Aristide Development
Caldwell, Christopher
Christopher Caldwell Aristide Development Not content with having destroyed the Haitian economy through sanctions, the U.S. now wants to impose a would-be tyrant by force. How Haiti policy has...
...There might be an initial euphoria if Aristide were returned with an American force...
...As we went to press, word from inside the Aristide camp was that Aristide was not returning Gray's calls...
...Will Halperin, then, have a key role in driving U.S...
...He would not return repeated calls seeking comment...
...Prosper Avril that he go to Haitian public schools and rally youth in support of the dictator...
...Caputo and Pezzullo negotiated with them for a month...
...Herard Abraham—who had quashed the Lafontant coup and become a symbol of pro-democracy sentiment within the armed forces—in favor of Cedras...
...That list, incidentally, included only blacks, according to administration sources...
...The International Liaison Office for Jean-Bertrand Aristide (not, interestingly, for the Government of Haiti) occupies a suite of offices—paid for with Haitian government funds—at 1000 29th St., near Aristide's old offices...
...Jackson allegedly demanded a fee that was stratospheric by Haitian standards, and was rebuffed...
...Registration forms filed with the Department of Justice list three American lawyers—Michael Levy, Steve Brescia, and Beverly Bell—as its principal lobbyists, but the director of the organization, if not the real power, is Aristide's cousin Fritz Aristyl, according to a source who has worked closely with it...
...military at the service of someone who is described by a close associate as "a cross between Idi Amin and the Singing Nun...
...mistake...
...Nor is it to dispute that the army is condoning street violence by right-wing groups—and even committing it...
...In mid-April, Pezzullo was ousted, and soon replaced by Gray, who spent an early interview on the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" praising Robinson for his anti-administration remarks and faithfully parroting the Aristide line on drugs and refugees...
...It was referred to by Aristide associates as the "day" apartment, and that was where he would entertain guests from outside the inner circle...
...How many cases were there of this happening...
...The army put down the coup swiftly, but Lavalas mobs rampaged through the streets all the same, killing a hundred people and systematically destroying non-Lavalas businesses in their dechouquage (the word is usually translated as "cleaning" by Aristide sympathizers, but is really closer to "uprooting...
...His office was renamed the Cabinet Particulier du President, and he continued to authorize checks, which Malval could not do...
...Fabricated Human Rights Violations Aristide supporters sought to link the immigrant problem to a human rights problem...
...may already be liable for the money spent, for the asset seizures violate the Haitian constitution, and quite possibly international law...
...With similar fickleness, Robinson had all but ignored the South African elections that he had worked for much of his life to make possible...
...That's how the law became a sentence for life...
...But don't think Aristide isn't going to send his guys up into the hills...
...What is happening to all that money is unclear: During the brief premiership of Robert Malval that was part of the hoped-for implementation of Governor's Island last autumn, Hala Observateur was leaked a copy of the Aristide government's fourth-quarter budget for 1993, which showed $740,000 per month budgeted for Malval's ministerial cabinet...
...This is money that Aristide has otherwise wanted hidden: according to a source in the Haitian business world, during his seven-month term, Aristide raised hackles at the Latin America division of AT&T 34 The American Spectator July 1994 by ordering the proceeds from Haiti's international phone traffic moved to a numbered Panamanian account...
...Like U.N...
...Racial Politics If race plays an important role in Haitian domestic life, it is not in any way analogous to Jim Crow or apartheid...
...million had been drawn...
...He is only a senator...
...FRAPH, then, is less a rebirth of the Tontons Macoute, as the American media would have it, than a reorienting of Lavalas's constituency...
...Yet Aristide has succeeded in casting U.S...
...Aristide also hired a $175-per-hour public relations firm, even though the quarterly budget that Observateur editor Joseph printed has no money earmarked for public relations...
...Reminded that the Rwanda crisis has cost 200,000 lives, he says, "I weigh my words carefully...
...ambassador Jean Casimir through the Haitian government account at Riggs Bank of Washington, but Aristide's disgraced ex-prime minister Preval, who is supposed to be playing no role in this government, still authorizes the checks, which are signed by Preval's sister Marie-Claude Calvin...
...The scrupulous Malval, who was not only a major backer of Aristide during his campaign but also runs the publishing house that printed all of Aristide's books, claims he never received a penny of that money...
...Former Pennsylvania Democratic Rep...
...At least one Canadian account exists.million on the telephone account, which originally contained $53 million...
...The less apocalyptic scenario has potshots at U.S...
...They decided to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment...
...Even though the majority of the cable was about right-wing violence against Aristide supporters—and the need to send monitors to stop it—a Lavalas sympathizer working inside the embassy in Port-au-Prince thought it sufficiently off the party line to leak it, in hopes that a sympathetic journalist could pre-emptively discredit the report...
...It has long mystified Haiti watchers on the right and left that Aristide' s first act as president was to fire a half-dozen of the most professional soldiers in the Haitian army, and then to sack its commander Gen...
...Unfortunately, the administration does not listen to Creole radio, and it wasn't until days later that it found out about the Aristide rejection—by mail...
...The Washington Post has referred to the "three-quarters of Haitians" who want Aristide back...
...business interests, the consequences of trapping two culturally irreconcilable and implacably hostile nations on an island without any supply of goods or means of transporting food are ugly to contemplate...
...The source also said that the goal of the International Liaison was the destruction of Haiti's business classes and their replacement with an agrarian smallholding Communist state—whether this is stated policy, however, or simple parroting of Aristide' s more incendiary speeches, is unclear...
...They did so by painting the Haitian refugee flow—which reached record numbers in 1994—as directly linked to political persecution following Aristide's departure...
...Robinson's wife, Hazel Ross-Robinson, now a staffer for Rep...
...While the press has treated the Congressional Black Caucus's interest in Haiti as a newfound brief, the caucus's interest—and interests—in Haiti are actually longstanding...
...Over the following year, Chamblain, along with the more flamboyant Emmanuel "Toto" Constant,, launched a right-wing political party, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), which has been blamed for much of the political violence in Haiti over the past nine months...
...The blades are rusted, the handles dirty...
...foreign policy as a morality play, with himself and his Lavalas movement painted as forces of "democracy" and the Haitian army and opposition political parties lumped together as "thugs...
...The other major government organ founded by Aristide is Radio 16 Desanm, a short-wave propaganda network that employs Preval's sister and brother-in-law and is housed in the Haitian embassy on Massachusetts Ave...
...In April, he called veteran drug witness Gabriel Taboada before his Senate narcotics subcommittee to testify specifically that police captain Joseph Michel Francois, despite being a low-profile officer until organizing the anti-Aristide coup, had been a kingpin of the Haitian drug world ten years ago...
...In Haiti, that is the role of the senate, which never recognized the Aristide choices...
...And when it becomes apparent that they're going to burn the whole f---ing city down, don't think that U.S...
...As chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the 1980s, Barnes was among the most outspoken leaders of the congressional effort to thwart supply of the Nicaraguan contras...
...CI © The American Spectator /All rights reserved...
...These jobs are gone permanently: to Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic...
...38 The American Spectator July 1994 when Ted Kennedy refused to take one of his phone calls after a meeting between Aristide, Kennedy, and Kennedy aide Michael Myers, Aristide spat at his assistant, "Get him on the phone...
...But the time has come to reassess the popularity of Aristide in Haiti as well...
...As he wrote in In the Parish of the Poor: "The forces of order wanted us to vote so that it would appear to the outside world that we were a happy, peaceful democracy, and then the exploitation and corruption could go on just as before...
...But if anyone has come to stand for the Aristide public relations effort it is former Maryland Democratic congressman Michael Barnes...
...One DEA field agent says there has been a recent major focus on Haiti at the agency's Miami office, but denies any link to Clinton's military or policy objectives...
...There is no curfew on the streets of Port-au-Prince, and at midnight, groups of half a dozen young men can be seen gathered, chatting on street corners...
...Above and beyond the damage an island-wide blockade would wreak on U.S...
...It is clear that there is a substantial increase [in refugees]," says one veteran of the Haitian refugee situation...
...the center of an angry internecine feud at the Chicago consulate...
...But that still adds up to big money: $303,237.60 for billings between September 29 and December 7, 1993, to take the last period for which records are available...
...Compare this force to the Sandinista army, which, in a country half that size, could call into the field a quarter of a million men (several dozen of them trained to fly MiGs) and a fleet of state-of-the-art Flying Fortress helicopter gunships...
