In and Out with the Tide

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

''Why do the bad guys always win? What's wrong with the U.S.?'' -- A Haitian supporter of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide

As Bill Clinton took care to point out, it's the good guys who have been winning lately in Russia, the Middle East and other areas far more vital to American interests than Haiti. Nonetheless, the Haitian's anguished question had a point. Some extremely bad guys in his poverty-stricken Caribbean nation had just won a round in a showdown with the world's lone superpower. Not necessarily the decisive round; at week's end Haiti's military leaders were backing off a bit from their early defiance. But if the showdown goes the wrong way, other bad guys around the world could get the idea that the mighty U.S. can be scared out of any venture that might get more than a handful of its soldiers killed. Initially, the Haitian military forces that deposed the democratically elected Aristide in 1991, and are now trying to wiggle out of an international agreement to let him return to power, got their way with no more than some effective theater. As the troopship U.S.S. Harlan County anchored off Port-au- Prince, thugs surged through the dock area brandishing pistols, screaming ''Get out!'' and kicking at or banging on cars, including one carrying U.S. charge d'affaires Vicki Huddleston. All show, says one Haitian with close ties to the leaders: ''As wild and scary as it appeared, ((the supposed riot)) was very carefully choreographed by the Haitian military.'' The demonstrators, he adds, ''had strict orders not to shoot anyone, just to raise the level of fear.'' The hard-core supposed rioters totaled at most 200, and might even have been outnumbered by the 193 U.S. and 25 Canadian military personnel aboard the ship. But the troops were not on a combat mission; they were engineers and specialists who were supposed to repair roads, hospitals and schools and train a new Haitian police force. Some carried only sidearms, some no guns at all. Clinton decided he could not risk sending them ashore and ordered the Harlan County to pull up anchor and steam away. At U.S. request, the U.N. Security Council voted to reimpose as of midnight Monday an embargo on oil and arms shipments to Haiti. An earlier embargo had pushed the Haitian military leaders into agreeing to let Aristide resume power on Oct. 30. But this time they answered with murder -- of Guy Malary, Justice Minister in the transitional government that was to pave the way for Aristide's return. Its timing made the assassination almost a personal rebuke of Clinton. Only hours after the President, in a Washington news conference, expressed concern for the safety of members of Aristide's putative government, gunmen riddled Malary's car with bullets as it drove along a quiet street in the residential Port-au-Prince district of Turgeau, killing the minister, his chauffeur and two bodyguards. The U.S. then sought, and got, Security Council approval to impose what would amount to a blockade of Haiti. It would not use the word, which Clinton noted historically describes an act of war. But on Friday the President dispatched six warships to stop and search vessels headed for Haiti. He also ordered a reinforced rifle company of perhaps 600 Marines to proceed from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and there to go on alert, ready to fly to Haiti to help evacuate the thousands of U.S. citizens there, should that become necessary. It might not be necessary, though. At week's end, Lieut. General Raoul Cedras, head of the Haitian army, and Joseph Michel Francois, chief of police, gave some indications that they were turning conciliatory. Both were supposed to step down Friday, to pave the way for Aristide's return. Neither did, and Lawrence Pezzullo, Clinton's special adviser on Haiti, told reporters after a meeting with Cedras that the general had given only ''vacant excuses.'' Later, though, Cedras offered a compromise under which they would after all quit and be replaced by people named by Aristide. That was not acceptable to the U.S., which feared Cedras was concocting a formula under which Aristide would return only as a figurehead and the military leaders would retain the real power. But the conciliatory noises indicated the Haitian leaders were beginning to weaken under pressure and might bend further. In the meantime, events in Haiti continued to get uglier. Thugs called attaches -- officially auxiliary police but actually descendants of the Tontons Macoutes who enforced two generations of Duvalier dictatorship -- grandly proclaimed themselves the Revolutionary Council of Oct. 11 (the day of the riots that forced the Harlan County to turn back). On Thursday they occupied the National Assembly building and briefly took some of the lawmakers hostage. Foreigners were frightened into leaving the country. First 240 U.N.