19607: Lemieux: Reuters: U.S. Top Aim in Haiti Seen as Halting Refugees (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

U.S. Top Aim in Haiti Seen as Halting Refugees
Mon Mar 1, 2004 02:13 PM ET

By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. intervention in Haiti,
which helped lead to the removal of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, was aimed primarily at preventing widespread
violence that could have sparked a massive outflow of
refugees toward the coast of Florida during the
presidential campaign, experts said on Monday.

"The Bush administration has focused its Haiti policy on
the very short-term concern of avoiding a refugee influx
into Florida during an election year," said David Abraham,
a law professor a Haiti scholar at the University of Miami.

The administration acted over the weekend, first by helping
persuade Aristide that he had to go and then by dispatching
a small number of U.S. Marines to stabilize the situation.

More were expected to join them in coming days but
Secretary of State Colin Powell said the deployment would
be "in the hundreds" and certainly nowhere near the 20,000
troops the U.S. dispatched to Haiti in the 1990s.

In the 2000 presidential election campaign, then-Republican
candidate George W. Bush criticized his predecessor,
President Bill Clinton, for dispatching U.S. troops all
over the world, and especially to Haiti, to take part in
"nation-building."

"I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's
called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used
to fight and win war," Bush said then.

In a presidential debate with Vice President Al Gore, Bush
was even clearer. "I wouldn't have sent troops to Haiti. I
didn't think it was a mission worthwhile. It was a
nation-building mission, and it was not very successful. It
cost us a couple billions of dollars, and I'm not so sure
democracy's any better off in Haiti than it was before,"
Bush said then.

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Although he has committed U.S. troops to major
nation-building operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, experts
doubted Bush had fundamentally changed his view about
Haiti.

"The United States doesn't have many interests in Haiti. It
is not a strategic threat; it doesn't have much of a
trading relationship with us. It does have 7.5 million
people, and there is also a growing Haitian-American
community which is becoming more politically vocal," said
Stephen Johnson of the Heritage Foundation.

A major refugee outflow, such as occurred in the early
1990s, would place Bush in a difficult position. The
military is already readying a camp capable of housing tens
of thousands of migrants, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, near
the prison where it is holding hundreds of captives in the
"war on terror."

But Bush wants to avoid the specter of thousands of
Haitians taking to the seas in rickety, home-made craft,
with the possibility of many drowning and the rest being
intercepted by U.S. vessels and taken against their will to
Guantanamo.

"The arrival of refugees is politically very destabilizing
in Florida. It creates tensions between Haitians, who are
denied entry to the United States, and Cubans who are
allowed to stay," said Abraham.

Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor of Florida and the
president is acutely aware that a few hundred votes one way
or the other in that swing state could decide the 2004
election, as happened in 2000.

One difference between past interventions and the current
action is that the administration is working very closely
this time with France, the United Nations and Caribbean
nations.

But Emory University scholar Juan del Aguila was not
convinced they either could or would achieve much.

"I'm not optimistic. I've seen it all before. There is a
great sense right now about the need to do something but
interest inevitably drains away once the situation is
stabilized," he said.

"I'm afraid that once the moment of crisis passes, things
will get back to the status quo in Haiti very quickly."


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