...After the September 1991 coup, under an executive order issued by President Bush, funds frozen in the United States—the bulk of them fees for international phone calls and airplane landing fees, but with various private moneys included—were to be delivered up to Aristide's personal use...
...foreign policy, and earn his current firm, Hogan & Hartson, a compensation that started at $55,000 a month...
...When the election percentages were made public in January 1991, it was announced that Aristide had received 67 percent of the vote...
...The following August, after the attempted coup against Gorbachev, Aristide offered the Soviet president his "regret that conditions did not allow the people of the Soviet Union to do what the Haitian people did on the night of January 5-6, 1991...
...Choking Them to Death The first track of U.S...
...At State, area expertise was traded for political savvy...
...Disbursals from the U.S...
...Pezzullo confirms the account...
...According to an Aristide-camp source, Then there is Aristide's Dan Lasater: Roland Seide, a major financial backer Who was arrested on drug charges during Aristide's presidency and personally sprung from jail by Aristide within days...
...He put out a record of his preachments called Capitalism Is a Mortal Sin...
...Including police chief Pierre Cherubin, who now serves in his Washington government...
...That Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was a well-remunerated lobbyist for the Duvalier regime is a matter of public record...
...Perhaps the existence of this remnant is what New York Democrat Rep...
...What are his objectives at this point...
...The document shows six residences and two bank accounts totaling $40,000 at the pre-embargo exchange rate in the Delmas Branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia...
...To remove—or even decapitate—the army could untether FRAPH from its only external loyalty...
...By early May, the CIA was being let back in, as Clinton loyalist Strobe Talbott emerged as the key interagency player...
...When Berger left his partnership at Hogan & Hartson to take up his administration post, Barnes—just four months later—pulled up stakes at Arent Fox and took his account to Hogan & Hartson, potentially bringing millions into a firm that Berger will have every right to rejoin once his stint in the White House is over...
...ARISTIDE: That is what you are learning...
...Donald McHenry of Georgetown University...
...Barnes had run the Clinton campaign in Maryland: Would Clinton wish to embarrass the lawyer who had secured a contentious state for him and raised millions for his campaign coffers...
...Late this May, the director of the Tenth Department's Chicago branch, Harry Fouche, Was at...
...In a letter that arrived at press time, White House counsel Lloyd Cutler wrote that Berger did consult both the White House counsel and the NSC's legal adviser, and that both okayed his participation...
...But in the days after the September coup in Port-au-Prince, Aristide supporters called for a general strike...
...In fact, an administration official says, the United States never at any point suggested a single name to him...
...Chamblain's womb and covered both mother and fetus with gasoline...
...The Miami immigration lawyer Ira Kurzban gets a six-figure salary from the Aristide government as Aristide's lawyer, and handles many of the government assets...
...A Dead-End "From now on," says Lawrence Pezzullo, "our agenda will be Aristide's agenda...
...A resurgent Macoutism is, of course, a pre-eminent worry, and its primary focus in recent years has been that Aristide would use a mandate in the constitution of 1987—which called for the separation of the police and the armed forces—to set up a private goon squad...
...After the July murder of five unarmed youths who had been spirited out of a parking lot by Port-au-Prince police, Aristide thwarted attempts to investigate those with authority over the matter...
...Embassy sent a classified cable to Washington that said, in part: The Haitian left, including President Aristide and his supporters in Washington and here, consistently manipulate or even fabricate human rights abuses as a propaganda tool...
...As their other progressive projects have fallen by the wayside, these backers have resorted to demagoguery, bought into such falsehoods as the administration's manufactured Haitian drug crisis, stood by while the president decimated the foreign-policy bureaucracy to stack it with compliant partisans, and gone to every length possible to protect the only radical leftist in the hemisphere brought to power in a free election—even though his government was evolving into a murderous tyranny by the time he was removed...
...These, checks need only one signature, that of a young female assistant who is the president's cousin...
...Look at their machetes...
...I am the president...
...Aristide is fond of speaking of "the deadly economic infection called capitalism...
...Kerry recently urged in the New York Times that the United States invade, among other reasons, "to root out drug traffickers...
...The suit was thrown out when an assistant to Clinton-appointed U.S...
...Christopher Dodd means when he calls the embargo "a joke...
...That journalist was found in the compliant Murray Kempton, who wrote a column that was a compendium of all the smugness and ignorance that has made its way into recent media coverage of Haiti...
...Baby Doc he is not, but Aristide does have a princely set-up...
...That led Joseph to speculate that the Aristide government had been fabricating its outlays to dupe the U.S...
...But Aristide's most important lawyers, perhaps, were at the firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky and Lieberman...
...to even negotiate with: in recent months, he has been in close contact with Evans Francois, brother of the Port-au-Prince police chief whom...
...Then there is Aristide's Dan Lasater: Roland Seide, a major financial backer who was arrested on drug charges during Aristide's presidency and personally sprung from jail by Aristide within days...
...This is only one of the connections that bind Aristide to the forces he publicly calls too dirty for the U.S...
...But that lobbying effort has taken on new dimensions in the Clinton administration, as it has come to be spearheaded by a variety of establishment-left figures to whom the president owes political debts...
...CROWD: No...
...None whatsoever...
...Brothers and sisters, it is our mission to help them stand up and live as human beings...
...They've got no planes, no copters, no radios, no money, no gas...
...That is, Kurzban, who complains of a "floating Berlin Wall" constructed around Haiti to keep migrants on the island, wants the island sealed off for all purposes except migration...
...Hogan & Hartson, in fact, had direct phone contact with Berger during this period to discuss the "restoration of democratically elected government in Haiti...
...after an article in the National Journal raised questions about Berger's negotiating mostfavored-nation status for China, since he had, lobbied for Payless Shoes, a major Chinese trading partner...
...There are strong indications that he doesn't want to go back to Haiti—at least until he can rule absolutely...
...A mob of any size could eventually overwhelm the weak Haitian army, says an administration analyst...
...And in the name of saving lives, the embargo kills Haitians at the rate of at least a thousand a month, according to research by the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies...
...Barnes has claimed to bill up to sixty hours a week and to charge Aristide half-price for his services: $175, instead of The American Spectator July 1994 35 the going rate of $350...
...Owens's firm has been involved in giving workshops for the Department of Health and Human Services, but in early March, Owens took a government job, as a senior policy adviser to Commerce Secretary Ron Brown...
...Aristide terrified most Haitians above the level of the lumpen masses...
...A machete is useful in almost any situation...
...Who will pay for it then...
...In light of that interest, Jesse's active involvement in the recent, ill-fated presidential candidacy of Dominican leftist Jose Francisco Pena Gomez perhaps deserves more scrutiny...
...Pezzullo imputes Dodd's behavior not to dishonesty but to a staff that is prone to "bizarre conspiracy theories" about executive-branch negotiations...
...In fact, the power structure was so closed to non-blacks in that era that Gen...
...In early March, most likely frightened at the prospect of an accommodating Haitian congress, just as he had been frightened by the prospect of a reasonable military at Governor's Island, Aristide booted from his legislative FNCD coalition the largest leftist party in the country (KONAKOM...
...What's more, deputy national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, who is in charge of Haiti policy at the NSC, was by all accounts a close friend of Barnes, which is where his contacts have raised suspicions...
...witness protection program and who claims he received his orders from high-level Lavalas sources...
...At one point, the source says, steering committee members discussed the worry that money given to Ambassador Jean Casimir had not gone to the country's poor, to whom it had been earmarked, despite the assurances of Casimir to the contrary...
...Shortly before the meeting of Haitian "democratic elements" that took place in Miami on January 15 of this year, chief State Department Haiti expert Sen...
...He has not merely condoned violence but allegedly even ordered killings...
...Human Rights Watch, which now stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the return-Aristide coalition, issued a detailed report on such abuses in 1991...
...Assets in Washington Since his arrival in the United States, Aristide has used those funds for a public relations blitz...
...Charles Rangel, meanwhile, has made the bizarre assertion that the Haitian army won't fire on white people...
...secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Vice President Gore made a second effort to anticipate any objections—for example, the installation of a prime minister that Aristide felt he could not trust—and said that if Aristide ever felt there had been bad faith in the implementation, the two would serve as witnesses and re-implement sanctions...
