A commentary by James Morrell, research director of the Center for International Policy

Overview and statement of the problem

Ed Bradley: It's hard to believe, but the man the State Department says ran the terror campaign against American interests in Haiti, the man who single-handedly turned back an American troopship was on the payroll of the CIA.

Emmanuel "Toto" Constant (FRAPH leader): If I'm guilty of those crimes that they're accusing me of, the CIA is also guilty.

--CBS News, "60 Minutes," December 3, 1995

During 1990-94, the United States simultaneously conducted two policies toward Haiti. One was the overt policy of support for democratic norms as the best way to manage the Haitian problem and contain the refugees. Both the Bush and especially the Clinton White House pursued this policy.

The other was the traditional U.S. embrace of the elite and military as a bulwark against waywardly leftist or nationalist popular movements. This was the approach that led the nation into the Vietnam and Central American wars, instigation of the military coup in Chile, and collaboration with repressive organizations ranging from the Savak in Iran to the South African intelligence agency and the Korean CIA -- i.e., the dominant U.S. policy theme toward the Third World in the postwar period. In the case of Haiti, the CIA and Pentagon were two of the proponents of this policy.

Theoretically, the U.S. executive branch is a hierarchy, with orders going out from the White House to the executive agencies for implementation. But in the case of Haiti, the CIA and Pentagon in effect conducted their own parallel and conflicting policy because they considered Aristide to be ideologically out-of-bounds. They felt justified in this because it was their approach, not the White House's, that was consistent with the norm established over the past half century in U.S. dealings with the Third World.

Thus in 1994 a high White House official could say, referring to the intelligence agencies on Haiti, "They don't work for us." The official was asked, "But you won the election." The official said that nevertheless the agencies thought that they did not work for the White House. Senior administration officials did not know what the CIA was doing in Haiti.

In the weeks after the signing of the Governors Island accord in 1993, members of these agencies gave public notice that the president's policy was not theirs. The CIA's chief analyst for Latin America, Brian Latell, leaked negative misinformation about President Aristide to Republican senators at precisely the moment the administration was preparing to send U.S. troops to return him. Latell's initiative must have been cleared at the highest level since he retained his post and CIA director James Woolsey strongly defended the agency's assessment of Aristide.

Under congressional questioning, Woolsey revealed that the agency had kept on the payroll key members of the Haitian military high command after they had directed the overthrow of Aristide. This explained the unyielding defiance of Haitian army leaders to Aristide's return. They obviously had defenders high in the American government and no serious move against them was to be expected.

The Pentagon also publicly dissented from Clinton's policy. Anonymous senior Pentagon officials told the press they were "unwilling to endanger American lives for a leader they considered highly erratic and unreliable." After the Harlan County incident, Undersecretary of Defense Walter Slocombe "boasted," in the New York Times's words, of saving the United States from a small war by turning around the troopship and went on to say that the Pentagon would not risk American soldiers' lives to put that "psychopath" back in power. No action was taken to discipline Slocombe.

For the Harlan County fiasco, General Cedras knew exactly whom to thank. "The army in the United States is very responsible. The executive is not."

Once President Clinton decided, in May 1994, to move resolutely to put the Haiti problem behind him, the Pentagon fell in line and a façade of unity was restored. After the intervention, the administration also decided, as a short-term domestic political stratagem, to lower the profile of its success in Haiti lest the Republicans seize on the inevitable continuing problems to embarrass the administration in the 1996 presidential elections. As part of this low-profile strategy, the administration made no moves against any of the officials who had thwarted its policy. No commissions reviewed the Harlan County fiasco and official disarray; no congressional committees called witnesses to explain the dual and conflicting policy and public insubordination to presidential directives. Only the occasional outstanding journalist, such as the Nation's Allan Nairn or the CBS "60 Minutes" team, shed light on this remarkable episode.

Problems with current policy

Current critiques of U.S. Haiti policy, whether from the right or the left, tend to focus on a narrow range of transient secondary issues. The right in American politics fastens on the small number of political assassinations that may be attributable to the current government. The left focuses on the return to Haiti of Constant, the terrorist leader, and documents currently held by the United States and the conditionality of World Bank loans.

These are truly minor issues compared to the transcendent importance of the precedents set by the Clinton administration in Haiti. For the first time in postwar U.S. relations with Latin America, the United States used military force on the side of a popularly elected leader against the military and elite. For the first time, the United States acted in concert with the United Nations.

These precedents could stand to inhibit future unilateral U.S. interventions in favor of the traditional military and elite. The fundamental problem with the current U.S. stance toward Haiti, therefore, is that these precedents are being buried by preoccupation with trivial issues. Far from using the Haiti precedents to reorient its foreign policy, the nation appears to be willfully blind to its own achievements there. In the first presidential debates, Clinton and Dole mentioned Haiti only in a superficial context of grading the Clinton administration.

