[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 93 (Monday, July 18, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


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

 
                            HAITI COMMISSION

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, invasion talk for Haiti continued this 
weekend. Deputy Secretary of State Talbott says ``The end of the day is 
approaching.'' That is his quote: ``The end of the day is 
approaching.''
  I saw with interest this morning that William Raspberry's column in 
the Washington Post contains an endorsement--of sorts-- for a 
factfinding commission. I will ask that the article be printed at the 
conclusion of my remarks. Walter Fauntroy, the former Delegate from the 
District of Columbia, is quoted at length. He points out:

       Knowledge is power. If [the Bush and Clinton 
     administrations] had more knowledge about Haiti, its people 
     and its history, they would have had the power to resolve the 
     situation without resort to violence.

  That is Walter Fauntroy's quote, not mine. Fauntroy talks about how 
the embargo has accelerated deforestation and made the sick sicker and 
the poor poorer.
  Fauntroy also points out the way to a political solution is to 
support the center and isolate the extremes. This seems pretty obvious. 
And Fauntroy points out the most recent effort to achieve a political 
solution was scuttled by Aristide's actions.

  This isn't General Cedras saying we should have more facts, and that 
Aristide blocked a political solution. It's Walter Fauntroy--long-time 
member of the Congressional Black Caucus and chairman of the bipartisan 
Congressional Task Force on Haiti.
  In the end, Fauntroy concludes the United States must invade because 
of past policy failures. In my view, that is exactly the wrong 
conclusion--we should not risk American lives because the White House 
and the State Department could not formulate proper policy. The fact 
is, there are alternatives to invading Haiti if anybody in this 
administration is interested in looking at them. Bill Gray's 
predecessor had some good ideas. The Haitian Parliament has some good 
ideas. Maybe we could learn from our 19-year effort at nation-building 
earlier this century.
  Reverend Fauntroy is one of many Haiti experts who say we should have 
spent more time looking at the reality of Haiti and less time rattling 
the sabers. It's too bad we cannot set partisan politics aside and take 
a time out to review some of these ideas before the invasion is 
launched.
  I ask unanimous consent the article by Mr. Raspberry be printed at 
the end of my statement.
   There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, July 18, 1994]

                          One Choice In Haiti

                         (By William Raspberry)

       President Clinton, we are told, has not made a decision 
     about going to war in Haiti.
       Maybe he hasn't. But with American service personnel 
     engaged in Haiti-like maneuvers, with 2,000 Marines already 
     deployed off the Haitian coast and with the U.S. warplanes 
     broadcasting speeches in which the ousted President Iean-
     Bertrand Aristide vows to return to the island, it certainly 
     looks like the president has made a decision.
       ``The end of the day is approaching,'' Deputy Secretary of 
     State Strobe Talbott told a CNN audience on Saturday. He said 
     he hoped that the military leaders who have run Haiti since 
     Aristide's ouster in a 1991 coup would step down voluntarily, 
     but said, ``We can't wait forever.''
       Virginia Sen. John Warner (R) said Saturday that he senses 
     ``almost a war fever'' in Washington, adding that he 
     questioned the appropriateness of an invasion.
       Walter E. Fauntroy used to. The former congressman from the 
     District of Columbia and chairman for 15 years of a 
     bipartisan congressional task force on Haiti said over the 
     weekend that the Clinton administration has pretty much run 
     out of options.
       ``We're down to two choices,'' he told me in an interview. 
     ``Either we go in, or we walk away.
       The liberal Democrat, Baptist minister and consultant on 
     international finance and trade said his reluctant choice is: 
     Go in.
       It's a position he doesn't like being in. He has been 
     pushing for a negotiated settlement of Haiti's governmental 
     crisis since the beginning, refusing even to join the 
     bandwagon for economic sanctions, let alone military action.
       He still thinks he was right--and not merely because of his 
     nonviolent philosophy as a one-time lieutenant of Martin 
     Luther King Jr.
       He believes that the reason Clinton--and Bush before him--
     couldn't find a way out of the Haitian mess is that they 
     didn't know enough.
       ``Knowledge is power,'' he said. ``If they had had more 
     knowledge about Haiti, its people and its history, they would 
     have had the power to resolve the situation without resort to 
     violence.''
       Did Fauntroy have that knowledge? ``I knew that a embargo 
     was wrong, because the sick would get sicker and the poor 
     poorer'' he told me. ``The last person to go wanting for food 
     or medicine would be the one with the gun. I knew that an 
     embargo would frustrate what our task force had been doing--
     seeking to attract labor-intensive industry to the island as 
     a way of dealing with the energetic but largely illiterate 
     population. It was predictable that an embargo would drive 
     those businesses into the eager arms of places like the 
     Dominican Republic and Honduras and Costa Rico.
       ``We spend a lot of years trying to help Haiti recover from 
     a French-led land scheme that had pretty much deforested the 
     place. We launched a reforestation program to keep the soil 
     from washing into the sea. Well, the first result of the 
     embargo was an oil shortage, which meant that people began 
     cutting down the trees to make charcoal.''
       There were subtler things, though, that a greater U.S. 
     knowledge of Haiti might have accomplished, Fauntroy 
     believes. The earlier ouster of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) 
     Duvalier involved not just pressure of the sort the Clinton 
     administration is applying to the military leaders but also 
     the deliberate nurturing of a centrist political faction 
     capable of crafting the constitution that would be the basis 
     of democracy.
       ``By promoting the centrists we were able to isolate the 
     extremes--both those on the right, with their penchant for 
     violence, and those on the left, who wanted nothing less than 
     the complete leveling of the society. It also split the 
     military, so that centrist military leaders could come to the 
     fore and help put together a constitution with check and 
     balances--a sharp break with Haiti's history.''
       The last chance of a resumption of that policy--and of an 
     effort by the present ambassador, William Swing, to cultivate 
     members of the Haitian parliament in order to work out a 
     process for Aristide's eventual return--was scuttled a year 
     ago when Aristide refused to abide by a resolution reached by 
     a multiparty conference in Miami, Fauntroy believes.
       Now, he said, the choices are to ``go in or walk away.'' 
     And each option has its own problems.
       Going in would give the invaders control, but it would also 
     saddle them with the responsibility of running Haiti for a 
     decade or longer--not merely to maintain the peace but to 
     assume the very efforts Fauntroy's task force started years 
     ago. As Fauntroy put it, ``Conquest is easy; occupation is 
     hard.''
       But if we don't go in, he says, the thugs will remain in 
     charge of what would surely be an outlaw territory and a 
     transshipment point for U.S.-bound narcotics. And worse: The 
     immigration problem that has driven the Clinton 
     administration to the brink would only grow worse.
       ``It's in our national interest to stop this outflow,'' he 
     concludes. ``We've got to go in.''

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