[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 36 (Monday, February 27, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H2228]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


          REPORT ON UNITED STATES MILITARY OPERATIONS IN HAITI

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 1995, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Goss] is recognized 
during morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GOSS. Mr. Speaker, it is day 162 of the occupation of Haiti by 
United States troops. The costs are about $850 million, heading to $1 
billion, but every American can feel safe and secure that the Haitian 
military is not going to invade us.
  Congress put itself back into the Haiti policy loop last year, after 
some of the concerns we had about the way it was being handled by the 
White House, by requiring reports. I have the report from February 1 
submitted by the White House to Congress. The report, a bit self-
congratulatory, documents the success of operations in Haiti to date. 
Indeed, it does that. It is a short report.
  What it does not do is document the problems we are facing and the 
risks we are facing and the costs we are obligating our taxpayers to at 
all, and that is something that needs to be done.
  I read from the report. It says the purpose of our mission down there 
was to use all necessary means to secure the departure of the coup 
leaders. Many will remember they have left, and I think we have 
primarily former President Carter, General Colin Powell, and Senator 
Sam Nunn to thank for that. Certainly the threat of the force of our 
U.S. military was part of that. But the fact is, maybe we did not need 
to send 21,000 of our assault troops to that friendly, neighboring 
country to accomplish the removal of those coup leaders.
  But let us go on to the next point, restoring the legitimate, 
democratically elected Government of Haiti to power. The administration 
is claiming great success for that. Well, they have not restored the 
Government of Haiti to power. They have restored President Aristide to 
power in his White House, but we no longer have a Parliament in Haiti, 
which is an essential part of government, and we certainly do not have 
much of a judiciary system. Any student of the Constitution in this 
country will understand that a functioning democracy has to have those 
three branches of government, which they do not have in Haiti.
  You also have to say that in Haiti that the Haitians are not the 
power. The Government of Haiti is certainly not the power. It is the 
U.S. military that is the power down there now. To say that it has been 
restored to the Haitian people is a further mistruth, because it is 
only to select Haitian people.
  If you go to Haiti today and say how do you feel about the United 
States troops, you will get a number of answers, depending on who you 
talk to. The people who are pro-Aristide will say we are very friendly. 
The people who are not pro-Aristide, which is about 30 percent of the 
country or so, will say we think everything the U.S. Government is 
doing is backing Aristide, and it is very pro-Lavalas, and we are being 
identified with one man's power, one man's presidency in that country, 
and that is a dangerous place for our foreign policy to be.
  But moving forward from those points, when we talk about whether or 
not the Haitians can run Haiti yet, it is clear they cannot, and even 
though we and the United Nations have declared that it is a secure and 
stable environment, we saw just last week that they had a massacre as 
soon as our troops left one of the enforcement areas, the police 
station up in a town called Limbe. Our troops left, the mob went in, 
grabbed the people out of the station, beat them to
 death, burned them, and at least had the decency to bury them after 
that.

  That is an isolated incident, I agree. But I suspect as our forces 
leave, we need to be on guard. To say things are secure and stable may 
be stretching the point just a little bit the way things are in Haiti 
today.
  That police force is supposed to provide some of the stability. Some 
observers now are saying they are being politicized, deliberately 
politicized by President Aristide; he is bypassing passing some of the 
screening process put in to build a professional police force. This is 
a serious problem and we need to know a lot more about it.
  I think that the report that we are talking about, restarting the 
Haitian economy, which is very important, signals something very 
curious for us as American taxpayers. We have about $1.6 billion 
pledged for our military support, and another $1 billion pledged for 
some type of aid support over the next year or so, I think would be a 
fair statement, and yet it is all at the top. It is not down at the 
bottom. We are not getting the money and the expertise down at the 
working level on the front lines of commerce.
  Talking to businessman after businessman after businessman, our 
program there is misdirected, and that is something we have to refocus 
very quickly, especially for that kind of money.
  We are paying a very heavy price in Haiti as taxpayers, as I said. 
What are we spending money on? We are buying troops from other 
countries. We are paying foreign soldiers, paying them at the rate of 
about $1,000 a month to foreign governments, who are taking a handling 
fee to put their troops into Haiti as part of a joint task force. Our 
troops down there are being used right now for things like garbage 
collecting, writing speeding tickets, making traffic flow work, that 
kind of thing.
  In this report, interestingly enough, the White House says we must 
have to cover a $2.6 billion shortfall in our defense spending because 
without it the net effect will be a significant decrease in overall 
military readiness.
  In other words, our military readiness is at threat because our 
troops are picking up the garbage in Haiti. We need a fuller report 
from the White House.

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