...Interestingly, exact vote counts were never printed, although there is little serious dispute of Aristide's overwhelming victory...
...When they were talking about giving fifteen years inside the court, according to the law .. outside the people began hitting their Pere Lebrun on the pavement, because the people's ire was swelling up...
...The following night, as movements for a coup began, Lavalas crowds in the town of Les Cayes necklaced Sylvia Claude, an outspoken political opponent of Aristide...
...processing policy and management of the asylum policy...
...Five days after that letter was written, Michael Barnes brought the Haiti account to Hogan & Hartson...
...The case of Jean-Claude Paul, the army kingpin who made $40 million dollars facilitating cocaine shipments between December 1986 and the time he died by eating poisoned pumpkin soup in June 1988, is well documented...
...Demme has emerged as the leader of the group...
...Note, though, that drug traffic and production in Vietnam—a country that Keny fought tooth and nail to open relations with—currently dwarf anything that has ever taken place in Haiti...
...Backing away from institution building and rights monitoring, while supporting Aristide, has contributed to the present deteriorating human rights situation here and the exploitation of the tragedy by Aristide and his Washington lobbying apparatus...
...When Gladys Lafontant, widow of the slain coup leader, filed a $10-million civil suit in Brooklyn against Aristide last November, charging him with Lafontant's murder, Aristide hired Rabinowitz Boudin to defend him, paying them tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees out of the Haitian treasury...
...At the NSC, Berger was still deeply involved, relying heavily on the services of Nancy Soderberg, a Clinton campaign worker and former Kennedy aide who is the point-man for contact with the Aristide camp, even though she met the exiled president only in March 1993...
...When Preval finally showed up, after several delays, it was with a Lavalas mob armed with tires and oil cans...
...He is married to former congressional candidate Magda Montiel Davis, who last April, during a visit to Cuba, was videotaped (as a kind of Castroite practical joke) extolling Castro to his face as her "teacher" and thanking him "for everything you have done for my people...
...The "monkish" one-bedroom apartment the Washington Post and others described was also on the fourth floor...
...Industrial jobs, which once numbered at least 150,000, have fallen to under 10,000...
...That begged the question of the role played by his prime minister Rene Preval, who did have control of the jails and who continues to be the most important figure in Aristide's Washington government...
...And they have kept tightening, under pressure from the American left that they were somehow not "real...
...Administration sources were expecting friction to arise with Hazel Ross-Robinson, who had apparently been at loggerheads with Phlebani throughout their time in Gray's office...
...But under Aristide, there was no end to Haitian-style armed abuses by the state, either...
...In recent years, he built a luxury hotel in Port-au-Prince valued at $1 million and until getting sick (he is reportedly in the advanced stages of AIDS) was a nightly high-stakes player at the capital's casinos...
...And he did it by ingeniously blaming the previous administration for the present Secretary of State Warren Christopher were described as "lukewarm, but able to be rolled...
...Kurzban, whose past clients have included Cuba's central bank, denounced them as "extremists...
...Joe Kennedy (D-Mass...
...Hoover does not recall such a discussion...
...Demme and Glover in particular have been useful to President Aristide, even serving as his bad cops when diplomacy required...
...Nonetheless, Aristide is now seen in Washington circles as democracy's symbol, his election success described in mythic, not historical, terms...
...A U.S...
...congressmen...
...Worst of all, the embargo, by driving out of business the middle class on which hopes for Haiti's democratic future rest, exacerbates the class rifts in Haitian society...
...Aristide's behavior has raised speculation about whether he even wants to go back to Haiti—at least, whether he would go back without U.S...
...He should have brought it through Haiti...
...In the summer of 1993, Jonathan was even guaranteed one of the seats on the plane scheduled to take Aristide back to Port-au-Prince in October, which Aristide hangers-on had been jockeying for, according to a source close to Aristide...
...Robinson derided Clinton's policy as "racist," to which Clinton responded, "I understand and respect what he's doing...
...With Clinton desperate for an intervention and the best advice dead-set against it, what followed was an Arkansasstyle attempt to stack all the agencies with loyalists and war enthusiasts...
...Their justification for doing this is that they are an unarmed force arrayed against an armed and brutal military...
...excluding the January 1991 Lavalas rampage and the September 1991 coup—has, if anything, risen since the "blood-soaked" Bush years...
...A spokesman for chamber of deputies' commission on human rights said that it was only as of this spring that killings from all quarters had risen above the level of 14 to 25 per month, and that they were now hovering at about 50...
...Now divorced from any negotiating strategy beyond self-congratulatory moralism, sanctions have become a disembodied act of barbarism...
...On top of the other legal help, Aristide' s young Haitian-American lawyer/adviser Mildred Trouillot is paid $6,000 a month, plus rent, expenses, and office space, according to documents...
...protection and all non-Lavalas sectors of the society devastated...
...Talbott has one great virtue, according to an administration source: "He doesn't back an invasion because he suspects he doesn't know enough about it...
...The information the DEA has on Seide, it should be noted, was gathered not by the agency itself but from Haitian military sources...
...The peasants let the knives hang at their sides except when they are working in the field...
...Now he has ensured that he has a working majority in neither house, making any future government he would lead unviable—unviable as a democracy, that is...
...I'm not defending them...
...But the real story is that Aristide has been repudiated by the heroes of the Haitian democracy movement of the late 1980s, even members of the PANPRA socialist bloc and many former Lavalas associates...
...That's exactly what they wanted," says a source close to those negotiations...
...Burton Wides, a former aide to Sen...
...Aristide is still the most popular single politician in Haiti, and whether or not his mandate has evaporated among the populace as a whole, he still has a solid constituency among the poorest of the poor...
...Clinton Manufactures a Consensus In response to Black Caucus pressure to pander to Aristide, the administration—blood-soaked or not—decided to stop pursuing the two-track strategy of getting the military to give up power and getting Aristide to form a broad-based government, in favor of one that made unilateral concessions to Aristide...
...They're pieces of s--t, torturers, maybe they should be removed...
...as for the Lafontant killing, he would later claim that he had no control over jails...
...In fact, it includes food and medicine, too, for the Haitian agricultural sector requires fuel, just as its hospitals require electricity...
...Furthermore, Aristide has not called his peo76 The American Spectator July 1994 ple into the streets to protest...
...When this is all over," says one American consultant to Haitian interests, "the Haitians are going to sue us for the money Aristide has spent, and we're going to have to pay it all back...
...Lifestyles of the Aristide Cabinet Whether Aristide received personal benefits from the frozen funds is open to interpretation...
...Rep...
...What they don't want to do is be used as a justification for something unjustified, to be accused of having given bad information...
...By the same token, Aristide's presence could embolden Lavalas loyalists in the small towns to liquidate FRAPHists...
...But firing Abraham was a highly irregular move, and however much Aristide may complain about Haiti's military, it is—at the top level—being run by the leader of his choice...
...He has close ties to the institutions—particularly the army and various paramilitary groups—that he excoriates as radical rightists, and is implicated in the very crimes, such as drug dealing, that he imputes to them...
...Aristide was completely under Julie's control [from the time he went into exile] until after the 1992 campaign," says one Haitian source...
...Meanwhile, gas continues to be smuggled across the border from the Dominican Republic—and the U.S...
...whereas previously only 2-3 percent of boat people undergoing "on-board prescreening" had been granted hearings, the new procedures put in place after ABC v. Thornburgh brought the rate considerably higher, says a longtime INS analyst...
...Aristide formed two agencies of the Haitian state in the U.S...
...She lost a little bit of power then...
...ARISTIDE: The masses have their own little tool, their own little secret, their own wisdom...
...It is a violent situation, and one day the people under that table will rise up in righteousness, and knock the table of privilege over, and take what rightfully belongs to them...
...A guest list for one of Owens's fundraisers last year included such entertainment figures as Ed Begley, Jr., Danny Glover, Jonathan Demme, and Norman Lear...
...Regardless of whether one accepts the CIA reports of Aristide's mental instability—the administration is deeply divided on them, and they are by no means the discredited efforts of a "rogue CIA," as Joe Kennedy would have it—Aristide has shown himself to be flighty, weird, mendacious, and violent...
...But the army has already The American Spectator July 1994 77...
...Kennedy now favors restoring Aristide through a military invasion...
...George Stephanopoulos, favoring invasion, stood in for the president and impressed attendees as both the most vocal and the least informed participant...
