No Refuge for Haitians

By the time you read this column, Haiti will likely have vanished once again from the front page of your local newspaper. And the Bush administration hopes it stays that way.

For four months after Jean-Bertrand Aristide - the first democratically elected president of Haiti - was ousted in a military coup d'etat on September 29, 1991, this poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere received sparse coverage in most national media. But that changed dramatically on January 31, when the U.S. Supreme Court lifted (in a 6-3 vote) a lower court's injunction against forced repatriation of Haitian refugees.

Haitians started fleeing in droves after the return of military dictatorship in their country - nearly 15,000 in the four months after the coup, compared with the 1,334 who fled during the eight months that Aristide was in office.

There is no doubt that the deteriorating human rights situation inside Haiti since the coup contributed to the exodus. More than 1,500 people have been killed in a systematic campaign of political repression since the coup, according to international human rights observers, including Amnesty International. Yet U.S. officials have steadfastly maintained that most Haitian refugees do not present a "well-founded fear of persecution" - the international standard for political asylum.

When U.S. authorities began forcibly returning Haitian boat refugees in mid-November, refugee and human rights advocates took their case to the courts and eventually secured the injunction. Thousands of Haitians were left in limbo at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba - until the repatriation ban was lifted by the Supreme Court.

As Sojourners went to press, hundreds of Haitians were being forcibly returned each day, despite a loud outcry of opposition from a growing coalition of church leaders, human rights observers, and refugee advocates.

"Stop the repatriation now. Don't send people where they may die," said a statement by the U.S. Catholic Conference.

"The United States is using a variety of weak rationalizations to justify a bankrupt policy that violates the most fundamental principles of refugee protection," said Bill Frelick, senior policy analyst for the private U.S. Committee for Refugees.

And while U.S. officials were still clinging at press time to the claim that no Haitian refugees who had been forcibly repatriated suffered any persecution at the hands of the military rulers in that country, mounting evidence suggests otherwise.

Dozens of refugees who say they fled Haiti a second time after being repatriated told U.N. interviewers of repression faced by returned refugees. Their detailed accounts of arbitrary detentions, beatings, and disappearances were released to the media and the Supreme Court in February.

"It is increasingly clear that the political decision to pursue forced repatriation with a vengeance has overwhelmed even these disturbing reports of abuses, and there is no reason to believe serious attention will ever be paid to the claims of these individuals," Arthur C. Helton, of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, told The New York Times.

While the screening of refugees by INS interviewers at Guantanamo Bay has reportedly improved, with more Haitians allowed to pursue their political asylum cases in the United States, refugee advocates have called for the granting of "temporary protective status" for all Haitians fleeing their homeland until the human rights situation in Haiti has improved. (Legislation was pending in Congress at press time.)

But the Bush administration appears to be simply hoping the whole affair goes away. "The White House is banking on the fact that people won't care," a disillusioned Republican congressional staffer told Time magazine. "Politics, not principle, is the overriding consideration."

THE EASING of the economic embargo by the United States in early February was a further blow to the hopes of Haitians for a return to democracy under Aristide.

The U.S. decision came after an intense lobbying effort by U.S. businesses operating in Haiti (such as Wilson Sporting Goods and Izod sports wear), who maintained that the trade embargo was hurting Haitian and American workers. According to a report in The Washington Post, the lobbying effort was coordinated by a Washington trade organization known as Caribbean Latin American Action (CLAA), which includes former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams among its board of directors.

"We saw a lot of these companies about to go broke," a senior State Department official told the Post. "In something like this, you have to make adjustments."

The embargo has been leaky from the start, with gasoline flowing as freely as ever in Haiti, according to observers. Critics of U.S. policy say the Bush administration has ignored violations of the embargo, unlike the tight enforcement of the embargo against Iraq last year.

"If Haiti had oil, this thing would have been settled a long time ago," Bill Quigley, a Catholic priest who has lived in Haiti since 1974, told Sojourners.

Interviewed by a reporter in Venezuela, where he is in exile, Aristide said that the easing of the sanctions sent a message to the Haitian military that it no longer needed to negotiate the return of the democratically-elected government. Instead, the deposed president predicted the easing of the sanctions would increase repression in Haiti and prompt even more to flee the country.

With Organization of American States-brokered negotiations now appearing dead in the water, observers say it will take international pressure from the United Nations if democracy is to be restored in Haiti.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration appears to have turned its back on Aristide and the Haitian people.

"This is no different from U.S. policy toward Central America in the 1980s," says the Quixote Center's Maureen Fiedler. "[The administration] wants no one in power in this hemisphere who is going to oppose the economic, political, and military policies of the United States. That's the bottom line."

Chris Herman assisted with research