19525: (hermantin)Miami-Herald- Bush's policies on Haiti at issue (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Mon, Mar. 01, 2004

PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS


Bush's policies on Haiti at issue

BY PETER WALLSTEN

pwallsten@herald.com


Lingering questions over what role the White House played in the Haiti
uprising -- and whether race was a factor in sending back hundreds of
fleeing refugees -- could haunt President Bush as he tries to win Florida
again this year and secure reelection.

Leading Democrats, including presidential front-runner John Kerry, moved
quickly Sunday in the wake of Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's
resignation to condemn Bush -- painting the situation as a foreign policy
failure by a president whose reelection campaign is based largely on
national security.

''The United States should have been an honest broker for nonviolence,''
Kerry told The Herald in a telephone interview from New York, where he was
campaigning for the Tuesday Democratic primary. ``This is one more
indication of how the administration comes late to an issue, very
ideologically colored in their approach, and allows things to get out of
control as they have elsewhere in the world.''

`DOUBLE STANDARD'

Kerry also described the Bush administration's policy of blocking Haitians
from fleeing the chaos while giving greater access to Cubans escaping
communism as a ''double standard,'' but he stopped short of critics who call
the Haitian policy racist.

Democrats believe the issue presents an increasingly complicated political
problem for Bush and his national security team -- especially as the
administration justifies ousting a dictator in Iraq in the name of fostering
democracy, while it stood by as armed rebels forced out a democratically
elected president only hundreds of miles off Florida's shores.

Some Democrats went further to frame the debate about Bush's priorities,
accusing the administration of fueling a coup to overthrow a legitimate
president.

''The conspiracy theory is alive and well as it relates to their hand in
this,'' said U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, a Miami Democrat who is Kerry's
Florida campaign chairman and who confronted Bush on Haiti last week along
with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus. ``This is going to be
front and center in the campaign, just like Iraq will be.''

There were signs, however, that some Democrats were being careful to sound
more moderate in anticipation of stories emerging about Aristide's problems
in office.

Kerry, a Massachusetts senator who has come under fire from Republicans as
waffling on positions, seemed to back away somewhat from his charge during a
nationally televised debate last week that the White House had been
''engaged in very manipulative and wrongful ways.'' He said Sunday that the
administration was ''disengaged,'' and that simply allowing the rebels to
move freely gave them ''veto power'' over any resolution to the problem in
Haiti.

Asked if he believed the U.S. government engineered the overthrow of
Aristide, Kerry said: ``I don't have evidence of it personally. I've heard
stories of it. I don't believe anything without evidence.''

But, he added, ``There may be some legitimate questions.''

Kerry also was careful to note that Aristide ''had a lot of problems,'' but
he stood by his earlier assessment that the Bush administration held ''a
theological and an ideological hatred'' of the former Catholic priest.

''It goes back to the liberation theology that he preached earlier in his
career,'' he said, referring to a liberal form of Catholicism that
emphasizes helping the poor. ``It's part of the right's attitude about
Aristide.''

Haiti is an emotional subject in two vote-rich states, New York and Florida,
where tens of thousands of immigrants have settled and remain in touch with
family and friends back home.

Republicans are most concerned about the political fallout in Florida, where
Bush won the state in 2000 by just 537 votes, and where the Bush campaign
can ill afford a high-profile crisis such as the arrival of a massive number
of refugees.

GOP REACTION

GOP campaign aides on Sunday reacted to the assertions by Kerry and others
with outrage, charging that the Democratic front-runner was trying to use
the issue to divert attention from his own inconsistencies on the Iraq war
and other foreign policy topics. ''This is reckless and irresponsible
politics,'' said Bush campaign spokesman Reed Dickens.

Still, an election-year refugee crisis in Florida is particularly dangerous
for the GOP because it would embroil the president's brother, Gov. Jeb Bush,
in touchy decisions over how to treat people entering the state -- and
whether Haitians fleeing chaos would be entitled to similar special
treatment granted Cubans who flee communism. Haitian Americans tend to vote
Democratic, while Cuban Americans are one of the Republican Party's most
important voting blocs in the state.

The issue is certain to arise during a major civil rights march planned for
Tuesday in Tallahassee to coincide with the governor's State of the State
speech -- the same day Kerry arrives for a set of major rallies in Florida
essentially to kick off his primary and general-election campaigns in the
state.

While Haitian Americans remain a relatively small voting bloc in the state,
the images of black people escaping the chaos of the impoverished Caribbean
nation and then being returned by the U.S. Coast Guard could inflame racial
tensions at a time civil rights groups are marshaling forces for a big
turnout against Bush in the November election, Democratic strategists and
leaders said Sunday.

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