...In fact, during Malval's tenure, Aristide forbade his colleagues to write or speak the words "Prime Minister" next to Malval's name...
...To which one Clinton administration official who tracked the floundering negotiating efforts replies: "That's bulls--t...
...In May 1991, Americans for Aristide took part in a now-notorious New York-based fundraiser for VOAM (Voye Ayiti Monte, or "Uplift Haiti"), which an early flier described as follows: Aristide...
...National security adviser Anthony Lake remained the most red-blooded war hawk...
...Aristide's forces have spent over $30 million of it thus far, and pledged $10 million more to rescue Haiti's credit, now in arrears by $100 million to multilateral banks alone...
...immigrant groups, Haiti's "friends," including Florida's Carrie Meek and others in the Black Caucus, set out to scare American voters into an invasion by threatening them with more black people...
...Kerry likes to draw a polarity between "Haiti's small wealthy, ruling mulatto elite" and the black masses...
...In his book In the Parish of the Poor—which anyone who considers him nonviolent can walk into a bookstore and buy—he writes: The rich of my country, a tiny percentage of our population, sit at a vast table covered in white damask and overflowing with good food, while the rest of my countrymen and countrywomen are crowded under that table, hunched over in the dirt and starving...
...The parlor game in Port-au-Prince now, obviously, is to guess how bad a catastrophe a United States invasion would result in...
...troops and ugly scenes out of a 1940s United Fruit strike...
...It is ironic that Antigua, one of the two countries in the hemisphere backing a U.S...
...But that hasn't stopped congressional and other Washington figures from clumsily casting Haiti as a racist analogue to South Africa...
...But indications are that Robinson's commitment is less to refugee policy reform• than to restoring Aristide to power...
...And you've got, to ask, if some Colombian tried to land a planeload of coke in Haiti, how in the hell would the Haitian army stop him...
...Aristide's spokesman rejected Gore's plan over Creole radio...
...Aristide never satisfactorily refuted the evidence that pointed to his involvement in the killing of Claude...
...As a result, certain House and Senate staffers began receiving unsolicited- information from the DEA that the Haitian army was not involved in any large-scale drug trafficking...
...This was hot a shift in policy but a retreat According to an Aristide-camp source, when Ted Kennedy refused to take one of his phone calls after a meeting between Aristide, Kennedy, and Kennedy aide Michael Myers, Aristide spat at his assistant, "Get him on the phone...
...When the Aristide government came to Washington, Jackson sought to use it to launch his son Jonathan's political/business career...
...Kempton accused the cable's author—who has devoted a career to fighting human rights abuses in very dangerous places—of "imperviousness to notions of possible moral distinction, however small, between murderers and murdered...
...There was more backpedaling to come: When the February parliamentary plan for Aristide's return—the one Dodd sought to discredit as soon as Aristide grew tired of it—hit a snag, the parliamentarians promised to meet any concessions Aristide might demand...
...Treasury started at $500,000 a month and have risen steadily, to their current point of $5.65.9 million per quarter...
...Contrary to press mythmaking, it was not so much Cedras as Aristide who "reneged" on the Governor's Island accord, by hinting broadly that he would scuttle his promised amnesty and prosecute army leaders as common criminals—or worse...
...When Tontons Macoute massacred thirty-four innocents at random on election day in 1987, Aristide saw it not as a tragedy but as a vindication...
...In March Senate subcommittee hearings, he did Aristide's work of trashing a plan launched by members of the Haitian chamber of deputies to return the ousted president to power...
...The administration has been making an effort to have [the DEA] provide them with evidence that senior people in the administration in Haiti are dealing in drugs," the official said...
...Ron Dellums (D-Cal...
...it was a foregone conclusion that Pezzullo's successor would be black, partly as a gift to the Black Caucus, and partly to defuse future claims from any quarter that the policy was racist...
...Stephanie Owens, a high-level Clinton associate who long maintained a close involvement with the regime's fundraising activities, was until recently a key player...
...This despite the seething hatred for the Kennedys Aristide evinced during his presidential campaign...
...Gray, who has no familiarity with...
...Even the Lavalas government estimates that such jobs produced 15 percent of the country's wealth as recently as three years ago, and the loss of that increment alone means that Haiti will emerge from this crisis unable to sustain its pre-existing international debt load...
...Observateur publisher Joseph says, "The problem with this administration is that it's been so extremist about Haiti...
...Clinton committed himself to the restoration of democracy in Haiti and the honoring of the results of the Haitian elections of December 1990...
...Asked whether the repeated waffling—verging on political self-destruction—made him think Aristide didn't want to go back, the official replied, "Yep...
...It was Hoover who urged the hiring of Michael Barnes and McKinney & McDowell, the source says...
...Julie Hoover, a New York veteran of left-wing causes who views Haiti's problem as "not just the army but the whole elite class," led the effort...
...Under these circumstances they see the truth as a flexible means to obtain a worthy political end...
...negotiators that they enlisted the ICITAP program, which had been used to retrain Noriega's "Dignity Battalions" and army into a professional police force in Panama...
...That $2.2 million has never been accounted for.1 The democratically elected Haitian chamber of deputies, which in April asked Secretary of State Warren Christopher for a thorough accounting of Aristide' s expenditures—a request that has thus far not even been acknowledged—claims to have documentation that as of April 15, Aristide had drawn $49.9 Expenses are supposed to be approved by Aristide's U.S...
...VOAM has no programs of its own, and turns over its collected pledges to those humanitarian causes determined to be essential in developing the country toward self-sufficiency...
...Treasury into releasing frozen funds...
...Sitting over coffee on his front porch, one prominent Haitian says, "You could have a situation that makes Rwanda look small...
...invasion, was the supplier for the Colombian drug lord Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha's paramilitary strike force, the largest drug army ever assembled on the planet...
...The day Pezzullo's departure was announced, his staffers at the Haiti working group draped the door to their suite of offices with black crêpe...
...So by most calculations, the Aristide government will be broke within months...
...The chamber once again adjourned and Haiti now faced a major constitutional crisis, with Aristide's government emerging as a "one-man, one-vote, one-time" democracy...
...But Catherine S. Manegold, in a New York Times Magazine article, mentioned that Aristide had moved from a fancy Georgetown apartment when it became a "painful p.r...
...Gray brought in a new team led by Somalia specialist Jim Dobbins (which may explain Gray's otherwise unfathomable references on "MacNeil/Lehrer" to getting the support of "the Africans" for U.S...
...Owens developed a friendship with Aristide and Mildred Trouillot while working as a special assistant on the Clinton transition team—she was in day-to-day contact with the president-elect...
...Haiti, was ostentatiously promoted to a level above Pezzullo...
...Second, after ABC (American Baptist Churches) v...
...They [the DEA] are practicing a little bit of insubordination here," said the source...
...Let alone active resistance: the flow of gasoline from the Dominican Republic to the Haitian capital could be held up with a few boulders:or stopped dead with a handful of bombs...
...He is only a senator...
...Christopher Dodd, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's subcommittee on Western Hemisphere and Peace Corps Affairs, has taken the driver's seat in sabotaging any initiatives that do not come directly from Aristide...
...First, in 1993, economic sanctions began to bite...
...Raoul Cedras, the mulatto who is Haiti's current military ruler, was admitted to military academy under a quota system...
...The real story is how the army came to trust—even foster—the paramilitary right in its current incarnation as the lesser of two evils, and how the majority of Haiti's democratic sector has come to prefer the army's temporary custody to what they fear would be an Aristide dictatorship...
...In 1989, according to Haitian sources, Jackson put forward a proposal to then–military ruler Gen...
...Soon thereafter, U.N...
...Clinton'thinks he's doing an anti-Vietnam here, that he's getting in on the right side of a people's revolution...
...has adopted Aristide's preferred policy of a near-total embargo on Haiti...
...It was President Bush who signed the executive order that would eventually allow Aristide to put the entire treasury of a sovereign state into an unprecedented Washington 32 The American Spectator July 1994 lobbying and public relations campaign...
...Jonathan attended several meetings with Aristide and Mildred Trouillot to discuss Jonathan's professed interest: the potentially lucrative business relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (although he was handicapped in that pursuit by knowing neither French, Spanish, nor Creole...
...According to a source who took part in it, the effort was directed by—and the monies delivered to—Guy Victor, de facto director of Haiti's Tenth Department, a leftist cooperative of expatriate Haitians that now favors a violent retaking of the island through an "international police force...
