Bill Clinton knows boat people. In 1980, he was blamed when Cuban refugees from the Mariel boat lift rioted at Fort Chaffee, Ark. Governor Clinton had nothing to do with putting the Cubans there – that was Jimmy Carter’s call – but his inability to control the situation became one of the issues that cost him re-election. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton momentarily forgot the lessons of Fort Chaffee and attacked George Bush for turning away Haitian refugees on the high seas. Tony Lake argued ““vociferously’’ in favor of this, according to one who was there. Lake’s position was honorable, plausible – and politic, given Clinton’s need to score foreign-policy points and please his party’s black constituents. It became impolitic when Clinton won the election and Haitians celebrated by building boats – and the president-elect, less than honorably, reversed himself.
An interesting bit of diplomacy ensued. The Clinton administration attempted a rare thing – to get a military junta to roll back a successful coup – and nearly succeeded. Last July, the Haitian military promised to relinquish power if the exiled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, agreed to build a coalition government. Lawrence Pezzullo, the career diplomat who cut the deal, blames the military for causing the crisis, but faults Aristide for not seizing the opportunity: ““If he’d played the game as Nelson Mandela has, and worked for reconciliation, we might have had a different result,’’ he says. ““But he was more interested in demonizing the opposition than in finding common ground.''
When the junta showed bad faith by turning away an American ship carrying peacekeeping forces from Port-au-Prince last October, Aristide was off the hook. The thugs on the dock had reaffirmed his status as a noble victim of oppression; he didn’t have to play ““peace’’ anymore. Pezzullo believes the junta might have relented (““they always dragged their feet, then played ball’’) if the White House had stood firm, but Lake and ““the civilians at the Pentagon’’ panicked – it was also Somalia humiliation week – and ordered the ship home. Worse, the administration began to show signs of caving in to Aristide’s intensified congressional lobbying. Finally, a new Clinton policy emerged – forced by the Black Caucus and hunger striker Randall Robinson – which put no pressure at all on Aristide. Pezzullo was sacked. All serious hope of negotiations ended. The ““peace process’’ was supplanted by a war process. Economic sanctions were toughened. The president threatened military intervention if the sanctions didn’t work. He offered a more elaborate hearing process for Haitian refugees at sea (on rented Ukrainian cruise ships, an appropriately bizarre touch).
The policy is a stopgap, at best. The sanctions will never be tough enough to displace the junta, especially with the Dominican government next door winking at the embargo. The sanctions will, however, make life even more miserable for average Haitians. They will build more boats and – if human-rights lawyers are on the Ukrainian cruise ships and advise them how to convince the authorities they are ““political’’ refugees rather than just poor people looking for a better life – more will be accepted. When word gets out that emigration is possible, more will come. Sooner or later, with cruise ships bulging, the president will be forced to contemplate an invasion.
The trouble with oxymorons is that they’re contradictory. An invasion would be ““neo-Wilsonian,’’ but not very pragmatic. It would risk American lives to restore a democracy that never existed. Haiti had an election, but it lacks the solid, stable middle class necessary to sustain democracy. Restoring Aristide – never much of a democrat – might only lead to more bloodshed, polarization . . . and refugees. One suspects that Bill Clinton is insightful and irresolute enough to see the folly of such a course. One suspects that, with Randall Robinson back on solid food, Haiti will be allowed to simmer along for a time – as did Woodrow Wilson’s incursion, which lasted 19 years. In the end, Wilsonism not only proved unrealistic, it was cruel. Clinton’s Haiti policy risks the same fate. His economic embargo is a casual, thoughtless cruelty. If he can’t come up with a better plan to end this thing, perhaps he should opt for common decency: perhaps he should simply lift the embargo. Ease the daily agony of most Haitians; ease the pressure to build boats. Woodrow Wilson learned it was hard to make life better in Haiti; Bill Clinton has a moral responsibility not to make it worse.
