Hostage to Violence

By CATHY BOOTH

Somewhere in northern Haiti: a lone human-rights worker sifts through a stack of Polaroid pictures. Photos of men beaten so badly that chunks of flesh are missing from their buttocks. Pregnant women with deep bruises on their bellies. Young girls gone vacant-eyed after rape. The pictures, the man says, are proof of brutal government repression in Haiti, in this case the coastal city of Gonaives, against supporters of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the President ousted in a 1991 military coup.

Horrific as the pictures are, observers for the U.N. and the Organization of American States returned from Gonaives last week with even grimmer detail. In the predawn hours of April 22, they reported, soldiers and paramilitary gunmen surrounded Raboteau, a slum where Aristide support runs strong, and shot down men, women and children as they fled toward the sea and their fishing boats. Because many bodies were lost at sea, the observers could not give an exact death toll, but witnesses claimed that at least 28 people had died. Soldiers hastily buried some victims in shallow graves that were soon dug up by pigs and dogs.

In Washington, where Aristide languishes in exile, the Gonaives killings finally forced the Clinton Administration to revise yet again its ineffective Haiti policy. The U.S. called on the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution imposing a worldwide embargo, more sweeping than the sanctions in force for the past six months, unless members of the junta in Port-au-Prince resigned or left the country within 15 days; the clock would start ticking the moment the resolution passed. "We're not alone in being frustrated, irritated, furious about what is going on in Haiti," said Madeleine Albright, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. The proposed sanctions would stop most trade and all travel to Haiti with the exception of regularly scheduled flights. In view of rising malnournishment and disease on the island, however, food and medicine shipments would be exempt. In addition, some 600 Haitian soldiers, policemen and their families would be barred from going abroad and their assets would be frozen worldwide.

The first casualty of the new Haiti policy, however, was not the Haitian military but Lawrence Pezzullo, Washington's special envoy to Haiti, who was forced to step down. After a year on the job, Pezzullo had come to symbolize the Clinton Administration's ambivalence toward the military leaders. In Port- au-Prince he had become so irrelevant that the Haitian army no longer bothered to show up for meetings with him. A frustrated Pezzullo admitted recently that the U.S. had been trapped into playing "rhetorical gymnastics with the military."

The U.S. proposal for sharper U.N. action still sets no date for Aristide's return and provides no real muscle to remove a junta whose members are getting rich smuggling in fuel and food from the Dominican Republic, in defiance of the existing U.N. ban and a voluntary OAS trade embargo. Senator Christopher Dodd, an advocate of tougher sanctions who recently returned from a trip to . Haiti, believes new U.N. measures will not be enough. With dissatisfaction over Clinton's Haiti policy mounting in Congress, a senior Administration official admitted that no option, not even military intervention, was being ruled out. In the past the Pentagon has balked at the idea of using force.

All the while, the Haitian military has been tightening its hold on the country. Since February, international observers have chronicled a "systematic" attempt by the army and its paramilitary cohort, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, to terrorize Aristide supporters. In the 31 months since his overthrow, about 3,000 are said to have been killed; over the past three months, the observers documented 157 suspicious deaths and 16 abductions as well as illegal detentions at secret torture centers. In Gonaives alone, the Catholic Church's Peace and Justice Commission reported 7,300 arbitrary arrests last year. Bribes of $25 to $30, a third of the average Haitian's annual salary, are demanded to win the release of detainees.

One aspect of Clinton's Haiti policy that has not changed is insistence on the immediate repatriation of Haitian boat people. The President waived the policy last month to allow some 400 refugees ashore in Florida because of "humanitarian concerns," including allegations of abuse. But later, 113 others were turned back.

Frustrated with the Administration's seeming indifference, 24 U.S. unions will call for a boycott of Haitian goods this week. At the Washington headquarters of TransAfrica, a group that lobbied successfully on behalf of the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa, activist Randall Robinson began the third week of a hunger strike to protest the U.S. policy of repatriating Haitian refugees. He saw nothing to please him about Clinton's Haiti stance. "The President is responsible for what constitutes a disaster in Haiti," he said. "The longer he waits, the more people die."

With reporting by Ann M. Simmons/Washington