The Caribbean Bad to Worse

By Jill Smolowe

For Haiti's poorest citizens, the term "quality of life" is a cruel mockery. Since the Sept. 30 military coup that deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and precipitated a hemisphere-wide economic embargo, malnutrition and disease have spread at a rate well beyond the usual disquieting norm. In rural areas, hungry peasant farmers eat the seeds they should be planting. Twenty miles from the capital, immunization programs have been curtailed, a casualty of government efforts to conserve fuel that make refrigeration of vaccines impossible. As a result, children are dying of measles. Yet in the slums, people do not complain of physical hardship; they speak instead of spiritual malnourishment. "Titid gave us dignity and hope," says a barefoot man, referring to Aristide by his popular nickname. "Keep the embargo. We are ready to suffer if it means Titid will come back." A moment later, he implores, "He will come back, won't he?"

Despite the persistent efforts of the Organization of American States to settle that very question, Haiti's political crisis appears no closer to resolution now than it did in the bloody days after the coup. Every attempt at a political compromise that might allow the populist hero Aristide to return in some restricted capacity has met with fierce resistance from military hard- liners and their Big Business allies, as well as grumbling from many in the middle class and the government bureaucracy. As if sensing greater misery ahead, record numbers of Haitians fled by sea last week to U.S. shores. Officials in Washington question whether all of the boat people have a "well- founded fear of persecution," the international standard for political asylum, and refuse to grant the newcomers protection even temporarily. People closer to the action describe conditions that argue for at least short-term refuge. Rene Theodore, Haiti's Prime Minister-designate, is worried that the country "is being held hostage by thugs."

Theodore's own experience is telling. Having received the OAS-brokered endorsement of Aristide and the army's nominal commander in chief, as well as a tentative nod from some segments of the armed forces, he was expected to head a new government. But on Jan. 25, seven plainclothes policemen bearing assault rifles burst into Theodore's office as he was meeting with political party leaders. According to Theodore, he and his guests were marched single file out to the driveway, then ordered to lie face down on the pavement and surrender their weapons. "One of the policemen began to kick us as we lay there," he says. "I received a kick in the face, just under the eye." Theodore's bodyguard and friend, Yves Jean-Pierre, was killed by gunfire. "I didn't see Yves shot," he says, "but others did." One of the policemen, he continued, "suggested they finish us with a grenade." Just in time, uniformed police ordered the plainclothesmen to put their weapons on safety.

The incident, pointedly designed to thwart attempts at political compromise, enraged the Bush Administration, which recalled its ambassador from Haiti last week. Beyond that swift reaction, Washington's Haitian policy is gridlocked by poor options. On the one hand, frustration over Haiti's deteriorating political and economic situation is running so high that in interviews last week with the New York Times, officials raised the remote prospect of military intervention. Yet at the same time, the Administration was petitioning the federal courts for permission to forcibly repatriate most of the boat people, who are currently residing in tents, ships and a huge aircraft hangar at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Supreme Court gave its assent Friday night. A State Department spokesman said the government "will begin immediately repatriating Haitians."

While awaiting the court's ruling, the State Department unveiled a new policy: Haitians will now be permitted to apply for asylum at the U.S. embassy in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Unless the rules are eased, the program will be restricted to just 300 Haitians over the next eight months, and it will confine admission to former political prisoners and applicants who are in "imminent danger" of persecution.

The new policy is unlikely to have much impact on the boat-people traffic. (In its petition to the court, the government claimed improbably that 20,000 Haitians stand poised to flee.) "While a positive development, it has to be seen as an in-house rescue program for a select few," says Arthur Helton, director of the refugee program run by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York City. It also remains uncertain how an embassy operating with only a skeleton crew -- most staff members have been withdrawn since the coup -- will process all of the claims.

Thus caught between its commitment to restoring democratic rule in Haiti and its determination to cork the outpouring of boat people, the Bush Administration weighed several unsatisfactory steps. One possibility was to end the embargo, which has hit poor Haitians the hardest. Such a reversal of policy, however, could prove messy for Bush in an election year. A military intervention in a country that poses no threat to international peace and security would be all but impossible to justify; last week the State Department quickly denied that any military option was being considered at present. The likeliest option was a three-pronged approach: tighten up refugee controls; target individuals connected with the coup by freezing their American bank accounts; and ease the toll on Haitians by loosening the embargo on plants that assemble goods for U.S. companies, restoring as many as 40,000 jobs.

The question now is how many of the boat people at Guantanamo will be returned to Haiti -- and how fast. Since Jan. 19, the Coast Guard has hauled 6,235 boat people to safety, bringing the total number of post-coup Haitian refugees to 14,610. Of those, almost one-quarter have been found by officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to have a "plausible claim" for asylum, which means they will be permitted to enter the U.S. and present further evidence. Among the most recent boat people, almost three-quarters made the cut.

Refugee experts believe the new leniency reflects a combination of factors: better-trained INS interviewers, stronger refugee protections during the screening process and a deepening climate of intimidation in Haiti. "I'm hearing about more violence," says Rolande Dorancy, executive director of the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami. "Last week was a week of terror." These complaints dramatize figures released last week by Amnesty International, the human-rights organization, which estimates that there have been 1,500 killings and 300 arrests since the coup. Human-rights workers in Haiti say that in addition to stepped-up military and police attacks, assaults by ordinary and notorious criminals -- most notably the former Tontons Macoutes -- have quickened since a Christmas pardon issued by the provisional government shrank the population of the National Penitentiary from 1,000 to several dozen.

Human-rights activists also contend that the embargo is missing its mark. Until three ships broke the embargo and eased the gasoline crisis, military leaders profited handsomely from black-market fuel dealings. Citizens, by contrast, have only suffered further. Some 160 assembly plants have collapsed or relocated. The resulting unemployment, coupled with the toll in the service and industrial sectors, has caused the loss of 120,000 jobs, according to U.S. embassy estimates. Moreover, because postal mail is included in the embargo, contributions from relatives living in the U.S. -- which totaled $300 million annually -- have dried up.

The environment has taken such a brutal beating that Haiti may have already mortgaged its future. To make up for the dearth of propane gas and kerosene, peasants have slashed away at trees, even mangoes, windbreaks and the mahoganies that shade the coffee crop. Thus, even in the unlikely event that Haitians settle their political differences soon, they will be living in the unrelieved glare of the current crisis for a long time to come.

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/Port-au-Prince and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington