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The recent successful policy to restore Haiti's democratically elected president to power marks a milestone in U.S. relations in the Caribbean and Central America-literally adding a new page to the Monroe Doctrine and its "big stick" enforcement methods. But to do so the Clinton presidency had to overcome a hesitant, fainthearted and inept beginning complicated by a near mutiny inside its own national security establishment.
The crisis began when the Haitian military overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on September 30, 1991. President Bush quickly pledged to restore him to power. Secretary of State James Baker III led the foreign ministers gathered at the Organization of American States to an unprecedented resolution that called for Aristide's immediate return and imposed regional sanctions until he was reinstated. Within a few months, however, the administration visibly lost its commitment. President Bush left office with the Haiti problem unresolved.
The presidential campaign of 1992 pitted a centrist Republican against a centrist Democrat with few important foreign-policy differences. But forced repatriation of Haitian refugees by the Bush administration gave candidate Bill Clinton one of his few opportunities to attack President Bush and help his candidacy with black voters. Clinton promised to restore Aristide and cease returning Haitian refugees without first determining their eligibility for political asylum.
What were the issues that drove Washington to concern itself with how the hemisphere's poorest and most neglected country was governed? What led two administrations to move against a military regime of a type the United States had traditionally supported? Why force from power a military junta that, if given the chance, would have proved docile and responsive to Washington guidance, and instead devote important resources to return to office a populist, left-wing president who had fiercely criticized the United States.
When liberté, egalité and fraternité made their way to the Caribbean in the late 18th century, rebellion followed in its wake. Only in Haiti did a slave revolt throw up leaders who transformed a colony into the world's first black republic in 1804. The new government could not, however, overcome a punishing embargo imposed by European powers terrified of Haiti's example. The United States followed Europe's lead and Haiti's thriving sugar industry was destroyed. For the next century Haiti stagnated, mired in poverty and corruption. In 1915, the United States, acting under the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, occupied Haiti to straighten out its finances, pay off foreign debts and ensure stable government. When the Marines departed in 1933, their principal legacy was a constabulary officered by light-skinned mulattoes. The tension between the ruling mulatto elite and the black majority runs like a discordant motif through Haiti's turbulent history.
In 1956, blacks surged into control with the election of François Duvalier. Papa Doc installed a reign of terror primarily against the elite professional class. His son, Jean-Claude, became president-for-life upon his death. Baby Doc possessed none of his father's political dexterity. Marriage into one of Haiti's richest families cost him popular support. High levels of corruption combined with sporadic terror brought the people into the streets. At Washington's urging, Baby Doc went into exile in 1986. Although a constitutional assembly was convened and civilian presidents came and went, the Haitian military exercised de facto control after the exile of Duvalier.
Secretary of State George Shultz visited Haiti shortly after the Duvalier ouster to convince the Haitian generals and colonels that their historic role was to move the country towards democracy. Yielding to pressure, the military scheduled elections, then decided it had gone too far and turned the much-heralded 1987 presidential vote into a bloody farce. Again at U.S. insistence, a quick election was called but more than 90 percent of the people refused to go to the polls and, within a year, the military had ousted the pre-arranged victor of this rump election.
A young firebrand priest had led the election boycott, thereby earning the hatred of the military and angering CIA officials who, according to congressional sources, had plotted to ensure a satisfactory vote. Undeterred, the United States insisted on a third election. Only hours before the filing deadline for the 1990 presidential vote, Aristide overcame his distrust of elections and filed his candidacy. With 12 serious candidates in the race, Aristide won with more than two-thirds of the vote. The American favorite, Marc Bazin, finished second with 11 percent. To the wild acclaim of the Haitian people, the fear and anger of the Haitian military and economic elites, and the nervous support of the United States, Aristide assumed the presidency.
For seven months President Aristide performed a high-wire act. He placated the military with soothing words as he retired the seven top officers. He assured the business community of his commitment to private property as he introduced modest taxes. He walked hand-in-hand with the U.S. ambassador on most issues but publicly announced his intention to recognize Cuba.