-Organization of American States human-rights monitors scattered around the countryside were pulled back into Port-au-Prince. From there the U.N., apparently fearing they might be targeted for violence or taken hostage, ordered them flown out in two batches to the Dominican Republic. Their departure is having ''a terrible demoralizing effect on the people, who feel abandoned,'' said one. A Haitian intellectual charged that ''the U.S. led us out on a limb and left us there to be eaten up slowly by these tigers.'' His comment indicates the stakes for the U.S. in this showdown. Haiti is important in itself. It and neighboring Caribbean states form a sort of unofficial U.S. border, and any increase in poverty and oppression triggers a flood of Haitian refugees into the U.S. But its greatest importance now is as a test of the President's ability to conduct an effective foreign policy. On Haiti, Clinton faltered early and embarrassed himself. In the opening days of his Administration, he felt obliged to continue George Bush's policy of sending all Haitian refugees back -- a policy he had denounced during the campaign as ''cruel.'' He had been well on the way to recovering, though. The U.S. brokered the agreement under which Aristide, who is living in Washington, was to be restored to power; it was signed on American soil, Governors Island in New York Harbor, in July. In a letter in June to American ambassadors around the world, Secretary of State Warren Christopher ranked Haitian policy among the Administration's major achievements. But now the agreement is severely threatened, just as events in Somalia have brought the Administration's foreign-policy competence under new questioning. And the timing is no coincidence. Clinton may have thought that by ruling out an immediate U.S. pullout from Somalia after the Oct. 3 fire fight in Mogadishu, which claimed 18 American lives, he was demonstrating that the U.S. would not cut and run if some of its soldiers were killed. But by setting a March 31 deadline for withdrawal, no matter what, he seems to have initially sent the opposite message to the Haitian military leaders. The mob in Port-au- Prince shrieked threats to create ''another Somalia.'' Ironically, events in Somalia last week went quite well from the official U.S. viewpoint. True, it was grating to watch warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, whom American soldiers had died trying to capture, hold a press conference with six reporters. Looking dapper in a blue pinstripe shirt and red polka-dot tie and sporting a gold-tipped cane, Aidid congratulated the U.S. on having ''decided to address its past mistakes'' -- meaning its attempts to take him prisoner. The whole point of the U.S. policy shift, however, was to call off the hunt for Aidid, which was widely blamed for converting what started out as a humanitarian mission into a mini war, in order to concentrate on a political - settlement that would prevent the country from falling apart after U.S. troops leave. To that end, Robert Oakley, Clinton's special envoy, met with five of Aidid's aides, though not the warlord himself. Afterward Oakley told reporters that Aidid wanted to be President of Somalia someday and . . . well . . . who knows? The buttering-up had one quick result: Aidid's fighters released helicopter pilot Michael Durant, whose terrified face on television had turned many Americans against the whole involvement, and Nigerian soldier Umar Shantali. Durant, suffering from broken bones in the back, leg, arm and face, was flown to an American hospital in Germany. Oakley also made some progress getting neighboring African states, notably Ethiopia and Eritrea, to involve themselves in peacemaking. One project he has been assigned by Clinton is to help organize an African commission to investigate who really was responsible for the killing of 24 Pakistani U.N. soldiers in June (though the U.N. and U.S. have no doubt it was Aidid). That would enable the U.S. and U.N. to negotiate with Aidid without officially ignoring a Security Council resolution calling for the arrest, trial and punishment of ''those responsible.'' And if the commission eventually concludes that Aidid really was the one primarily responsible? Well . . . maybe it won't do so until after March 31, when U.S. troops are safely out.

