[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 89 (Tuesday, July 12, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 12, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]


                              {time}  2000
 
                           THE HAITIAN CRISIS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Georgia). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 11, 1994, and June 10, 1994, the Chair 
recognizes the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the Haitian crisis is getting more national 
and world attention each day. The recent expulsion of the OAS and 
United Nations observers has led the whole world to understand that the 
military thugs who are in charge of Haiti will honor no agreement. This 
is the last vestige of the Governors Island Agreement, the placement of 
OAS and United Nations observers.
  With this, the military thugs are saying that they want no part of 
any kind of peacefully negotiated settlement.

                              {time}  2010

  At the same time the thugs in Haiti have stepped up their repression 
and their terror and thumbed their nose at the world, there is a 
problem of the Haitian refugees. The search for safe havens for 
Haitians among the other countries of the Western Hemisphere has also 
gotten a lot of attention. There is concern about a policy of searching 
for safe havens when previously we have always allowed into this 
country those persons who were seeking a haven from political 
persecution.
  Why do we make a double standard for the Haitians? On the one hand, 
and a principle I deplore, the fact that the United States has created 
a double standard for the Haitians. On the other hand, Mr. Speaker, I 
think it is also important that the other nations of the Western 
Hemisphere step forward to loan some help, provide some assistance, to 
Haiti in a time of great need.
  The ordinary Haitian people who are being held hostage, they are 
being held hostage by a United States-trained army, a United States-
equipped army, and an army that is led by people who are on the United 
States CIA payroll until very recently. They are being held hostage, 
and, when people talk of an invasion, they should not talk of an 
invasion and use the word in the usual sense.

