Trying to do the right thing in Haiti, Clinton finds himself with nothing but bad options. The military rulers who seized power illegally in 1991 are still holding out against a trade embargo that has only been effective enough to hurt the poor. Violence against opponents of the regime has become even uglier than usual in recent months, with the appearance, for the first time, of politically motivated rapes and a grisly practice known as “facial scalping,” in which the face is hacked off murder victims with a machete. From exile in Washington, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president, refuses to accept a compromise worked out by the administration. He and his American supporters want Clinton to tighten the embargo and threaten the use of military force. Clinton, who has just finished extracting U.S. troops from Somalia, wants to avoid another quagmire. But he can’t appear to abandon Aristide. “We’re trapped,” says a senior U.S. official. “Anyplace else, we’d walk away. But with Haiti, you can’t.”
Aristide thinks he can get a better deal than the latest U.S. proposal, which calls for Gen. Raoul Cedras to step down but does not specify a date for Aristide’s return. Apparently he believes that his backing in Haiti is still so strong that the stalemate cannot be broken without him. “No matter what the s.o.b. does,” says one of his own exasperated American advisers, “they cannot drop him, and he knows it.”
In Haiti, however, Aristide’s supporters are under increasingly brutal pressure, both from the embargo and from a violent new organization called the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti. In French, the front’s initials (FRAPH) sound like frappe, which means “hit.” In the last two months there been at least 75 killings and a dozen or more rapes that appear to be political, and FRAPH is widely blamed. The front’s thugs also roughed up five U.N. observers last week in a town outside Port-au-Prince.
Aristide’s American supporters blame the administration, in part, for the ugly turn of events. Last week the 40-member Congressional Black Caucus charged that U.S. policy “encourages the torture and murder of civilians.” Three Democratic senators discussed Haiti at the White House with senior Clinton advisers, including national-security adviser Anthony Lake. Afterward one of the senators, Bob Graham of Florida. said the administration was “re-evaluating” its Haiti policy, which he said “has not and does not show any likelihood of achieving the principal U.S. goal, returning Aristide to power.” Graham said a new policy ought to include “a credible threat of military intervention.” With Somalia in his past and Bosnia still before him, that is a threat that Clinton would prefer not to make.
