boats and coming here, and the great tragedy of that Nation is there 
has been a lot of people coming here for a very long time because it 
has not been able to build a viable economy, and part of it has been 
because it has had such miserable leadership at home, and many people 
felt they took power to line their own pockets rather than to help 
people. All of that we understand, and they are trying very hard to 
process the ones who are truly, truly political refugees suffering all 
sorts of torment and discrimination at home because of their politics 
and those who were just coming as economic refugees, and, as my 
colleagues know, they can condemn the United States for enforcing that 
law, but, if we just said every economic refugee in the world can come 
in here, I am not sure when we run out of space.
  So, again they have tried to put a humanitarian policy in to prevent 
those who are being beaten, and battered, and tormented to come in, but 
those who were just coming because life would be better, we would like 
to do that, we would like to do that for everybody, but we cannot do 
that because at some point we run out of room, and we have got to worry 
about lives of Americans who are here.
  So, Mr. Speaker, we hear all of these tough choices, and it is so 
very easy to criticize, and it is so very painful to look at the 
pictures. But then my question is:
  What do people want us to do? Is it the policy of the gentleman who 
was here to invade Haiti?
  I do not think Americans are prepared to do that. We tried that once, 
too, in this century, and, before we quickly sign up for that program, 
I think we better look at the results of the other time we tried it, 
and the results were not very positive, to be perfectly honest. We were 
there quite some time, it cost a lot of money, and really nothing got 
better in Haiti.
  So, again all I want to say is I would like to see a bipartisan 
solution to this. I would like to see an American solution to this. I 
would like to see something we can all be proud of, or we never saw 
suffering children, or we never saw people trying to flee again, and we 
knew everything was solved in Haiti in a painless, bloodless way. I 
just do not know what that is, and I hope, if there is anyone in 
America who has an idea of what that is, they would come forward, 
because I think every American would like to see the same thing, but I 
do not think we get anywhere by attacking the administration, or 
attacking William Gray, who is the man trying to make some sense out of 
all of this, or saying that some people just do not care about the 
starvation. I think all of us care, and we care very deeply about the 
starvation and torment people are in. We just feel a little bankrupt in 
trying to figure out what to do.
  We ran in to Somalia feeling very badly about all of that, and we 
found that it was a lot more complex than we thought, and we had gone 
into Haiti before, and we found that was more complex than we thought. 
So, let us try to come together and reason together to find a way 
rather than shout at each other, and I think we will get a lot further.

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