  We are not talking about the need for an invasion. There may be a 
need, and there is probably a need, for a rescue of hostages. A nation 
of more than 6 million people can be held hostage by an army of 7,000 
if they have all the guns across the island.
  We have the same world. A handful of criminal military leaders can 
thwart democracy, thumb their nose at democracy, and hold their nation 
hostage.
  In Nigeria we see the military thugs there are holding their nation 
hostage after an election where Mr. Abiola, the President-elect, won by 
a landslide. They refuse to acknowledge and to recognize the election. 
So, Mr. Abiola finds himself thrown in jail, and they may destroy him, 
they may murder him, any day now. The military refuses to honor the 
wishes of the millions of people who live in Nigeria.
  So it is with Haiti. The military refuses to honor the wishes of 70 
percent of the people who voted for Jean-Bertrand Aristide for 
President, and they are holding the country hostage. The masses are 
being held hostage.
  Let us all hope that these escalating events will result in a 
positive conclusion at some time soon, within the next 30 days maybe. 
Let us hope that there will be a return to democracy and that Aristide 
will be restored as the rightfully elected President of Haiti. Let us 
hope that all of this will take place and it will happen soon. If it 
does not happen soon, the situation, I am afraid, will unravel, and we 
will be faced with an untenable situation, and certainly the United 
States, as the moral leader of the free world, as the moral leader of 
the world now, as the only remaining superpower, will be in a position 
where it will not be able to hold up its head among the nations of the 
world and call itself a leader.
  Haiti policy has two distinct components. The political crisis caused 
by a criminal military takeover of the democratically elected 
Government is the first component of the crisis. That is the serious 
matter that can be taken care of only by the imposition of sanctions, 
which have been imposed, and possibly, probably, by the rescue effort, 
of a hostage rescue effort by the United Nations or by the United 
States alone, if necessary. The political crisis is one component.
  The other component is the refugee crisis. That is the second 
component of the Haitian problem. The second component, the refugee 
crisis, was set in motion by exactly the same cause as the other 
component. The criminal military takeover of a democratically elected 
government set in motion a refugee crisis.
  It is a little known fact in some certain circles that do not like to 
talk about it, but during the 7 months that Jean-Bertrand Aristide 
served as the president of Haiti, Mr. Speaker, the number of people who 
were trying to leave Haiti and get into the United States went down to 
zero. Nobody was trying to get out, nobody was risking their lives on 
the high seas, in order to escape Haiti.
  Did Jean-Bertrand Aristide have some kind of magic? Did he have a 
foreign aid program coming from the United Nations, or the United 
States, or the World Bank? No. Did anything change materially and 
economically after Aristide was elected President? No.
  The one thing that the Haitian people saw in Jean-Bertrand Aristide 
was the hope of building a nation for the first time. They hoped that 
they would have law and order. They hoped that they would have 
civility, fair play. They hoped that when taxes were collected they 
would not go into the pockets of the military. They hoped that there 
would be some kind of standards for the way workers were treated. They 
hoped that electrification of the country could take place because the 
profits of the electrical company are owned by the State, would not be 
skimmed off by the military, or they would not allow the elite 
businessmen not to pay their bills, and give no profits to the 
electrification company, and allow it to be able to expand so all 
Haitians could have simple electricity, basic things like a minimum 
wage, maybe 50 cents a day. A minimum wage would be established, basics 
like that which they do not have, basic things like the collection of 
taxes, the Government collects taxes from those who are able to pay 
taxes. But the rich in Haiti have never had to pay taxes.
  Is it any wonder they have not been able to establish any decent kind 
of government? Any decent roads? Any decent infrastructure? The rich 
have never had to pay taxes, and they are the ones that have the money 
to pay taxes.
  So, those steps taken by the infant Aristide government led the 
Haitians to believe that there was some hope. They stayed home. They 
stayed home, and they hoped to rebuild a nation.
  A number of things began to take place in the countryside, in the 
city. People began to try to establish their own institutions and to 
begin to create an economy that would support the Haitian people. But 
with the collapse of the Government, with the overthrow of the 
Government, probably with the help of the United States CIA, since the 
men who led the coup, the military coup, overthrew Aristide, were on 
the payroll of the CIA at that time. This has been acknowledged by the 
CIA. It is a fact that Mr. Cedras and Mr. Francois, some of those same 
people were leaders in the coup, were informants for the CIA, on the 
payroll of the CIA, at the time of the coup.
  The two problems, the refugee problem and the restoration of 
democracy, the solving of the political problem, are inextricably 
interwoven. Both have the same solution. You want to solve the refugee 
problem, which American taxpayers must understand they are paying a 
considerable amount of money each day to deal with the refugee problem 
in this unique way we are handling it. It would cost less if we handle 
it in the same way we dealt with the refugee problem of the Cubans, our 
refugee problem of the Soviet emigres.
  Long ago, when--not too long ago, but most people have forgotten, 
when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, we not only took large numbers 
of Hungarians into the United States, we sent the planes to Europe to 
pick them up and to bring them here. So, you know it costs less to 
handle the problem the usual way. They came. They were given temporary 
asylum. They found people who would take them in. Institutions took 
them in, and they were settled.
  We have settled in this country more than 500,000 Cubans. More than 
500,000 Cubans have been settled in this country in this way. Why are 
we panicking in the face of 10, 15, 20,000 Haitians when we have been 
able to settle a half a million Cubans in a usual, standard way? They 
are given temporary asylum. They are assisted by institutions which are 
usually private, nonprofit institutions. They get resettled in some 
way, and they take their turn in having their cases heard, and later on 
they are given green cards, they are allowed to blend into the society, 
or, if they are rejected for some reasons, they will have to leave.

