[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 91 (Thursday, July 14, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 14, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]


                              {time}  2040
 
                      COST OF CLINTON HAITI POLICY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Frost). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Goss] is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. GOSS. Mr. Speaker, today I received, with many other Members, a 
very good briefing by the U.S. Coast Guard. The new commandant, Admiral 
Kramek, came up and explained to Members of Congress just what a good 
job our U.S. Coast Guard is doing with the Haiti situation.
  I have great admiration for the Coast Guard. They are working 
extremely hard. They are putting in 80- to 100-hour weeks under very 
difficult situations. They work on overloaded cutters, picking people 
out of the water, shuttling them back and forth, and really carrying 
out a very difficult mission. My hat is off to the U.S. Coast Guard for 
the excellent work they are doing and to the commandant for the fine 
briefing he gave us.
  Unfortunately, there is a cost to the Clinton administration's policy 
in Haiti. While the Coast Guard is concentrating its assets to deal 
with the refugee problem and the security problems in the area of the 
Windward Passage off Haiti, they have had to pull resources from other 
areas. There are only so many cutters. There are only so many 
resources.
  It turns out, of course, that we are therefore letting some of the 
Coast Guard missions go unattended, primarily in the areas of drug 
interdiction and fisheries enforcement. Those are matters of great 
concern, of course, to our commercial fishermen. I think the need for 
drug interdiction and beating the drug problem in our country is a 
matter for every American. We are all concerned about it.
  I was very concerned myself to learn that the Coast Guard has 
virtually stripped its drug interdiction capabilities in the Gulf of 
Mexico in order to take care of the Haitian refugee problem. That is 
not welcome news, and I am sure as soon as the drug lords and 
traffickers find out, they will consider that sort of a welcome mat. I 
presume they know that by now.
  The other part of the bad news in the briefing, of course, is the 
cost, climbing past the tens of millions of dollars already. I don't 
know what the drain is on our other services from the other aspects of 
our Haiti policy, but when costs for one service alone is into the tens 
of millions of dollars, we know the extra costs for this ill-advised 
policy are going to be gigantic.
  We also learned one of the cruise ships we are renting down in 
Jamaica, at a great rate for the taxpayers, is not being utilized, 
because an appropriate agreement hasn't been worked out with the 
Jamaican Government on how to screen people through the process there. 
We apparently are not using the cruise ship, but, of course, we are 
paying for it.
  My suggestion to the administration this evening might be why not 
move the cruise ship to Port-au-Prince and let the people seeking to 
escape from Haiti just go by land to board the cruise ship. That way we 
get some return for our money anyway.
  We also are told the hospital ship down in Kingston, Jamaica, 
providing a processing center for Haitians who are plucked out of the 
water, will be moved to Guantanamo, because the overcrowding situation 
is now so bad there. They are involved, I understand, in double 
bunking, and they have got sanitation and water problems that are very 
severe.
  The good news was maybe the flow of refugees is slowing a little bit. 
Maybe there are not quite so many refugees. And the interesting news 
is, when many of the refugees who turn out not to be political 
refugees, but to be economic refugees, are given the choice of going to 
a safe haven somewhere in the Caribbean or going back to Haiti, 
interestingly enough, thousands are opting to go back to Haiti.
  Now, does that belie a little bit some of the statements that we are 
being given by the administration about the repression by the Cedras 
military junta in Haiti?
  It seems to me people would not be willingly going back into harm's 
way if there are choices of safe haven elsewhere in the Caribbean?
  I wonder if perhaps we have not finally gotten some belated 
recognition that this repression, much which has been caused by our 
policy, is a quality of life matter; it is an economic matter. Perhaps 
some of the human rights violations have been somewhat exaggerated. 
That is not to say there have not been some horrible brutalities 
created by both sides in Haiti.
  The administration in fact has been a lot less than candid about what 
is going on in Haiti, and that is understandable, because it is very 
hard to explain what is going on there. It is very hard to explain 
their policy. It is harder to defend their policy, especially when we 
see the pictures, the pictures of misery caused by our embargo there: 
the pictures of people drowned and in overturned boats; of people 
trying to flee the economic mess with the incentive to come out and 
maybe get some kind of passage to the United States, if they can just 
get that leaky boat out to a Coast Guard cutter.

  The Clinton administration is overlooking the very good possibility 
of dealing with Haiti's moderates who don't want us to invade, and 
don't want the embargo. These are elected members of the Haitian 
parliament. They are members of the Chamber of Deputies. They want our 
help at rapprochement. They want help building peace among the warring 
factions in Haiti. And they want our help to bring relief to the dismal 
quality of life that we have helped make in Haiti.
  I think that that is a very productive course we ought to pursue. It 
sure beats sending the Marines to Haiti. We have had a proposal by 
Senator Dole for fact finding. We have resolution by our colleague, 
Chris Smith, that we should swap interparliamentary visits and reopen 
negotiations. We have the safe haven proposals in Haiti, using the Ile 
de la Gonave or some other Haitian island for the type of relief people 
are asking for and trying to find.
  How much better are those proposals than sending the Marines, to do 
what? Defeat the Haitian army? Remove Cedras? If you remove Cedras, 
then what? I think the message is clear. We gain nothing but trouble by 
invasion; we gain a lot if we pursue a course of negotiation. I urge 
the President not to invade Haiti.

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