...Dodd, who spent two years in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic—"on the island of Hispaniola," as he is fond of sayinghas a longstanding interest in Haiti and was intimate with members of the Duvalier family, according to sources close to the Duvaliers...
...The picture that emerges from classified embassy cables and other sources is this: Much of the money Aristide stole from the Haitian treaThe American Spectator July 1994 75 sury and from private "alphabetization" programs was spent to buy off street toughs and organize them into small, politically loyal cells—called "neighborhood committees" or "vigilance brigades"—that resembled Castro's Committees in Defense of the Revolution...
...It was sufficiently worrisome to the U.S...
...Dodd set the hearings up to sandbag administration policy from the left, with a host of adversarial witnesses allowed to testify before the administration ones—a highly irregular procedure...
...President Aristide is directly involved with VOAM and his vision of a new Haiti can be realized through the use of its resources...
...Thethree exile papers—Hard Observateur, Haiti en Marche, and Haiti Progres—still circulate, albeit not widely, and Haiti still receives CNN...
...Kerry may not realize that for the better part of the last half-century, Haiti has been run by expropriative black-power regimes—that of Dumarsais Estime from 1946-50, and the two Duvalier dictatorships of 1957-86—and the black elite now enjoys a big share of the economic and political pie...
...While Talbott's constant refrain at top-level meetings concerned the need to "get the policy back in State," he brought that end about by putting State's Haiti experts in cold storage and dealing only with the newcomers, like Steinberg and Gray, who were effectively agents of the NSC...
...Did the people give Pere Lebrun that day...
...Where this property comes from is unclear, but syndicated columnist Robert Novak revealed last November that Aristide had received a series of three checks from the government of Taiwan (totaling $321,500) that he had cashed to personal accounts...
...Well after Malval putatively took over as prime minister on August 31 of last year, Preval retained full prime-ministerial power...
...A month before Aristide's inauguration, the potential violence of the regime was showcased in the aftermath of a coup attempt by Roger Lafontant, former head of the Tontons Macoute, the plainclothes private mafia founded by longtime dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier...
...Senior director Richard Feinberg, a war hawk who had been eclipsed by his Aristidecourting deputy Larry Rossen, was brought back into the picture...
...Aristide backed off, but whether directly or through intermediaries, sent Demme and Glover to release on bond a handful of Haitian refugees still held in Southern prisons...
...The day Gray arrived, he had an "in-briefing" in Anthony Lake's office with a group heavily weighted toward the pro-invasion camp: it included Stephanopoulos, Lake, Berger, Haiti working group chief-of-staff Rich Brown, NSC senior director Eric Schwartz, Feinberg, and Rossen...
...William Gray, The American Spectator July 1994 39 picked by Clinton to replace Pezzullo as the head of the State Department's Haiti policy, is one of Ross-Robinson's mentors...
...One Aristide associate claims that during a meeting in December 1992 with Aristide's "drug czar" and paramilitary adviser Patrick Elie, Dodd's chief foreign policy assistant Janice O'Connell warned that unless Aristide could disprove his involvement in the killing of Lafontant he would find no support in Washington to return him to power...
...It's just getting their ducks in a row, like on the Castro operation...
...There is some evidence that his popularity in Haiti is on the wane...
...If previous acts of pandering to Aristide are any indication, before this crisis is over, the Clinton administration will try to do exactly the same thing to the Dominican Republic that it has done to Haiti...
...Embassy spokesman said there had been "one killed, probably—over a year ago—and another guy who got poked in the eye...
...But the second, and cruadministration's policy: The tragedy is that President Bush could have halted—but did not—the butchery of the coup leaders in 1991...
...Says one administration official, "Pezzullo told [Aristide] in no uncertain terms that it would be a colossal mistake to use this thing to attack the government that was doing all it could to get him back in power...
...The court relented, and a week later Aristide whipped up crowds in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Croix-des-Bouquets: ARISTIDE: Does the Constitution tell people to forget their Pere Lebrun...
...As of last winter, he had rooms in both wings of the Georgetown Suites apartment complex at 1101-1111 30th St...
...According to an Aristide source, when associates of the exiled president expressed unhappiness with Barnes's work in late 1992, Barnes was able to play his last card—the fact that he would have formidable access to the incoming administration...
...While the U.S...
...According to friends of Chamblain, the mobs cut the baby out of Mrs...
...Vice President Al Gore andcial, move was to drive policy out of the State Department and into the more politicized National Security Council...
...who has smeared Haiti's elected parliament as "self-proclaimed leaders," was an early Aristide backer, even inviting the Haitian leader to his wedding...
...A Port-au-Prince source delivered a photocopy of Aristide's inventaire des biens from the last election, a personal-disclosure form that each presidential candidate must file by law...
...How did we get to the point of putting the U.S...
...Dodd's people are by some accounts inclined to open their hearts to Aristide...
...Everyone [in the office] said Aristide wanted to keep this a black thing," says one witness who spent the evening with him...
...Thus, if Payless were a specific party in a particular matter, he would be required to assess whether his impartiality might reasonably be questioned, and, if so, to recuse himself from such a matter unless he received authorization to participate...
...Through various fundraising efforts, VOAM raised $397,000, by its own estimates—although the leftist Haiti Progrês printed a banner headline midway through the drive reading, "First Million for Aristide...
...Indications are that despite his mendicant reputation, Aristide accumulated an astonishing amount of property in Haiti...
...But I have problems drawing the causal link between the increase and Aristide's ouster simply because of other changes in U.S...
...Meanwhile, he has shown himself to be as anti-American as any world leader of our time...
...The general agency bias is to be very forward on this...
...Where Does the Renewed Violence Come From...
...Steinberg's star was falling as we went to press...
...Furthermore, no matter what Lavalas partisans say, there is no popular sentiment at all in favor of the embargo in Haiti...
...Absolute, unadulterated—those liars...
...But there are those who, like Bush and Quayle, advocate that the United States either engineer or insist upon new presidential elections rather than allowing Aristide to serve until his term expires...
...In a Petionville restaurant, a Western journalist who has been visiting Haiti for decades says, "What happens when Aristide sends his Lavalas up the hill [to the middle-class suburbs] to dechouque all the people he says are responsible for this situation...
...ARISTIDE: But if things didn't go as they should, would the people have given Pere Lebrun...
...The new team allowed Gray to all but jettison the old Haiti working group...
...He then unilaterally named five judges, including the chief justice, to the supreme court...
...Cedras is described as having been a good friend of Aristide's, and he is married to the sister of leading Aristide adviser (and Preval's best friend) Rene Prosper...
...One of the people the Lavalas mobs attempted to dechouque that evening was Jodel Chamblain, a prominent right-wing figure...
...Once you do that," asks Pezzullo, "what leverage do you have over the military, beyond threatening a military invasion...
...policy as "racist" (as he did the moment Pezzullo's adult supervision was removed in April...
...Not that Cedras, a mild-mannered career officer who had headed the country's military academy, was a bad choice, with democratic credentials that were (at the time) arguably as good as Abraham's...
...Do They Even Want Him Back...
...He and Susan Sarandon were among those who started a group called "Governor's Island Watch...
...36 The American Spectator July 1994 Allies in New York and Hollywood But sources close to the Aristide government say that Americans for Aristide, a New York–based organization founded to funnel money to the Aristide campaign but which continued operating during his presidency, has until recently exercised great sway over Aristide...
...And given his ineptness, that's a prescription for disaster...
...You will learn to write Pere Lebrun, you will learn to think about Pere Lebrun...
...So I assume he will...
...In a Washington Post article days after Gray's appointment, Robinson, who had spent much of the previous month calling Clinton inhumane, took him off the hook—for a policy Clinton had in fact not yet lifted...
...But don't be fooled...
...she worked under him on the House Foreign Affairs Committee during Michael Barnes's tenure there...
...On September 27, Aristide gave another speech extolling necklacing...
...They then plummeted into the hundreds, where they remained until 1993 (two years after Aristide's departure...
...It is unlikely that any such inquiry was ever launched, for by November 14 of last year the Washington Post was describing Berger as the "principal driver of the U.S...
...The CIA laid out various disaster scenarios and pressed its point about the mercurial Aristide...
...Aristide has made his public symbol of human-rights violations...
...policy of supporting Aristide's return...
...On April 11, an officer from the U.S...
