This one is going to mind f-ck both the Dems and Reps.
NEWS ANALYSIS
Haiti situation may force U.S. to step in
Florida senators worry about refugee influx
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004
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Pressure on the Bush administration to send U.S. troops to Haiti is rising, as the Caribbean nation teeters on the brink of full-fledged civil war and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide pleads for foreign assistance to put down a fast-growing rebellion.
While U.S. officials have downplayed the chances of any military intervention, some observers say the Bush administration's hand may be forced if things deteriorate further.
The situation worsened Wednesday, as the government's police force crumbled in the nation's second-largest city, Cap Haitien, and other northern towns, with police declaring they could not repel threatened rebel attacks. It now appears likely that the rebels -- a rag-tag mix of former pro- Aristide street thugs and former leaders of the rightist FRAPH death squads --
will advance rapidly in the coming days.
Appeals for a second U.S. troop mission in a decade are anathema to many administration officials and Republican members of Congress, who have long distrusted Aristide and opposed any use of U.S. power to help him. In 1994, President Bill Clinton sent 20,000 U.S. troops to overthrow the brutal military junta and restore Aristide to office, beginning an occupation that lasted two years. Republicans opposed the move, arguing that Aristide was a mentally unstable, pro-Castro leftist.
A partisan issue may be arising again. Florida's two Democratic senators, Bill Nelson and Bob Graham, said Wednesday that the Bush administration is resisting their appeals for U.S. military action to prevent a flood of possible Haitian refugees heading toward the shores of their state -- as happened before Clinton's decision to intervene in 1994.
Nelson said he favors sending in an armed force to protect civilians and to force a political settlement. "If you act now, you cut off all those problems at the source," he said.
"If we can send military forces to Liberia -- 3,000 miles away -- we certainly can act to protect our interests in our own backyard," said Graham, referring to Bush's short-lived dispatch of U.S. Marines last year. "Inaction can no longer be our policy."
While the Bush administration is saying publicly it has no plans to intervene, it apparently is concerned about a possible refugee crisis. U.S. interagency meetings on what to do about Haiti include representatives from the Homeland Security Department and the Coast Guard, a senior U.S. official who asked not to be identified told the Associated Press.
In 1994, Haiti became a partisan football between Democrats and Republicans, and U.S. aid to the Aristide government was quickly slashed to the bone after the Republicans won control of Congress in the 1994 elections, only seven weeks after the start of the invasion.
"Haiti was a more polarizing intervention than any of the other ones," said James Dobbins, a veteran U.S. diplomat who served as special presidential envoy to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan under Clinton and the current administrations.
"Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo were not particularly controversial as far as U.S. aid was concerned, but Haiti was divided precisely along party lines," Dobbins said in an interview with The Chronicle. "All Democrats were in favor of aid, and all Republicans were opposed."
In a book he co-authored, "America's Role in Nation-Building From Germany to Iraq," published by the Rand think tank late last year and partly financed by the Pentagon, Dobbins laid out the factors that meant the Haiti occupation was doomed to fail:
The United States made no major effort to rebuild roads, ports and airports or to reform the judicial and penal systems; U.S. reconstruction aid to Haiti was only one-fifth the amount per capita given to Bosnia and one- tenth the quantity given to Kosovo under American occupation; and after 1996, U.S. aid to the Port-au-Prince government shrank to virtually the same amount as it had been to the military junta prior to its overthrow by U.S. troops.
"There was a real prejudice against nation-building by Republicans generally," said Madeleine Albright, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the years of the Haiti occupation and later became secretary of state. "It was very difficult to get appropriations for a long time to be able do a good job," she said in a Chronicle interview.
The chill deepened in 2000, when the United States froze $500 million in desperately needed aid to Haiti because of parliamentary election results that international observers viewed as flawed.
U.S. officials have demanded that Aristide reach an agreement with the opposition for new elections, but the opposition parties, which have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from U.S. agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy -- a huge amount in dirt-poor Haiti -- have refused to negotiate.
The result, said Alex Dupuy, a sociology professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., who closely follows Haiti, is that the opposition to Aristide now has "a virtual veto power over U.S. aid, with no incentive to negotiate with the president. This has pushed Haiti closer to the brink of full-fledged civil war. The risks of huge bloodshed are very high."
But by nearly all accounts, Aristide has made matters worse, and his government has been remarkably corrupt and incompetent. He disbanded the army in 1996, leaving the 4,000-man national police as the government's only armed institution -- and, as the desertions showed Wednesday, it may be almost totally ineffectual. Amid this security vacuum, Aristide has relied on street gangs, named chimeres, which have terrorized the political opposition.
On Wednesday, the opposition coalition, the Group of 184, ruled out any negotiations with Aristide and insisted that he resign -- an all-or-nothing stance that increases the likelihood of a widespread fight between pro- Aristide chimeres and the FRAPH-led rebels.
The Bush administration has sent mixed messages, with hard-liners such as the State Department's Western Hemisphere envoy, Otto Reich, and the ambassador to the Organization of American States, Roger Noriega, suggesting that Aristide step down. But on Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell defended Aristide, saying, "He is right now the free and fairly elected president of Haiti."
The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday threw its weight behind Caribbean and Latin American efforts to find a peaceful political solution. But diplomats said there was no discussion about sending U.N. peacekeepers.
Only France, Haiti's former colonial ruler until the 1804 slave revolution, has said it is considering using military muscle. Because the U.S. military is overextended with its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a French decision to intervene might be convenient for the Bush administration.
But some analysts say any French intervention would be almost unthinkable because it would mark a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the policy announced by U.S. President James Monroe in 1823 declaring that European powers should not interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. The policy has been a bulwark of U.S. foreign policy since then.
Chronicle news services contributed to this report.E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com. |