The Senate left no doubt last week that the prime U.S. goal in Somalia is now just to get out. Clinton and his aides had to fight hard to head off a Senate move to force a faster pullout. West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, who had tried to force a withdrawal by Feb. 1, was persuaded to sign on instead to a bipartisan motion reaffirming the March 31 date. Arizona Republican John McCain, however, moved a rider to a defense appropriations bill that would have forced an immediate pullout; it lost, 61 to 38. The compromise rider then passed, 76 to 23. A victory for Clinton -- but at the price of having to agree to have all funding for the troops cut off after the March 31 pullout date. It was the first such cutoff since a 1973 ban on spending further money for combat in Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia. The Senate action underlined a cruel dilemma for Clinton: the public expects its President to conduct a forceful and effective policy in the Somalias and Haitis of the Third World, but is dead set against risking the lives of American soldiers to do it. And this fact is well known to adversaries. Romeo Halloun, an aide to Lieut. General Cedras, the Haitian army chief, told foreign newsmen that CNN had announced a poll showing 66% of Americans opposed to sending troops to Haiti. He had it just about right. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll asked 484 respondents what they thought of ''contributing American troops to a United Nations force to retrain Haiti's military''; 67% were opposed, vs. only 27% in favor. Clinton cannot escape some blame. Though he bristled at an allegation that his Administration was ''naive,'' it is hard to find any other word for the idea that Haiti's military rulers would stop terrorizing the country and meekly yield power to Aristide merely because they had signed an agreement. The President should have realized, or so the argument goes, that the military rulers were only stalling in an attempt to get the embargo lifted, and would try every expedient to hold on to their power as the deadline approached for surrendering it. After all, it was hardly a secret that the attaches were intensifying a reign of terror. Justice Minister Malary was murdered only yards from a church where Antoine Izmery, a pro-Aristide activist, was dragged out of Mass and slain by gunmen five weeks ago. When the U.S.S. Harlan County sailed away last week, one worker in a Port-au-Prince slum was asked if he had cried. His reply: no, because ''if they caught me crying, they might take it as a sign of the wrong emotion and shoot me.'' Yet what was Clinton to do? In the light of Somalia, the Pentagon was extremely skittish about sending even a lightly armed training and construction force to Haiti. Defense Secretary Les Aspin tried to delay the sailing of the Harlan County until the U.S. positioned an ''extraction force,'' perhaps a Marine contingent, nearby to evacuate U.S. troops from Haiti if they came under attack, but the White House overruled him. There would have been no support at all for sending a force capable of storming its way ashore and shooting it out with the attaches. Senate Republican leader Bob Dole, who strongly supported Clinton on Somalia, questioned why the President even had to send six warships to enforce an embargo. So how can Clinton now press the Haitian rulers to yield power without using enough force to risk losing American lives? An embargo worked once, at least to the extent of getting rulers' signatures on an agreement, but Administration policymakers concede they will have some problems matching that success if the military leaders do not cave in quickly. Haiti is thought to have laid in a supply of oil sufficient to last at least three months (some reports say six months). Also, Haiti is difficult to blockade because it shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, which can and reportedly has slipped supplies across the land border. Another idea is to freeze the assets held outside the country by prominent Haitians, so that they lose money by clinging to power. That was done, however, during the initial U.N. embargo, and American planners suspect that the military leaders have now moved and concealed their foreign bank accounts, placing them out of U.S. reach. To be effective, a freeze would have to be extended downward. U.S. officials say they have in fact targeted the bank accounts of wealthy families who support the junta but who might be inclined to stop doing so if faced with losing their money. A further option is to cut off Haiti from all civil air traffic, in effect isolating it from contact with the outside world. At best, though, an agreement to democratize the country is likely to be reached only slowly, step by step -- and then, says one senior official, ''it's never going to be tidy, or easy, or work out the way anyone would want'' ideally. If nothing else, the Haiti crisis, coming before the U.S. can fully see its way out of Somalia, may cure Clinton of his belief that he can get by keeping half an eye on foreign policy at odd moments. The President once remarked that he wanted to spend no more time on Bosnia than absolutely necessary, because he had been elected to force the pace of domestic change, a statement that could generally stand for his approach to foreign affairs. To the extent that he did have to focus on foreign policy, he chose to concentrate on the problems he saw as most important. At a news conference last week, he ticked off a list of what he saw as successes: progress toward stability in Russia; progress toward a new trade agreement with Japan; the movement toward peace in the Middle East. Referring to Haiti and Somalia, one State Department official says, ''They are a lot less worrisome than nuclear war or peace in the Middle East.'' But as the current headlines may be driving home, the Somalias and Haitis of the world are important too. Clinton has often remarked that the end of the cold war has left the U.S. with no overarching standard of when to intervene, when not. That is true, but it does not excuse him from failing to develop a new approach; ad hoc decisions can be defended, but there ought to be some rule to guide them. Moreover, decisions on the Somalias and Haitis contribute to a general impression of competence, or its opposite, which influences the inclination of the public to follow its President both domestically and abroad. Says one senior official: ''The real danger of places like Somalia, where you engage troops, is that it can affect the willingness of the country to remain engaged internationally on the really big ones. The Somalias really have to go right, because in an interdependent world it is very dangerous for us not to be engaged.'' The Haitis have to go right too.

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/Port-au-Prince, J.F.O. McAllister/ Washing ton and Andrew Purvis/Mogadishu