                              {time}  2020

  Why not handle the Haitian problem the same way? There are a number 
of reasons. I will not go into them at this point, but at the heart of 
it has to be a kind of double standard that can only be attributed to 
racism. The Haitians happen to be black. The Haitians are black. There 
are certain parts of the country where they gravitate toward naturally 
and those areas are very hostile, the administration has allowed itself 
to be taken in and to turn its back on principle as a result of this 
effort. The administration will have to show the backbone to implement 
the standard immigration policy that we have always had and that would 
be one solution.
  The other solution, of course, is a more costly one, it is being 
pursued. We are going to pay for places in other countries. Antigua has 
agreed to take some, Dominica has agreed to take some. We have big 
ships moored out there to process people. It is a complicated process. 
It would be far more easier if we did it the right way, but it is 
better to take this step of dispersing them into safe havens across the 
hemisphere than to return them to Haiti. The cruelest, the most 
inhumane policy, of course, was the policy of picking them up on the 
high seas and returning them to Haiti. As chairman of the Black Caucus 
task force, I have watched the process for the last 2 years of what is 
going on in Haiti and the effort to reach some kind of positive 
conclusion. Everybody desires a peaceful conclusion. We would all like 
to see a negotiated conclusion. We would all like to see Haiti return 
to its status as a democracy, President Aristide restored as the 
President. We would all like to see it done peacefully. We all rejoiced 
when Yassar Arafat and the former chief of staff and now President 
Rabin shook hands at the White House and we had the beginning of a 
peaceful process to restore some kind of normalcy between Israel and 
the palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. Everybody was proud of that 
moment. Everybody was proud of the fact and rejoiced and appreciated 
the fact that the Soviet Union in its process of collapsing internally 
did not try to save itself, that Mikhail Gorbachev had the wisdom and 
the fortitude and the internal strength not to try to save himself by 
starting a war. He could have started a nuclear war and tried to save 
his political life, but he did not, so we all rejoiced at the peaceful 
way in which the Soviet Union became a noncompetitor, a nonbelligerent 
on the face of the Earth. We all appreciate that very much. We would 
like to see the little nation of Haiti return to normalcy and have 
democratic leadership without the kind of military action, any kind of 
use of force. But what is the history? The history is that the 
criminals who took over have offered the nation absolutely nothing. 
They do not have a philosophy. They are not fascists who have an 
ideology. They do not even collect the garbage. They do not do anything 
in terms of carrying out the functions of a government. They have 
nothing to offer. They sit there and they drain off the meager revenue 
that is available in the country. Anything that comes into the ports, 
they go to one set of colonels and generals. Anything that comes in in 
terms of fees that are paid for the telephone company, the electric 
company, they go to another one. They have a flour factory that is 
Government-owned, and the proceeds of that go to another set of 
generals and colonels. The drug trade, the transshipment of drugs 
through Haiti goes to a number of different units, colonels and 
generals. It is all very lucrative to the men who sit on the top. They 
are enjoying themselves while the nation is being drained dry. The 
criminals have no desire to leave. They came to Governors Island, they 
pretended they were negotiating in good faith. At the first time that 
we imposed an oil embargo, it did catch them by surprise. In order to 
deal with that, they pretended they wanted to negotiate, they signed an 
agreement at Governors Island, President Aristide was very reluctant to 
sign the agreement at Governors Island but he was pressured by the U.S. 
Government, by the members of the United Nations, to go ahead and sign 
the agreement. The agreement allowed the military leaders to retire, it 
allowed them to go free without any trial for all of the terror that 
they had caused, thousands of people who had been killed, they would 
not have to face any kind of judgment. It was a very generous agreement 
for the illegal criminal military leaders. However, they immediately 
proceeded to ignore the agreement and step by step they let it be known 
that they would not honor it at all.

  The agreement had a timetable. The timetable required them to take 
certain steps leading up to October 30. By October, the military 
command, certainly the two top people at that time, General Cedras and 
Colonel Francois, were supposed to step down by October 15, and by 
October 30 Aristide was supposed to return. October 15 came, Cedras and 
Francois refused to step down. October 30 came. Of course Aristide 
could not return. They became more and more belligerent. Our Government 
waffled at a key point when we should have pressed forward and let it 
be know that we wanted the Governors Island Agreement because we were a 
part of that agreement. Governors Island is in New York State; 
Governors Island was set up by the U.S. Government. We were very much a 
party to the agreement. Instead of pressing forward and insisting that 
the agreement be honored, we waffled. We had leadership that was 
confused and confusing. We communicated a message to the military but 
we were not sincere about the return of democracy to Haiti.

  Now we are faced wtih a much more difficult situation. Newer and 
tougher sanctions have been ordered and we are all in favor of that. 
Some people have asked what is the Congressional Black Caucus policy 
nowadays on Haiti? As the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus 
task force on Haiti, I can state that there has been no change in the 
Congressional Black Caucus policy. There is no need to change our 
policy.
  In October of last year, 1993, shortly after the military decided 
that they would not honor the agreement, shortly after it was clear 
that the criminals were not going to behave like honorable men, we took 
a position. We called for the toughest possible sanctions, and we 
called for the option of the military intervention to be placed on the 
table at that time. We called for protective military intervention. 
Protective military intervention would mean that the Government of 
Haiti, the head of which sits here in Washington, would be returned to 
Haiti and all the other members of the government, the senators and the 
delegates, whether they were for Aristide or against Aristide, they 
would be protected, they would all be protected by a military force and 
anybody who chose to attack them, who chose to harm them in any way, 
would, of course, have to be repelled. So it would not be an invasion, 
it would be a protection.
  I still think that basic principle of returning the Government with 
military protection is a sound one. We still think that it ought to be 
on the table as an option and we think that the timetable that goes 
with the sanctions and the use of the military option ought to be now 
clearly stated.

