19787: (Hermantin) PalmBeachPost:Powell: U.S. aid failed to bring desired results (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Powell: U.S. aid failed to bring desired results

By Bob Dart, Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Friday, February 27, 2004



WASHINGTON -- America's attempts to help Haiti have frustrated U.S.
taxpayers while failing to end the misery of the impoverished, chaotic
Caribbean country.

The United States has provided nearly a billion dollars in direct aid to
Haiti over the past decade and is sending more, but the results were
disappointing even before the current armed revolution, Secretary of State
Colin Powell said Thursday.

"We've provided over $800 million from 1995 to the present to Haiti," Powell
told the Senate Budget Committee. "We're still providing funding to Haiti,
$75 million this past year. There's a request in our budget for more."

But the spending has not brought stability. In 1994, the United States sent
20,000 troops to put elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power
after his ouster in a military coup. The U.S. soldiers stayed for two years.
Then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell was among the negotiators
who helped restore Aristide to power.

"It's a great disappointment to me to find ourselves in this position,"
Powell said. "I went down 10 years ago with Sen. Nunn and with President
Carter and talked the generals out in order for President Aristide to come
back in. And I regret that over those 10 years we have not seen the kind of
progress that we'd hoped for."

Overall U.S. spending in Haiti since 1994 approaches $3 billion, but most of
that has been in military costs, said Steve Pike, a State Department
spokesman. The $800 million figure cited by Powell reflects humanitarian aid
and police training.

Non-military U.S. spending in Haiti peaked in 1995 at $170.3 million,
compared with $75 million last year.

Critics say the U.S. help has been insufficient and its policies dangerously
inconsistent.

"Over the past decade, the U.S. approach to Haiti has vacillated between
aggressive engagement that eventually falls prey to disappointing results,
and partial withdrawal that allows the country's woes to multiply until
heightened involvement again becomes necessary," said Daniel Erikson,
director of Caribbean programs at Inter-American Dialogue, a center for
policy analysis on issues in Western Hemisphere affairs.

"The people of Haiti have enough problems: Erratic U.S. policy should not be
yet another," Erikson concluded in a recent report, The Haiti Dilemma.

The Bush and Clinton administrations have had "diametrically opposed
policies" on Haiti, agreed James Dobbins, Clinton's special envoy to Haiti
from 1994 to 1996. "Clinton had a policy of partisan engagement on behalf of
Aristide. The Bush administration has had a policy of partisan
disengagement."

Since President Bush took office, Dobbins said, aid to Haiti has been at
"the minimum" necessary "to keep the Haitians home." By providing money for
food and medicine, he said, the U.S. prevents widespread starvation and the
boatloads of refugees that such hardship would cause.

But support to Aristide subsided even before Clinton left office.

In Haiti's 2000 elections, Aristide was blamed for widespread fraud.
International organizations responded by cutting off millions of dollars in
badly needed aid.

The United States stopped paying for training of Haitian police forces.



Aid to Haiti has been comparatively paltry to other assistance efforts, even
at levels under the Clinton administration, said Dobbins, now director of
the International Security and Defense Policy Center at Rand Corp. For
instance, he said, the rebuilding aid in 1995, the first year after the U.S.
intervention, was one-hundredth the amount of assistance the U.S. provided
to Iraq after its intervention there.

"The decision to cut off assistance as a result of the flawed elections in
2000 was undoubtedly justified but equally unwise," said Dobbins. "If you
cut off resources to a society as poor as Haiti, you increase the likelihood
of violence, chaos and significant humanitarian catastrophe."

The is no doubt, though, the more funds will be channeled to Haiti -- later,
if not sooner.

"The international financial community and the institutions of the
international financial community are willing to help more. But they have
become frustrated that the money doesn't seem to produce the kind of result
intended," Powell said. "Until the political situation stabilizes itself and
there's a legislature and there's a functioning executive branch with some
security in the country and there are institutions that are functioning,
there's a reluctance in the international community to just pour money into
the place."

Warning than an exodus of Haitian refugees is already preparing to launch,
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said the push for stability had better be
successful and rapid. Afterward, a more stable U.S. policy is also needed,
he indicated.

"And then, once the country is stabilized, then I think we've got to have
fresh thinking about how we help them stay stabilized in the future," he
said.

bdart@coxnews.com

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