[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 96 (Thursday, July 21, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 21, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                     DISARMAMENT IS A RISKY MISSION

  (Mr. GINGRICH asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I want to draw all of my colleagues' 
attention to an article in the Washington Post this morning entitled 
``If U.S. Invades, Plan Calls for Disarming Haitians.''
  According to this article by Daniel Williams of the Washington Post, 
Mr. Speaker, there would be an effort to go door to door in Haiti, 
gathering weapons from both the Haitian military and powerful military 
groups. It says, ``Disarming soldiers and paramilitary groups in 
particular can be a daunting task. It sometimes requires searches in 
maze-like urban confines and risks hostilities. The administration 
expects the size of the U.S. intended force will be large enough to 
accomplish the deed.''
  Let me say there is no moral justification for this administration to 
risk a single American life by invading Haiti. Haiti is not morally 
superior to Cuba, to China, to Syria. The human rights problems are not 
greater than Rwanda, Angola, Sudan. The fact is that for domestic 
political reasons the Clinton administration is considering risking the 
lives of American men and women, and this article should alarm every 
Member of the Congress:

           If U.S. Invades, Plan Calls for Disarming Haitians

                          (By Daniel Williams)

       If U.S. troops land in Haiti, they will disarm the Haitian 
     army and paramilitary groups such as the Tons-tons Macoutes 
     to pacify the country, according to the administration's 
     current plans.
       Disarmament would take place whether Haiti's military 
     rulers step down voluntarily or are forced out by American 
     invaders.
       The program would be designed to avoid the kind of problems 
     that erupted in Somalia, where competing militias were 
     permitted to keep their weapons even after U.S. troops 
     arrived to safeguard relief supplies. The guns were 
     eventually trained on the Americans by followers of a militia 
     leader whose quest for power was threatened by U.S. plans to 
     rebuild the Somali government.
       The disarmament plan was raised during talks between 
     Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff, United Nations 
     Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright and U.N. Secretary General 
     Boutros Boutros-Ghali Tuesday. The U.S. officials were 
     launching an effort to win U.N. Security Council blessing for 
     U.S. forces to take ``all necessary measures'' to restore 
     Haiti's exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
       No deadline has been set for Haiti's military rulers, led 
     by Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, to step down. A published interview 
     with special envoy William H. Gray III, in which he said he 
     expected the dictatorship to be out by October, was not meant 
     as an ultimatum, Gray and other officials said yesterday.
       ``We think it is time for the military leaders to leave 
     now,'' White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers said. ``Not 
     six months from now, not three months from now. We'd like to 
     see them leave now.''
       Nevertheless, administration officials said pressure for a 
     quick invasion has eased with the drop since early July in 
     the numbers of refugees leaving Haiti by boat. No boat people 
     were picked up at sea yesterday; the chance seems to be 
     fading that the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 
     where more than 16,000 refugees are living, will soon be 
     overwhelmed.
       Boutros-Ghali is already convinced that an initial American 
     force ought to pacify Haiti before a U.N. peacekeeping force 
     is sent in to keep order, protect Aristide and revamp the 
     Haitian military and police force, one U.S. official said. 
     Boutros-Ghali, too, wants to avoid the debacle of Somalia. He 
     had urged the Bush administration to disarm the Somalis when 
     troops first went in but was ignored.
       ``Unlike Somalia, in this case we will be saying it is our 
     mission to disarm the Haitians. That will make it much easier 
     to turn the country over to U.N. peacekeepers. One of the 
     lessons we learned in Somalia is that it is easier to do such 
     a thing earlier rather than later,'' said the U.S. official. 
     He and other who discussed the peacekeeping operation spoke 
     on condition of anonymity, on grounds that the topic was the 
     subject of sensitive diplomatic consultations.
       Disarming soldiers and paramilitary groups in particular 
     can be a daunting task. It sometimes requires searches in 
     maze-like urban confines and risks hostilities. The 
     administration expects that the size of the intended U.S. 
     force will be large enough to accomplish the deed and that 
     the Haitian population, largely supportive of Aristide's 
     return, will cooperate in uncovering arms caches and 
     fingering renegades.
       The plan may raise the anxiety not only of the Haitian 
     army, but also the Haitian well-to-do who fear that 
     Aristide's return will unleash a wave of retribution by angry 
     mobs of the poor.
       The decision to seek a U.N. resolution is designed both to 
     display international support for what would look to be a 
     traditional American intervention in the Caribbean, and to 
     scare Cedras. The administration would prefer that the 
     military regime step down without violence, and hopes a 
     crescendo of invasion preparations and rhetoric may persuade 
     it to go into exile.
       No deadline has been set, but one could be proposed in the 
     U.N. resolution, as happened in the lead-up to the liberation 
     of Kuwait by American and allied forces during the Persian 
     Gulf War. Albright, the U.S. ambassador at the United 
     Nations, began to recruit support for a resolution among 
     France, Venezuela, Canada and Argentina, a group informally 
     known as the Friends of Haiti.
       The administration holds back on setting a deadline because 
     it is not yet prepared to be held to one. Gray said. ``We 
     believe when a deadline is set, you must be prepared to 
     totally enforce it, to have credibility,'' he said. ``We are 
     working multilaterally, and it is agreed by all to continue 
     on the course of diplomacy and economic pressure, at this 
     time.''
       Gray said his comments on a deadline, in an interview with 
     USA Today, were misunderstood. Calling Cedras and two other 
     top Haitian military officials ``the three stooges,'' Gray 
     said in the interview, ``By October, we expect them to be 
     gone.''
       Instead, Gray said yesterday, the administration hope is 
     that the three will step down as soon as possible, and 
     October is not a formal deadline.
       During a recent television interview, Gray indicated that 
     the military had to leave within six months. He also said 
     then that he had been misunderstood.
       It appears that the administration will be able to follow 
     the methodical approach it prefers for resolving the Haitian 
     crisis without the added pressure of handling thousands of 
     refugees picked up at sea. For a while the outflow seemed 
     destined to make invasion both inevitable and something that 
     would have to be considered soon.
       But administration officials regard the dropoff in the 
     numbers of boat people in recent days as no fluke. Rather, 
     they said, the decision to keep Haitians at Guantanamo until 
     they can be sent to temporary safe havens in other 
     countries--in effect keeping them until they can be returned 
     to Haiti when Aristide is restored--has deterred boat people 
     from leaving Haiti because they no longer can hope for 
     eventual emigration to the United States.

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