  Sanctions have been finally as a result of pressures that have been 
brought by a number of people as a result of a great deal of support 
for democracy in Haiti and for President Aristide, we were finally able 
to get the White House and the State Department to see the wisdom of 
more aggressively pursuing a policy of sanctions and not just giving 
lip service to it. So we do have a policy of sanctions now being 
implemented more aggressively.
  The Congressional Black Caucus in March wrote the President a letter, 
and we introduced legislation calling for the most aggressive approach 
possible to the implementation of sanctions.
  We have a two-pronged policy, then. We are in favor of military 
intervention if necessary, but we put that on the back burner in March 
and called for a sincere effort to implement the sanctions, a sincere 
effort which would communicate a message, send a message to the 
military thugs who are holding the nation hostage that the United 
States is really serious. The sanctions have gone forward seriously for 
the first time, but unfortunately because of the long delay, obviously 
the military, they have stored enough oil, they have stored enough 
foodstuffs for themselves, they have been able to take care of their 
needs in ways that allowed them to sit this one out.

                              {time}  2030

  They can survive while the great majority of the people suffer. 
Millions suffer, while the handful of army officers obviously are well 
taken care of. In fact, they have so much gasoline, that the price of 
gasoline since the tightened embargo and the intensified sanctions, the 
cost of gasoline has gone down, not up. So certainly something is 
radically wrong.
  Our slowness in implementing the policy of sanctions gave them 
warning. They have built storehouses for themselves. They have escaped 
other parts of the sanctions which we were slow in implementing, 
freezing the assets of the military, freezing the assets of the rich 
elite that financed the coup. We talked about it for too long before we 
finally decided to do it. Probably all of those people who had assets 
and could move them out of the United States banks have already done 
that. The military people have already made provisions for the movement 
of any assets they had in this country, and it is not as effective as 
it would have been if we had done it before.
  Nevertheless, I am all in favor of the intensified sanctions 
remaining on, going forward, communicating a message. I am all in favor 
of sending a message to the military that every effort to solve this 
problem peacefully is still possible, is still underway, the door is 
still open. I think the President is doing that. I think the special 
envoy of the President, Mr. Gray, is communicating that very well.
  We should support the effort to move forward in a sustained and firm 
way as rapidly as possible. Those people who say that under no 
circumstances should there be a military invasion or intervention or a 
hostage rescue team to take the country back from the military thugs, 
those people who stand on some kind of abstract principle are not in 
touch with reality.
  I think Albert Einstein was as much of a pacifist as any person on 
the face of the Earth. When he viewed the calamity caused by Nazi 
Germany and the kind of force that they were up against with the 
Gestapo and storm troopers and the whole philosophy, amoral philosophy, 
of the Nazi regime, Einstein remarked that in principle the pacifists 
are right; in principle the pacifists will finally win out in the 
world. The problem is, when you are faced with a regime like Hitler's 
regime, all the pacifists would be dead before victory came.
  We are faced with a similar situation in Haiti. The principles of 
peaceful negotiation, the principles of trying to resolve conflict 
peacefully, all that is very important and should be held in place. I 
am a follower of Martin Luther King. I am a follower of Gandhi, of 
Nelson Mandela. We have done great things through peaceful 
negotiations.
  I had the pleasure of going to South Africa to see the inauguration 
of Nelson Mandela and the miracle of a transformation of a society 
peacefully. Yes, there had been some bloodshed in the past, but the 
real resolution of the problem in South Africa, the transfer of power 
from the small elite minority to the 36 million strong majority, took 
place without any massive bloodshed.
  So we are still in favor of a peaceful transition. We are all in 
favor of every effort being taken in Haiti to accomplish this. But if 
you are faced with criminals and thugs, there is no negotiation 
possible. People used to try to ridicule Martin Luther King and the 
civil rights adherence of non-violence, make fun of them, by saying 
what would you do if a burglar came into your house and he was about--
if you caught a burglar in your house about to attack you and your 
children and your wife, what would you do? How would you approach the 
situation with non-violence?