...Basically, after we refused to recognize the junta, refugee status became the best way out...
...This is not to say that the military has not taken part in the drug trade in the past...
...In South Africa, Aristide—who also attended—would not meet with Gray, meeting instead with Hillary Clinton...
...The problem was that the cause-and-effect relation was not so neat...
...Berger has a "covered relationship" with, inter alia, anyone who was his client in the last year [002 (b) (1) (iv...
...two nights later, Lafontant was killed in his jail cell George Stephanopoulos, favoring invasion, stood in for the president and impressed attendees as both the most vocal and the least informed participant...
...As soon as he ended his strike, Robinson dropped the refugee issue although, as of late May, the new refugee-screening procedures Clinton proposed to induce Robinson to stop the strike had not been implemented—to take up a call for all-out war on Haiti's "thugs...
...For one thing, in 1986, Seide was poor enough that he was doing menial work in Aristide's food-distribution program...
...Against the invasion were Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili, Secretary of Defense William Perry, and Pezzullo...
...Aristide brought that up," says a parliamentary source...
...Nonetheless, Seide's arrest came before the coup, and a source inside the agency says, "That information is pretty solid...
...On his behalf the United States has pursued an embargo policy that has wrought misery on the poorest country in the hemisphere, and President Clinton now favors, against the counsel of his more level-headed advisers, the restoration of Aristide to power by military force...
...In fact, Francois Duvalier founded the Tontons Macoute as an alternative—more loyal—source of military power, and used them to decimate the army...
...Well, he knows nothing about Haiti," says Lawrence Pezzullo...
...The organization of these committees was facilitated by Aristide' s purge of the country's rural mayors, and it was these groups that led the murderous dechouquage on the night of the Lafontant coup...
...attorney Zachary Carter urged that Aristide be given diplomatic immunity, since "permitting this action to proceed against President Aristide would be incompatible with the United States' foreign-policy interest...
...Kurzban claims that there were slightly over $30 million in frozen assets, on which $17...
...The parliamentarians—who have the.right to ratify all ministerial choices—gave Aristide carte blanche to name a prime minister of his choosing...
...By the time they threw him out, Aristide didn't have enough support to put together a twocar parade," says one Washington-based Haiti consultant...
...Reagan administration officials discussed the possibility of prosecuting Barnes under the Logan Act, which forbids American citizens from independently making foreign policy with representatives of a hostile government...
...That's exaggerating...
...An excellent synopsis is given by Raymond Alcide Joseph, editor of the exile weekly Haiti Observateur, in the spring issue of Forbes MediaCritic...
...For one thing, they said, he was being pressured to put rightists in his cabinet...
...Frank Wolf (R-Va...
...FRAPHnow with greater funds to buy them off, due to payments from members, contributions from wealthy Aristide opponents, and a gradual entry into the protection rackets that Lavalas had previously controlled—began to fish from the Lavalas pool...
...Joe Kennedy, and the Congressional Black Caucus...
...There is also an ideological constituency—including Senators Dodd and Kerry, Rep...
...Rep...
...Former defense secretary James Schlesinger brings up an old saw to say that Clinton's Haiti policy has the true mark of the fanatic—the president is redoubling his efforts as he forgets his objectives...
...Despite the fact that voluntary unemployment among Haitians is virtually unknown, and that Haitians rank among the more successful U.S...
...You cannot destroy 96 percent of the manufacturing sector in a country with a per capita income of $440 a year without creating economic migrants...
...This is presumably why Aristide's people like it, and why they arq now pushing to stop the flow of contraband gasoline by punishing the Dominican Republic as well—through sanctions and a sugar boycott...
...The firm hired was McKinney & McDowell, which has represented the African National Congress, the NAACP, and the National Organization for Women...
...Pezzullo had worked in the building's fourth-floor Panama office at the center of the Haiti working group, and had the title of special adviser to the secretary of state...
...It was fine-tuned at a Paris meeting attended by twenty-five people, including representatives of France, Venezuela, Canada, and the U.S...
...In March, perhaps reacting to the Aristide government's straitened circumstances, Hogan & Hartson cut their retainer in half...
...In the afternoon session, Dodd grilled special assistant Lawrence Pezzullo on the parliamentary plan, alleging that it had been cooked up secretly in the State Department...
...In addition, thanks to defectors, FRAPH suddenly knew the entire command structure of the Lavalas enforcement apparatus—and moved to silence it, as would any rival gang...
...When the videotape somehow showed up on the local news in Miami, a thousand angry Cubans marched to protest the remarks...
...Secret Service agents detailed to Aristide, and the office of the President's "private secretariat," on which more below...
...Port-au-Prince and Washington A 11 of the Clinton administration sources interviewed for this article referred to Jean-Bertrand Aristide as unreliable, almost half called him "dishonest" or a "liar," and the vast majority described him—unbidden—as "paranoid...
...O'Connell denies that she ever had such a meeting with Elie...
...Another study, by the independent Haitian Health Organization, didn't count bodies but found similar devastation...
...Dealing with Haiti at all may have become a serious ethical violation on Berger's part...
...Chamblain was not at home, but his pregnant wife was...
...Note, too, that no representative of TransAfrica has made any public statement regarding any aspect of the ethnic civil war in Rwanda, in which at least 200,000 have been slaughtered in one month...
...The far more sumptuous "night apartment" was one of two units rented on the fifth floor—that was where Aristide actually lived, and where he spent most of his time playing guitar, writing poetry, and watching television...
...It was a disdain that continued even after his arrival in Washington...
...Nonetheless, Mr...
...And there are two other major living compounds for the entourage, including at least fourteen apartments at 2501 Q St., near Dupont Circle, and a half-dozen more at the West Park complex at 2130 P St...
...Which brings us, finally, to the question of why Aristide needed personal control over so much money in the first place...
...That is, they informed on political dissent to higher-ups and occasionally roughed up, and killed, Lavalas opponents...
...For some reason they did not light the corpses on fire...
...Specifically, the White House began pressuring the DEA to manufacture a Noriega-style smoking-gun drug crisis among the Haitian military, according to a former drug-enforcement official...
...Aristide' s lawyer Ira Kurzban takes an even harder line, urging retribution against the Dominican Republic similar to that which the Western nations took against Jordan for breaking the embargo during the Gulf war...
...Opting for an easier ride early on has led to a very rough ride in the here and now...
...Finally, there is a law enforcement ramification of the Cedras regime's international standing, and word of it is already well known to would-be migrants from Haiti: Undocumented aliens don't get deported to governments the United States does not recognize...
...Fouche, claiming authority from Aristide, had accused the Haitian consul there, Lionel Barberousse, of pocketing money from "ghost" jobs created during the Malval government...
...The hearing was postponed...
...Gray was given an office on the seventh floor, next to Christopher and Talbott, with the title of special adviser to the president and the secretary of state...
...Christopher Dodd, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's subcommittee on Western Hemisphere and Peace Corps Affairs, has taken the driver's seat in sabotaging any initiatives that do not come directly from Aristide...
...Jim Steinberg, a political appointee who had no experience with Haiti but was nonetheless "actively pushing going in," was brought in to replace veteran Samuel Lewis as chief of policy planning in March...
...That is, the so-called Haitian "right" has become more violent precisely to the extent that it has embraced Aristide's followers and methods...
...Having repudiated the leftist coalition under whose banner he got elected, Aristide orchestrated the forcible removal of rural mayors and their replacement with members of Lavalas ("Flood"), the loose coalition of lumpen radicals and Marxist activists who were his real base of support...
...We are, frankly, suspicious of the sudden high number of reported rapes, particularly in this culture, occurring at the same time that Aristide activists seek to draw a comparison between Haiti and Bosnia...
...In August, after several incidents of financial corruption on the part of Aristide' s prime minister Rene Preval became public—particularly the doling out of checks in $10,000 and $20,000 dollops to radical Aristide cronies for non-existent "alphabetization programs"—the chamber of deputies, in which Aristide had never enjoyed a majority, called Preval forward to "interpellate" him, i.e., to interview Preval for the purpose of dismissing him on a vote of no confidence...
...Other residences are spread throughout the Washington area, and all of them are paid for with frozen Haitian assets...
...He also hired John Phlebani, an aide from Gray's congressional days, for the exclusive—and unusual for State—purpose of selling the administration's policy on Capitol Hill...
...The agent denies that drug traffic in Haiti is a serious problem...