Aristide had taken over a state administration that served chiefly to enrich the top families and the military. When he moved to put his own people in government agencies, enforce customs collections and gradually end monopolies, the families staged their coup on September 30, 1991. During his seven months in office, President Aristide accepted free-market policies and raised $511 million in grants and concessionary loans to restore economic growth and promote social development. But Aristide lacked governing experience and inevitably his presidency was marred by mistakes, a few of them serious. Yet as Pamela Constable aptly pointed out in Foreign Policy magazine, Aristide's policies posed little immediate danger to the social order, much to the disappointment of his more radical followers. He was overthrown not because of a few disputed offenses against democracy or human rights but because he insisted that the rich pay taxes and the military end its drug-trafficking.
The coup in Haiti had come at an embarrassing moment for an administration trying to restore some sense of order to Central America and the Caribbean. President Bush had inherited two ideological wars and a thuggish, drug-trafficking dictator in Panama who ultimately had to be ousted by an American invasion. Insuring successful elections had long been crucial to Washington's rhetoric, but when U.S. favorites emerged victorious in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Bush administration transformed rhetoric into official policy.
In Santiago, Chile, the Bush administration presided over a unanimous vote at the General Assembly of the Organization of American States making democracy the official governing doctrine and requiring an emergency meeting of foreign ministers to take action should an interruption of constitutional government take place. This initiative had to overcome traditional Latin resistance to any U.S. policy that contained even the hint of intervention in the internal affairs of a member country. The Santiago resolution clearly implied common action in defense of democracy and human rights in the hemisphere.
Although the 1991 coup was made by Washington's traditional allies, the military and economic elites, the overthrow of constitutional government was a frontal challenge to its public stand that the United States could not ignore. At stake was the hard-won commitment of Latin America to electoral democracy. President Bush quickly pledged that this coup would not stand. Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson told Congress that the United States had an unshakable commitment to constitutional government and that coup leaders must receive a "clear message that there is a terrible price to be paid for overthrowing a democratically elected president."
Uncharacteristically, the Bush administration quickly lost its sense of purpose and its policy visibly disintegrated. Within weeks Aronson was pressuring Aristide to accept as commander- in-chief of the armed forces General Raoul Cedras, the general who had presided over the coup. The Bush administration then disregarded the OAS embargo and unilaterally declared that U.S. assembly plants in Haiti would be permitted to resume operation and oil to supply their needs would be permitted to flow. This made the embargo totally porous and sent a business-as-usual signal to the military.
President Clinton began badly on Haiti. First, he gave charge of his policy to Bush administration holdovers who had made clear their intent to construct in Haiti a version of democracy that left the president in exile but with an Aristide-appointed prime minister and cabinet. This tortured scenario was doomed to failure because more than two-thirds of the Haitian people equated democratic government with the return of Aristide, and no arrangement that excluded his presence could rule without massive repression.
The Clinton foreign-policy team soon recognized this error and appointed a former ambassador wise in the ways of Latin American dictators, Lawrence Pezzullo, to head Haitian policy. Things began to move. In mid-1993, a UN-sponsored agreement was signed at Governors Island, New York. In return for removal of the oil cutoff which the Clinton administration had promoted within the United Nations, plus a four-month transition period, the army agreed to the return of President Aristide, the installation of a consensus government and replacement of the army high command. It looked as though a transition from arbitrary, oligarchic rule towards constitutional government had been found.
Aristide had not wanted to sign at Governors Island. Most of his Haitian advisers believed the United States had given away too much to the coup-makers. Aristide's principal American advisers argued that if he did not sign Washington would abandon him. They maintained that, if Cedras violated an international agreement signed by both parties, the United States would have no choice but to stay the course. Aristide signed.
Yet not all agencies of the U.S. government appeared willing to follow their president and abandon their longtime clients-the military and economic elites of Haiti. In those crucial weeks before President Aristide's scheduled return on October 30, 1993, key players on Clinton's foreign-policy team gave public notice that the president's policy was not theirs.