  Of course, all of us, Martin Luther King and everybody else, used to 
refuse to give any dignity to that kind of question. It is ridiculous 
to ask that kind of question. If you are confronted with criminals and 
your family is in danger, you, of course, do everything possible to 
defend your family and stop the criminals. Criminals are not the kind 
of people you negotiate with. Criminals are not the time to use non-
violence.
  This is what we are faced with in Haiti. We are faced with criminals, 
and the criminals have caused a great deal of harm. A great number, 
masses of people have suffered, and continue to suffer, because of this 
handful of criminal leaders.
  What is the new world order going to do across the world as these 
criminals who have the guns hold their nations hostage, as they thumb 
their noses at democracy? What are we going to do in the face of a 
handful of people being able to cause so much misery, as they are in 
Nigeria right now; as they are in the former Yugoslavia right now; as 
they are in Haiti. A handful of criminals, a handful of people can make 
the world sit by quietly and watch masses suffer, can make the world 
seem paralyzed, unless we have some new way of dealing with it, unless 
we declare the Cedrases of the world and the Francoises of the world as 
war criminals.
  We have heard the term ``war criminal'' in connection with the 
leaders of Serbia. Very little has been done to follow through with 
that, to publicize it. One way out of this pattern of having military 
thugs, military criminals, take over whole nations, is to start a new 
kind of system, a new kind of approach, where the whole world declares 
the leadership as war criminals; where the whole world threatens them 
and says once this is all over, you are not going to be able to take 
your place as a normal human being among the people of your nation or 
any other nation. No nation will accept the war criminals who terrorize 
their own nation, who run rough-shod over democracy, who become killers 
and lead killer regimes.
  There ought to be a message communicated. We are faced in Haiti with 
that kind of killer regime. We are faced in Haiti with a nation led by 
war criminals, people who ought to be acclaimed as war criminals. We 
should proceed accordingly.
  We can find solutions to the problem of the refugee crisis by 
restoring democracy. Haitians want to go home. Haitians want to stay 
home. There are one million Haitians, Americans of Haitian descent, in 
America. There are Haitians who are not American citizens in America. 
There are Haitians all over the world. There are Haitians all over the 
world who want to go home to Haiti. If we restore democracy and return 
Aristide and give some hope to that nation, that will take place. We 
would have a return of the thousands of Haitians in diaspora, we would 
have all the Haitians in Haiti ready to stay home and rebuild their 
nation.
  There are people who say this has nothing to do with us. Why should 
we bother to bear the burden of what happens in Haiti? The problem is 
for the last 100 years the United States has been the dominant force in 
decision-making in Haiti. We have never left Haiti or any nation in 
this hemisphere alone.
  We have always assumed we had the right to take certain prerogatives 
as to what happened in this hemisphere. We never allowed outside powers 
to come into this hemisphere and form a partnership with any nation in 
this hemisphere without our approval, our participation. It has been an 
assumed situation. The Monroe Doctrine in one form or another has 
always existed.

  If Haiti were to try to form an alliance right now with some outside 
power, if the French or Canadians were to say to President Aristide, 
look, we will train a police force, an army for you to go back to Haiti 
with, I don't think the United States would allow the French and the 
Canadians jointly to train a force to go back to Haiti. They would not 
allow that kind of thing to take place in this hemisphere. They would 
want to have some kind of participation, some kind of role in that.
  Certainly if Castro out of Cuba would say I want to come to the aid 
of the situation and offer some kind of help, we would be alarmed and 
say hell no, we will not allow Cubans, not allow the nation of Cuba, to 
participate in any way, in any kind of solution to the Haitians crisis.
  We will not tolerate even in peacetime a nation like Taiwan or South 
Korea to come in and establish economic ties and use their built-up 
capital, their industrial might that they have accumulated, and now 
have nowhere for it to express itself, to rebuild Haiti. We would not 
allow South Korea and Taiwan to come in and rebuild Haiti and the 
United States have no participation or no concern in it. That would not 
be the case.
  We are not ready to take our hands off of Haiti totally. We have no 
right to say that we want to drop Haiti and have nothing to do with the 
solution to the problem, when we created the problem.
  I have just said most of the military leaders holding the nation 
hostage were trained in the United States. Fort Benning, Georgia, was 
the site of the training of many of the officers who are now holding 
the nation hostage. The supplies they have came from the United States. 
The equipment they have came from the United States.