...And that is not to say that Arent Fox lost out...
...That is, Aristide would repudiate an international refugee treaty and brand the U.S...
...You will have to use it when you must...
...At that point the possibilities for civil war would be real, and the United States would have to choose between walking away from a bloodbath it had started or occupying the whole country town by town...
...The thinking was that, at that point, if Aristide wanted to turn.it into a private apparatus, the U.S...
...This is not to say that Haiti has a free press, or to deny that its police force has a brutal Anti-Gang Unit...
...Aristide's Reign of Terror Aristide's seven-month presidency in 1991 was marked by constitutional and human rights violations too numerous to be catalogued here...
...Dealing with Aristide has been to face a "constant pattern of lies," according to one aide...
...In every article ever written on that Georgetown apartment, Aristide was described as leading a "life of almost monkish asceticism," to quote merely the Washington Post...
...For another, he was not even involved in the coup, and acceded to it only when a group of soldiers and policemen gathered outside the balcony of his office and threatened to kill Aristide...
...In the other wing, at 1101 30th St., Rene Preval has a suite of seven offices, including one for Aristide's biographer, the French leftist gadabout Christophe Wargny...
...Since Berger's "covered" status with Hogan & Hartson didn't expire until January 19, 1994, an inquiry should have been opened into his Haiti role, and Berger should have recused himself from Haiti policy, until his covered period expired...
...He also has a brief on Haitian refugees—although an Aristide source says that most of his work has been done by the young lawyer Mario Louis and several students, while Kurzban works on "political activity...
...Voodoo Economics How the administration came to condone and promote this kind of slow-motion Great Terror—that is, how Aristide's policy became our policy—is a story of the distortions that result when virtually the entire budget of a sovereign nation is funneled into a massive Washington lobbying and public relations campaign...
...Bizarrely, Owens referred all questions on her personal involvement with Aristide to Aristide's press adviser Leila McDowell...
...In fact, the number of Haitians dying in day-to-day violence—i.e...
...According to State and Treasury sources, the actual figure is just upwards of $50 million...
...Aristide has returned to the anti-democraticstance he espoused in the late 1980s, right up to the eve of his own candidacy, when he stood forcefully against elections—allied with only the Duvalierists and a hard-line minority in the army—on the grounds that they would be manipulated by the Americans and the "bourgeoisie...
...Hardline ideological Aristide supporters here regularly compare the human rights situation in Haiti to the carnage in Bosnia...
...If Aristide took himself out of the ballgame," says one administration official, "then we could begin to look at other options...
...Then Gray got on a plane to attend Nelson Mandela's inauguration in South Africa...
...The debate now being carried on in the Clinton administration is largely over how to launch an invasion—a political strategy that is less likely to end the violence than to begin it...
...Every time someone gets close to an agreement, they make up a new outrage...
...Another rumor out of the Aristide camp was that Aristide had had the Governor's Island negotiations imposed on him, that he had found out he was going to Governor's Island by watching the evening news...
...Even those most zealous about monitoring human rights abuses were a bit embarrassed by those statistics...
...This includes Payless...
...warships and Coast Guard cutters, is preposterous on its face, but that hasn't stopped the administration from advancing it...
...If the US and UN choose to remain engaged with President Aristide, they must also remain engaged with institution-building and human rights monitoring in Haiti...
...embargo that has come—officially—to embrace all products except food and medicine...
...Most people credit his hunger strike for the abrupt shift in Clinton refugee policy...
...Our response was, 'You name it.' ") Dodd had to be fully aware of this chronology—but he got Aristide out of a spot in which his good faith had been called into question by attacking the good faith of Pezzullo...
...Numerous embarrassing letters of praise to both Duvaliers, by individual members of the body and the caucus as a whole, are to be found in the cache of a Duvalier-era minister who now lives in the United States...
...No passive resistance to the leaks in the embargo—simply not buying gasoline, for instance—exists at any level of society...
...many were from Hollywood circles close to the Clintons, like Michael and Patricia Medavoy and Hillary Clinton's close friend Mary Steenburgen...
...How Haiti policy has turned into a con job by the administration—and a cash cow for its friends...
...The issue was first broached by Rep...
...The military must have at least a degree of popular support at this point, for it is simply too small to exercise effective repression...
...It was one of the largest and most costly anti-drug efforts in U.S...
...Clinton assumed Haiti would be an easy battle to win—not to mention a distraction from Bosnia and Paula Jones—and decided on an invasion...
...The Cayman Islands...
...But media accounts all treat the alliance between the army and paramilitary elements as if it were a perennial state of affairs...
...But Aristide himself, say intimates, was throughout the mid-1980s under the protection of Paul and two subordinates, Danny Toussaint and Pierre Cherubin (the latter of whom remains a close Washington adviser...
...By some reports, they threatened to kill Cedras as well...
...Barnes has used his connections to give the Aristide government a beachhead inside U.S...
...Similarly, he has a covered relationship with Hogan & Hartson for a year after severing his relationship with that firm, and would be required to undertake the same inquiry if Hogan & Hartson represented a party in a particular matter...
...He would come to espouse "necklacing"—i.e., lynching people with flaming tires, which is known in Haiti as "Pere Lebrun" after a prominent local tire merchant...
...strategy to restore Aristide is its lead role in the U.N...
...CROWD: No...
...He derided President Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion, and particularly blamed the Kennedys, "who were boat people, too," for abandoning the migrant poor...
...But it keeps growing...
...Gwen McKinney is described by one Clinton administration official as a "groupie . . . somewhat star-struck," who "sticks by the more ideological of the Aristide camp...
...To the extent that he has an ideology at all, it is a Communism that dare not—since the coup, at least—speak its name...
...John Keny (D-Mass...
...Photos of the incident show Lavalas delegate Jean-Claude Jean-Baptiste at the front of the crowd...
...It was a near-replica of the scandal played out at the New York consulate in March, when ousted consul Joseph Pitval accused Aristide's consul-geheral, Wilson Desk, of financial irregularities...
...Whoever shoots first," says one Port-au-Prince resident, "it's on...
...Up until his election, Aristide never made a major speech in which he did not denounce the United States, which he refers to in his books as "the cold country to the north, which denies visas to the very people whose lives it has ruined"—a sentiment that is closer to the mark now that the U.S...
...Joe Kennedy had also been guaranteed a seat...
...None of the money ever made it into the Haitian treasury and few, if any, of the donors got receipts...
...I am the president...
...Two successive presidents have felt that restoring a corrupt and violent leftist autocrat is an objective for which it's worth destroying the economy of what may soon be the poorest country on earth...
...Morton Halperin, re-emerging after his ill-fated nomination for deputy secretary of defense last year, was given a Haiti portfolio at the NSC, and fell almost immediately into the invasion camp...
...It is a measure of the administration's unwillingness ever to abandon Aristide that none of his moves constitute a "taking himself out of the ballgame" in administration eyes...
...Without consulting the State Department, they made even more concessions to Aristide, who seems then to have panicked at the prospect he might actually wind up back in Haiti...
...Which is, that he goes back without any military and without any parliamentary constraints...
...Hoover disputes the account, as does Leila McDowell, who thinks confusion may have resulted from her firm's having received a foundation grant to train Americans for Aristide workers in public relations...
...That a multinational corporation—such as the cocaine cartels are—would choose to do business on an unstable island with hardly any goods or services, under constant radar surveillance and surrounded by U.S...
...The most sensational figures used for any purpose were Aristide' s own, broadcast on Creole radio: 500,000 people in hiding and 100,000 dead...
...Treasury and State departments have imposed no oversight requirements, the rough amounts of the money Aristide can tap are known...
...When Dodd lectured Pezzullo on why Aristide should be allowed to rule without any democratic checks and balances, he described Aristide as "the fellow who got 70 percent of the vote...
...The question is, compared to what...
...human rights monitors in Haiti, the figure was zero...
...In interagency meetings held at both State and the NSC, battle lines quickly developed...
...But Amnesty International, whose leftist English chapter was responsible for much of its information-gathering in Haiti, reported almost 200 people killed or tortured for the act of trying to flee, and it was these numbers that tended to get picked up in the press...
...Barnes began representing the government on a pro bono basis while he was working for another Washington law firm, Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn...
...One good turn deserves another...
...Remember that the army was solidly against the Macoutes as recently as January 1991...
...He [couldn't continue negotiating because he] had to go visit Barbra Streisand...