The CIA's chief analyst for Latin America, Brian Latell, performed a slash- and-burn operation on Aristide in the form of a leaked psychological profile. The classified report was filled with misinformation. Apparently Latell's initiative had been cleared at the highest level since Latell 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 revelation made more comprehensible the unyielding defiance of Haitian army leaders to the return of Aristide. They obviously had defenders in the American foreign-policy community and no serious move against their power was to be expected.
Perhaps most inexplicably, the CIA in Port-au-Prince recruited Emmanuel Constant, the leader of a gang of thugs and murderers known as FRAPH-which spread terror among Aristide's supporters in the weeks prior to his scheduled return. This confirmed to the Haitian military that administration public statements did not reflect the true policy.
The Defense Department also refused to conform to President Clinton's Haiti policy. Pentagon spokespersons-identified as senior Pentagon officials-told the press they were "unwilling to endanger American lives for a leader they considered highly erratic and unreliable," and they questioned the wisdom of putting American troops into a "potentially dangerous, unpredictable and hostile environment."
This public display of indiscipline culminated in the shameful spectacle of a shipload of American troops turning tail and running from a FRAPH gang of dockside toughs. The retreat of the USS Harlan County on October 11, just four days before Aristide's scheduled return, delivered a punishing blow to a Clinton policy already in serious disarray. General Cedras knew exactly whom to thank. "The army in the United States is very responsible," he said, "The executive is not."
In a telegram to Washington, Ambassador William Swing made clear his disagreement with the decision not to land the peacekeeping troops and his judgment on the potential consequences: "The arrival of the USS Harlan County was critical because it demonstrated our commitment to the process; its departure set the scene for the unravelling of the Governors Island process when it was on the very verge of success."
Those public servants who undercut Clinton's policy cannot plead that the policy was vague or imprecise. He had stated repeatedly, "I want to emphasize how important it is to me personally to restore democratic government to Haiti and how important it is to the United States that we return President Aristide to power." No empty phrasing here. No ambiguities that could justify competing interpretations or backsliding among Clinton's foreign policy team.
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Walter Slocombe did not hide his disagreement with official policy and with Ambassador Swing. According to the New York Times, Slocombe "boasted" of saving the United States from a small war by turning around the Harlan County and went on to say that the Pentagon would not risk American soldiers' lives to put that "psychopath" back in power. When no action was taken to discipline Slocombe or other officials who had publicly insulted Aristide, the Haitian president told his closest advisers of his worries that the White House was abandoning him.
This was a low point for Clinton's foreign-policy team. The United States had been chased out of Somalia and was uncertain and tentative on Bosnia. The visible disintegration of its Haiti policy confirmed to critic and ally alike that the administration lacked not only guiding principles on foreign policy but had no firm hand instilling a minimum of discipline and order.
In Haiti a toughened embargo increased the suffering of the Haitian people to no apparent end. A campaign of terror by military and paramilitary forces recalled the worst days of the Duvalier dynasty. And in violation of his campaign pledge, Clinton had adopted a variation of the Bush policy on forced repatriation. To complete the bleak picture, Pezzullo and the State Department designed a plan they tried to disguise as a Haitian parliamentary initiative, calling for a coalition government and the return of Aristide at some vague, unspecified date. The exiled president began to speak out publicly against U.S. policy. In full view of the world Clinton's Haitian policy had fallen apart.
Then Randall Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, burst into the headlines with a dramatic hunger strike to protest "Clinton's betrayal of Haiti." When the press asked the president about Robinson's strike, Clinton acted as though he were a spectator and powerless to adopt a new action plan. "I think he's right," Clinton said. "We ought to change our policy. It hasn't worked."
Clinton's public musings galvanized the National Security Council into conducting a full-dress policy review. The White House fired Pezzullo and former Congressman William Gray was named special envoy. Yet after several months of fruitless negotiations, the military junta remained intransigent. President Clinton had little choice. On national television he told the Haitian military: "Leave now or we will force you from power."
With an invasion force set to go, the administration reluctantly accepted an 11th-hour peace mission by former President Jimmy Carter. The Carter delegation, which included Senator Sam Nunn and General Colin Powell, held nonstop negotiations, but Cedras did not yield and only agreed to a peaceful entry for U.S. troops after the troop planes were airborne.