                              {time}  2040

  No government in Haiti has ever existed without having a tacit 
approval and interference from the United States. The businesses in 
Haiti, most of them are owned by Americans. We always had policies, 
trade policies with Haiti which favored those businessmen. And we did 
not ask the Haitian people. We made arrangements with the government 
and with those businessmen. So we are inextricably interwoven within 
the fate of the Haitians at this point.
  Our honor demands that if we want to wash our hands of the problem, 
if we want to say Haiti is not worth one drop of American blood, as 
some high-ranking Republican has said, if we want to say that and we 
want to pursue that policy, we have no right to start it today. Let us 
return Aristide, let us restore democracy. And if we want hands off 
after that, it will be honorable to walk away. But let us undo the 
damage that we have done. Let us throw out the people who were trained 
by America at the American bases. Let us throw out the people who were 
in league with the CIA, and let us allow Haiti a chance to breath.
  If they want to bring in more of the French influences and French 
industrialists, if they want to bring in the Taiwanese, if they want to 
bring in the South Korean industrialists, let it be. But we have an 
obligation first to undo the damage that we have done.

  We should not turn our back on obvious history. From the time that 
the Haitian slaves overthrew Napoleon's army, they defeated Napoleon's 
army, they handed Napoleon a humiliating defeat in this hemisphere. 
They were the reason Napoleon got out of this hemisphere. They were the 
reason we moved to making the Louisiana Purchase, a large portion of 
our country that was annexed peacefully as a result of the Haitian 
slaves defeating Napoleon.
  Thomas Jefferson, of course, as great as he was, was probably the 
first President who saw in this new slave nation, former nation of 
former slaves, a danger. And in order for him to not be in a position 
of influencing slave uprisings, slave revolts in the United States, we 
began to interfere in their affairs as far back as Thomas Jefferson.
  We have always interfered in the affairs of Haiti, keeping them off 
balance, to serve whatever purpose we needed to serve in the United 
States. It is time we brought that to an end. The American people need 
to understand this.
  If you take polls, you ought to give people the background and the 
information as to what they are voting on. We did not have polls to 
decide whether or not we would enter World War II to fight Hitler. 
There was no poll. A vote was taken in Congress. Certainly, there was 
no poll taken. We do not decide matters of great import with polls. We 
do not decide, we do not go to the public to ask for polls.
  Let me just close with two examples of actions that never would have 
been taken if we had to depend on polls taken among ordinary people who 
did not know the backgrounds, did not understand the implications, have 
no concept of what it takes to be the leader of the world, the 
superpower of the world that has set a moral example.
  When Abraham Lincoln was considering the Emancipation Proclamation, 
the first step to free the slaves, he did not take a poll of the Nation 
because at that time polls of the public were not in vogue. There was 
no apparatus for taking polls on a timely basis. But he did take a poll 
of the Cabinet, and in the Cabinet, every member of the Cabinet of 
Abraham Lincoln was against the Emancipation Proclamation. Everybody 
said it was a bad idea. Everybody said, no, we should not do it.
  The lone vote, the only vote for the Emancipation Proclamation was 
the vote of Abraham Lincoln. And thank God, he went ahead and set in 
motion the process by which this Nation had freed itself from the 
burden of having slavery. Both whites and blacks were freed as a result 
of the first steps taken by Abraham Lincoln in issuing the Emancipation 
Proclamation.
  In a more modern example, a more recent example of the same kind of 
courage, when polls were available, was the position taken by Harry 
Truman at the time when the new State of Israel was under 
consideration. Recognition of the State of Israel was critical; 
recognition by the United States was critical. The public sentiment was 
against recognizing the State of Israel. The congressional sentiment 
was against recognizing the State of Israel. The members of the Cabinet 
were against recognizing the State of Israel.
  Gen. George C. Marshall, who probably, next to the President, had 
more influence than any other public figure in the country was dead set 
against the recognition of the State of Israel. But Harry Truman went 
ahead and deliberated, meditated, and he decided the right thing to do 
was to recognize the State of Israel.

  By recognizing the State of Israel, President Truman set in motion a 
process by which other nations moved on to recognize Israel. The State 
of Israel was born, had some kind of atmosphere to thrive in and begin 
to build itself because of what one man decided to do against the 
public polls and against the odds.
  It may be that the decision to move in a decisive way on Haiti is the 
same kind of critical decision that has to be made by a President, and 
the President has to look to his own vision of what the future is, his 
own vision of where we are going in this hemisphere, to his own vision 
of what it means to say that democracy is a value, democracy in nations 
is a highly-prized value that we want to promote.
  We are for democracy. We certainly are for democracy in this 
hemisphere. Human rights are a concern that all nations should be 
preoccupied with. Human rights and the standard for human rights is a 
standard we want to uphold in the world. All of these are at stake in 
Haiti.
  If the United States does not provide the moral leadership, if as the 
last remaining superpower of the world it does not show moral 
leadership, it will lose its claim to moral leadership. And those of us 
who think Haiti has nothing to do with us and what we do now is not of 
any import, in a world that has no leadership, where nobody has the 
right to claim moral leadership, we are all going to be threatened. We 
are all going to find it much more difficult.
  There are those who say, there is no superpower, nobody else has 
nuclear weapons. Nobody has the Army, the Navy, the kind of military 
might that we have. So what could go wrong in the world if we do not 
offer moral leadership?
  A great deal can go wrong in the world if across the world the people 
who have command of the tanks and the guns and the bullets in a given 
nation decide they want to hold the nation hostage. Across the world 
you have an obligation of treaties and agreements, and across the world 
trade agreements, property rights agreements. Nothing matters as long 
as the people in power have the guns and they can force their will.
  Trade will become chaotic. Markets in the world will collapse. The 
economy of this country will be as much affected as many because we 
depend on exports. A chaotic world politically will mean a chaotic 
world economically. The stakes are very high in this Haitian crisis. 
The stakes are much higher than the average American who, as someone 
would ask them question in a poll, would realize. The stakes are very 
high.
  We should go forward to do the right thing. In the next 30 days the 
decision is going to be critical.
  In the next 30 days the matter will be decided.
  If we hesitate and do not take affirmative action, do not take 
positive action, do not move in one way or another to dislodge the 
government of the military criminals, then we are going to find a 
chaotic situation which we will not be able to bring under control.
  There are two components of the problem. While I insist that we 
should handle the Haitian refugees the way we handle all other 
refugees, we should not have to resort to the various devices that we 
are using now, safe havens in other countries, et cetera, I do applaud 
the administration for at least backing away from the policy of 
returning the Haitians to the military thugs in Haiti.

                              {time}  2050

  That is one step forward. A Haitian, faced with the situation of 
having to be returned to the terrorist government that he tried to 
escape from, would appreciate being in a safe haven in any country, 
rather than going back there, so I think it was a step forward.
  The kinds of steps that we are taking in terms of allowing anybody 
who says they believe their life is threatened to be accepted as a 
person who is fleeing persecution is also another step forward. It does 
not go as far as we would like. The principal position of giving asylum 
on the soil of the United States is not being honored, but at least 
there have been some steps forward.
  On the other component, the component of trying to restore democracy 
and end the political crisis in Haiti, I applaud 100 percent what the 
administration is doing now. We should go forward. In 30 days we should 
try to resolve this problem, and certainly if military intervention, a 
hostage rescue, is necessary, then we should rescue the hostages. We 
should rescue the 6 million Haitians who are now being held hostage by 
an army of 7,000 trained by the United States, equipped by the United 
States, supplied by the United States.
  The return of John Bertrand Aristide to Haiti, the restoration of a 
democratic government, will mean a new birth for Haiti. Haiti is not 
inevitably a basket case. Haiti has never had a decent government. 
Leadership and government determine what happens in nations. Haiti can 
pull itself up by the bootstraps. Haiti has land, Haiti has resources 
that have never been discussed. Haiti can become a self-sufficient 
nation. Haiti can take its place among the nations of this hemisphere 
if we will just give it the chance.
  If we will undo the damage we have done, and for one last time 
intervene on the side of the forces of democracy and restore Aristide, 
we will have a new day and our Nation can hold its head high as a 
leader of the New World Order.

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