The Caribbean: Showing Them the Way Home

By Jill Smolowe

By the hundreds, Haitian boat people in search of asylum in the U.S. were delivered by Coast Guard cutters back to Port-au-Prince. Each was fingerprinted and photographed by local immigration officers. Just routine procedure, police assured scores of foreign journalists. But the swiftness with which the returnees melted into the population suggested that these Haitians were more than a little skeptical -- perhaps with good cause.

Three days after his repatriation from the detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, a youth who identified himself only as Marcelin spoke briefly with TIME. He said that last Monday, within hours of returning to his family in Carrefour on the southern fringes of the Haitian capital, a soldier and a man in civilian clothes appeared at his door. Addressing him by name, they asked where he had been for the past two months. "Cap Haitien," Marcelin answered, referring to a city in north Haiti. "You were over there in Guantanamo, not Cap Haitien," one of the men responded. "O.K., we'll come for you. We'll come and kill you." Soon after that, Marcelin boarded a bus back to Port-au-Prince and went into hiding.

Such accounts by frightened returnees have done nothing to move the Bush Administration to reconsider its plan to ship home more than 10,000 Haitian boat people from Guantanamo. The dilemma for Washington remains acute: Are these people merely looking for a better life, or genuinely in danger of persecution?

Those in danger are supposed to be admitted to the U.S. -- but proving they face reprisals, even death, back home is rarely easy. Those seeking a better life pose one of the more painful questions for a nation philosophically committed to an open door. While Administration officials acknowledge that the | political climate in Haiti has worsened since the Sept. 30 coup that deposed democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, they maintain that most of the boat people are economic migrants whose free-floating fears of persecution are not grounds enough for asylum. Backed by a Jan. 31 Supreme Court decision, little can now deter the Administration's plan to empty the detention camps, save a public outcry.

On Capitol Hill, a House Judiciary subcommittee approved a bill halting the exodus until violence in Haiti is sufficiently reduced so that no returnee faces "persecution or politically motivated violence." But with Congress in recess until Feb. 18, the Administration has time to return thousands more Haitians before the bill can be put to both houses for a vote.

Human-rights activists are waging a loud campaign to halt the repatriations, backed by groups ranging from the N.A.A.C.P. and AFL-CIO to the American Jewish Committee and the U.S. Catholic Conference. But it is uncertain how long Americans will listen. "The White House is banking on the fact that people won't care," says a disillusioned Republican congressional staffer. "Politics, not principle, is the overriding consideration."

With the presidential race under way, the White House has apparently not forgotten the drubbing Jimmy Carter took in 1980 from Florida voters after the Mariel boat lift, which settled some 125,000 Cubans in the U.S., mostly in Miami. The state, which already houses 80% of the 1,402 Haitians who have been let in to make their case for political asylum, can expect to be hard hit by further waves of refugees. Yet last week the repatriations drew fire from Florida politicians, including Senator Connie Mack, a conservative Republican, who charged that the policy was "based on crisis management instead of the principle of freedom."

Meanwhile, the Administration strove to create the impression that it was taking humanitarian steps to alleviate Haitians' suffering. Officials spoke of "redirecting" the economic embargo imposed by the Organization of American States, to relieve pressure on ordinary Haitians and target the assets of individuals connected with the coup. Yet in the four months since the trade ban was imposed Bush has taken no steps to implement such a "scalpel embargo," giving coup sympathizers time to clear their assets out of the U.S. An official acknowledged that the Administration had bowed to domestic business interests after complaints that the embargo had shut down U.S.-operated assembly plants in Haiti, putting 40,000 locals out of work and costing U.S. jobs.

Washington's decision emboldened Haiti's army officers to stall the docking of two U.S. ships carrying 508 boat people. "The military believes it can get the U.S. to soften up the embargo even more," says a leading Haitian businessman. Last week, as the commander of the country's armed forces elevated to a top post a former police chief who was fired by Aristide, the prospect of the deposed President's return seemed more remote than ever.

Washington still has many untested weapons at its disposal. It could grant the boat people temporary protection, spearhead an oil blockade or try to rally support for an international peace-keeping mission that would guard against human-rights violations. But as last week closed, it was hard to shake the sense that the Bush Administration was giving up on Haitians -- and their democratic aspirations -- for good.

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