The failure of the public to understand and support these precedents grievously undermines their force for the future. The Clinton administration is in a defensive crouch and almost apologetic about its actions in Haiti. The Republicans, through their so-called "attack hearings" in the House of Representatives (the House Foreign Affairs Committee or its subcommittees held seven hearings on supposed political assassinations by the Aristide or Preval governments), have found no evidence of administration wrongdoing but have succeeded in preventing Clinton from taking credit for fixing the problem in Haiti. The left, confused even whether to support the original intervention, dissipates its energy on secondary issues and fails to lead public opinion in generalizing the precedent of multilateral action on behalf of a populist leader.

Recommendations

1. There should be a national review of the conflicting policies and internal administration dissent during the 1990-94 period. Conducted by the administration, Congress, and the public, the review should address these questions:

a. Which officials undermined the stated policy of the Bush and Clinton administrations of restoring Aristide?

b. With what authorization did they act?

c. What sanctions or dismissals of officials and reforms of agencies will be necessary to prevent future internal right-wing sabotage of public policy?

2. Bill Geertz of the Washington Times has reported that the CIA flatly refused White House orders to destabilize the Cedras regime during 1993-94. The failure of the CIA to cooperate left Clinton no choice but the military option.This episode should be thoroughly investigated. If substantiated, the CIA as presently organized should be profoundly reformed.

3. With a per capita income of $260 a year and unemployment above 60 percent, combined with the effects of a punishing three-year embargo, Haiti's poor have been pushed to the very brink. U.S. economic aid policy toward Haiti needs to be far more consistent and effective than it has been since 1994. In 1995 the administration joined with international donors in withholding budget aid because President Aristide balked at an IMF austerity program; simultaneously, congressional Republicans withheld humanitarian and police aid to score political points against the administration. Both these cutoffs destabilized an already precarious democratic regime and undermined the very economic confidence the aid program seeks to instill.

While budget and humanitarian aid has been temporarily restored, the stringent conditions of the IMF and World Bank agreements almost assure future crises and suspensions of aid as Haiti misses the targets. It will be virtually impossible for the Preval government to impose the taxation, downsizing, and divestment provisions of this aid without violating the other undertaking he and Aristide made to Washington on their restoration--reconciliation. One cannot reconcile with the rich in Haiti by taxing them and dismissing their relatives from government jobs. Such taxation and governmental reforms will satisfy IMF criteria, but risk major political destabilization. The recent assassinations and attacks by former armymen who have not been paid pensions underscores this point.

The U.S. government must therefore cease to push Haiti in two conflicting directions: first, toward government efficiency, and second, towards reconciliation with the rich who have traditionally battened on the government as a source of jobs and corruption. It must choose.

4. If the United States chooses path one, namely government modernization and efficiency, it must support the Haitian government against the reaction from the right. It must recognize that the Haitian government has virtually no constituency, beyond the inchoate, unorganized masses, for its reforms and with no army is subject to destabilization from reorganized former armymen. But the U.S. government virtually forbids the Haitian government from mobilizing the mass constituency. The one move Aristide made in that direction, in late 1995 after several political killings, drew strong U.S. opposition.

If the United States excludes mass mobilization and yet insists on reforms, it must substitute its own support against the reaction of entrenched interests. The United States should campaign strongly within the United Nations for extension of the U.N. mandate and peacekeeping forces. It should again contribute a sizable U.S. contingent to such forces, and U.S. public opinion should support such deployment. The pattern of six-month extensions should end. The U.N. force should have a mandate to stay in Haiti as long as the Preval government requests it in the full knowledge that President Preval himself will not want foreign troops protecting him any longer than absolutely necessary.

With a renewed U.N. force, and steady multilateral aid for the police and judiciary, the Haitian government will create the capacity to receive both Constant and the FRAPH documents. Constant and the documents should be returned as soon as possible, and whatever security mechanisms the Haitian government proposes for their safekeeping should be provided.

5. While helping Haiti fend off reaction from the right, the United States must adopt a flexible, understanding posture towards the demands of Haiti's impoverished majority which are sure to be articulated in new, unpredictable ways as Haiti undergoes unprecedented modernization and change. While the U.S.-U.N. intervention threw out the military regime and abolished the army, it left the highly-skewed and unjust Haitian social structure intact, creating an enormous disequilibrium between politics and society. The history of twentieth-century revolutions suggests that there are three prerequisites for overthrow of the old social order: the complete moral discrediting of that order, weakening or disarmament of its armed forces, and the emergence of a disciplined revolutionary party (usually Marxist or religious) articulating mass discontent. If this is so, then Haiti has already met the first two prerequisites, and lacks only the third. The United States must resolutely help Preval and Aristide raise the masses from "misery to poverty with dignity," as Aristide has phrased it, or they will seek other outlets.