...With CNN cameras whirring, they delivered the indictment according to Aristide's instructions, the source says...
...Congressional Players To dwell on the financial means Aristide has at his disposal is not to ignore the ideological ones—specifically, liberal U.S...
...Aristide has a separate source of funds for personal use—the account of,his "private secretariat" at Washington's Capital Bank...
...In fact, Arent Fox is now on a $10,000-a-month retainer, according to records filed by Ira Kurzban...
...Asylum applications, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had held steady at 5,000 or more per year until 1986 (four years before Aristide's election...
...There is also a huge Hollywood support network forLawrence Pezzullo got wind that Aristide wanted to use the conference as a public forum to embarrass the United States internationally on the issue of its treatment of Haitian refugees...
...According to several sources, though, the plan had its genesis in the Malval government's attempts to broaden the Aristide coalition...
...It has no oversight of any kind...
...The sanctions do not harm the army at all—if anything, they foster a new and necessary contraband mafia, which the army takes part in and taxes...
...One of the residences is well-known as Aristide' s, and a call to the Bank of Nova Scotia confirmed that the account numbers were for a checking and a savings account...
...I'm not trying to say [drug dealing in Haiti] doesn't happen...
...Dodd later attacked the plan for not including a specific date for Aristide' s return...
...Aristide had always drawn a great deal of support from Macoute elements, even as he denounced Macoutism...
...Lavalas extremists were at a boiling point, and the army was too disorganized to resist it, but the strike fizzled after only 20 percent of the city's workers showed any inclination to participate...
...In a May 12, 1993 letter to Wolf, then–Waite House counsel Bernard Nussbaum replied that there was no conflict...
...Kurzban is prominent politically in Miami...
...Aristide had long been bitter that, while he had an effective majority in the senate, his programs were thwarted in the chamber of deputies...
...Jesse Jackson was not above pandering to a military leader for a piece of the pie...
...But if there is a paradigmatic figure in the racial games being played over Haiti it is Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica...
...Specifically, they wanted to demonstrate that Haitians were being beaten and tortured for the very act of trying to flee...
...That is at best an oversimplification and at worst a distortion...
...announced it would disband in the face of an invasion, and then the trouble would start...
...At Lafontant's July trial, Aristide urged Lavalas groups to surround the supreme court and demand a life sentence, even though the constitution allowed a maximum of only fifteen years...
...The light industry that was the bellwether of the Haitian economy is gone...
...For a range of cultural reasons (not pleasant to contemplate) rape has never been considered or reported as a serious crime here...
...CROWD: Yes...
...The American Spectator July 1994 33 by a soldier who is now in a U.S...
...troops aren't going to fire on them...
...And as Lavalas veterans began to join FRAPH in growing numbers, a rough parity between the two groups was reached...
...So he flew off to France, leaving the parliamentarians, who had flown to Washington to discuss the plan with him, in the lurch...
...And I wonder," he says, "if he's not calling them out because he doesn't think they're there...
...Manegold was half-right: it should have been a The American Spectator July 1994 37 public-relations embarrassment...
...It not only was the largest part of Aristide's coalition, but had also been a cash cow for Lavalas, as USAID, mistaking a socialist political party for a private aid program, had bestowed millions of dollars on it prior to the 1990 election...
...Is it true, as an Aristide source claims, that the Lavalas government wanted, to turn any new police force into a partisan instrument...
...He couldn't save his country from starving because he had to go to Hollywood...
...In 1993 he was arrested trying to smuggle cocaine into Miami Airport and is now in federal prison...
...According to Colin Granderson, head of the U.N...
...In the days leading up to the Governor's Island accord that would have returned Aristide to power last fall, Aristide's associates in Washington began to put out word that he was being pushed into a sellout by the United States...
...But what do you invade next?, Antigua...
...Paul Sarbanes, continued to advise the Aristide government in his capacity of partner there...
...For one thing, he has conspicuously refused to take control of any of the country's institutions...
...It is a conspicuously weak military: The combined Haitian armed forces (including the police, who continue to carry out their law enforcement duties) consist of 7,000 men, with no airplanes, no boats, no tanks, and one unarmed helicopter—for a country of 7 million people...
...is described by one Clinton official, admiringly, as "a really committed proAristide individual," who therefore has "as good a rundown as possible on the state of the Black Caucus"—that is, she is simultaneously the staffer most tapped into the Aristide camp and the one most influential in forming caucus policy...
...His justice minister Guy Malary, for instance, whose murder last fall was simplistically ascribed to politics and cynically exploited by Aristide, had himself been closely linked to a prominent Macoute figure...
...On the fourth floor of one building were rooms for a female friend, a secretary, the U.S...
...By all accounts, Warren Christopher has been nearly comatose in defending State's prerogatives...
...With Aristide and his organization exiled to Washington, local toughs were shut off from their patrons...
...The same process took place seven years ago, when slum-dwellers began to desert the Macoutes for left-wing movements and high-level Macoutes began turning up burnt to death in the streets...
...Clinton must be careful not to follow the blood-soaked blueprint of Bush's Haiti policy...
...The media are portraying the undoubted upsurge in violence in recent months as the work of the right...
...Whether or not Gray's appointment was part of a bargain with Clinton is unclear—and, to be fair, administration sources say that Gray was on the short list made up by the State Department, and that the only other successor seriously considered was Prof...
...One step was to shake up the interagency working groups that were being run by assistant secretary of state Alexander Watson—and to exclude the CIA from the group completely...
...And he's sure the people who are backing it don't know enough about it...
...law-enforcement history—hardly a routine operation...
...Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Due to tightened security and dwindling access by journalists, little is known about his current living arrangement in the Lansburgh, a posh Washington apartment building in which Janet Reno also lives...
...At one point, when Pezzullo sent a memo to Christopher, requesting authority for State to take up a position at odds with Berger and the NSC, Christopher's response was that Pezzullo should clear it with Berger...
...The night before Aristide was scheduled to meet Joe Kennedy for the first time at a breakfast meeting, his staff had to beg him to go...
...So does Sen...
...74 The American Spectator July 1994 The Real Correlation of Forces The Haiti story has certainly shaped up as one without any good guys, but Raoul Cedras, who has been cast as the chief "thug" in American leftist parlance, is in many ways an unlikely villain...
...The selectivity was shocking: on one block, the only building left standing was that of a Lavalas activist lawyer...
...continued on page 74) The American Spectator July 1994 41 CALDWELL (continued from page 41) The Refugee Threat Meanwhile, the Clinton administration and its allies, surely aware that analogous Reagan invasions had been political hits due to a ballast of anti-Communism among the American electorate, sought an interpretation that might woo those same voters to favor an invasion to install a Communist...
...The "Castro operation" he is referring to is most likely the 1989 Operation Greyhound, which tried to link the Cuban military hierarchy to drug dealing...
...Ambassador Madeleine Albright, he was a veteran of Edmund Muskie's political organization...
...The Bogus Drug Problem Just as alarming as the attempt to effect a consensus-bypurge in the foreign policy branches was the politicization of the non-policy-making bureaucracy...
...Aristide's response was to describe the looting as "just," even when it spread to the residence of his archenemy the papal nuncio...
...Aristide, ordained a priest, was expelled from the Salesian order by Rome in 1988 for preaching the righteous-ness of class violence...
...But Manegold's own article was the first mention ever made of it in that light...
...Clearly other factors were at work...
...But McKinney deserves credit for recognizing that, however she might admire her client, his rhetoric doesn't fly with an anti-Communist public, and has kept him as far out of the media as possible...
...The U.S...
...Embassy continues to flout its own embargo by buying it...
...Rhodes Preval, the cousin of Aristide' s prime minister and an intimate of his drug czar Patrick Elie, was set up to run the Haitian consulate in Bogota after Aristide came to power...
...40 The American Spectator July 1994 from it...
...wouldn't be responsible...
...On the third attempt to question the prime minister, on September 3, Aristide himself showed up in the chamber with a vase of flowers, as a means of conveying, one parliamentary source says, that anyone who tried to interpellate Preval would find these flowers on his grave...
...Charles Rangel is referring to when he says this hasn't been a "full" embargo, or what Connecticut Democrat Sen...
...Thornburgh (1990), a case involving Central American immigrants, the INS, in an act of bureaucratic self-defense, began broadening its criteria for granting asylum hearings...
Vol. 27 • July 1994 • No. 7