Until the United States moved decisively to restore exiled President Aristide to power, the Clinton administration had appeared fainthearted and awkward. By carrying the Haiti operation to a successful conclusion over resistance and near- mutiny inside his own government, President Clinton and his foreign-policy team seemed to have acquired the confidence to cope decisively with other pressing international issues.
When the Haitian army stormed the presidential palace and ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, it was not just democratic government in Haiti that was at stake. Generals and colonels in a half dozen Latin countries measured Washington's reaction as they nurtured their own political ambitions. Our vacillation encouraged military-inspired coup attempts in Venezuela and Guatemala and a successful presidential coup against legislative government in Peru. The hurdle that President Clinton had to overcome was not the resistance of the Haitian army but foot-dragging and worse inside his own national security establishment. In deciding to restore Aristide, President Clinton decided a far larger question: Who was to be in charge of American policy for the rest of his time in office?
After months of contradictory actions, when President Clinton liberated Haiti with American troops, he succeeded in that most difficult of foreign-policy tasks-the rescue of a failed policy. He accomplished this without the stigma of a forcible invasion and with international endorsement and participation. In the process, he established two highly significant precedents: For the first time in the history of our relations with the Caribbean and Central America, the United States used armed force clearly and unambiguously on the side of a democratically elected president. For the first time, America intervened not to shore up an unpopular, military-dominated regime but on behalf of an elected government pledged to change and reform.
In another historic first for the Western Hemisphere, the United States rejected unilateral intervention in favor of acting with the United Nations. President Clinton set an important precedent by taking his case to the Security Council. Once the Security Council licensed the United States to lead a multilateral force to restore democratic government to Haiti, and after the de facto military regime had faithlessly violated its solemn agreement to permit Aristide's return, the issue was no longer a political problem but how to enforce the will of the international community.
Writing in the Summer 1994 Washington Quarterly, Lincoln P. Bloomfield said, "Despite setbacks and loss of nerve, the innovative collective measures of the early 1990s could in time become habit-forming, particularly if politicians keep their nerve and eschew the "principle of the dangerous precedent" which says that nothing should ever be done for the first time. Once again, as in 1945, the future hinges on the political imagination and moral authority of those in power. Absent those qualities there is no U.N., no law, no order."
There is a vast difference between the unilateral big stick and the responsible exercise of power within a multilateral framework. Once a pact is signed, those who assumed responsibility for conducting the negotiations-in this case the United Nations, the OAS and the United States-must insist on compliance. Accountability, not nonintervention, is the basic principle of foreign policy. Once a government takes the lead in persuading the international community to impose sanctions in order to force an illegitimate regime to cede power, that nation has incurred an overriding obligation to see that policy through to success.
Not only did the Clinton policy successfully restore constitutional government to Haiti but on February 7, 1996, Jean- Bertrand Aristide passed the presidential sash to RenŽ Preval, his political ally and first prime minister. For the first time in the history of Haiti, power had been peacefully transferred from one elected president to another.
As he moves to consolidate these fragile gains towards the institutionalization of democracy, Preval must not only cope with members of Haiti's economic elite still unreconciled to democratic rule and a staggering unemployment rate, but he must also confront these challenges without the authority and prestige enjoyed by Aristide. Yet, whatever his faults, Aristide is a large- minded man and a patriot. He will support Preval not just because they are friends and political allies but because to the extent that Preval succeeds, Aristide's vision of a democratic Haiti becomes reality and his place as a unique and towering figure in Haiti's history confirmed.
Aristide may run again for the presidency in five years. In the past, Aristide's popular appeal was partly based on his status as a loner, an ascetic. "I am married to the people of Haiti," he would declaim. An orphan, a priest at odds with the church authority, Aristide was to Haitians a leader with ties only to them. In the future, should Aristide choose to run he will go before the electorate as a statesman at home in the corridors of power and the exercise of authority. His church has released him from the priesthood and witnessed his marriage to an attractive, highly intelligent New York lawyer, a member of one of Haiti's distinguished families. The people of Haiti will, if given the opportunity, return Aristide to the presidency but both they and he will have undergone profound changes.
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