20478: Lemieux: Reuters: Analysts criticize U.S. approach to Haiti crisis (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

16 Mar 2004 16:31:00 GMT
Analysts criticize U.S. approach to Haiti crisis
By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A decade after the United States
restored Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power as Haiti's
president, the former priest is back in exile and America's
commitment to democracy there is under fire.

Despite spending $850 million in aid and twice committing
troops in 10 years, the United States "has never learned
how to deal with Haiti and probably never will," said
Riordan Roett, director of Western Hemisphere programs at
the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns
Hopkins University.

"The band-aid approach is what the United States likes. We
love holding elections and then we come home and prepare
for the next crisis," he said.

Like many analysts, Roett believes the blame lies largely
with Aristide, who fled to the Central African Republic two
weeks ago after being chased from his country by an armed
rebellion. The Americans encouraged him to leave.

Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected leader,
returned to the region on Monday, arriving in Jamaica for a
stay that the new Haitian government says will fan
tensions.

Roett faults the former priest for "his intransigence, his
inability to build coalitions and to deal with the
violence" that increasingly characterized his political
movement. Others accuse him of corruption.

Robert Pastor, the Carter administration's Latin American
expert, said the task was too great. "He was not a great
leader in a country that needed a (Nelson) Mandela to heal
it."

Still, experts say President George W. Bush and former
President Bill Clinton share some responsibility for the
chaos that recently forced the deployment of 2,650 U.S.
Marines at the head of an international force to keep order
in Haiti.

FAILED PROMISE

Aristide, Haiti's first freely elected president, took
office in December 1990 but was overthrown by the military
nine months later and went into exile in Washington.

But in returning Aristide to power by force in 1994, the
Clinton administration made a "critical mistake" because
its aim was restoring Aristide rather than a broader goal
of bringing democracy to Haiti, said Robert Perito, author
of a new book, "Where is the Lone Ranger When We Need Him?
America's Search for a Post-Conflict Stability Force."

Perito, of the United States Institute of Peace, said this
was compounded when Aristide was forced prematurely to call
new elections. Had he completed his five year term, the
political environment may have been more stable.

In 2000, Bush took office determined to focus on major
powers like Russia and China. His key advisers felt
Clinton's deployments to Haiti were of little value and
they distrusted Aristide, who was re-elected to a second
term in 2000.

In the latest crisis, the United States attempted to
negotiate a political power-sharing settlement that might
have averted the latest armed intervention, but the effort
came too late, depended too much on other Caribbean states
and lacked sufficient U.S. muscle, critics said.

Once in Africa, Aristide charged that the United States had
kidnapped him -- an allegation dismissed by U.S. officials
-- and insisted he was still Haiti's president.

It has prompted Democrats and members of the Congressional
Black Caucus to question why the administration did not do
more to save Aristide from being ousted.

"We have to make decisions about where we will put American
lives at risk," Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega
recently told Congress. "The erratic, irresponsible
behavior of Aristide ... did mean he was not a sustainable
political solution."

While sympathetic to reluctance to use military force to
keep Aristide in power, Pastor said Bush aggravated
suspicions of the United States by handling the Haiti
crisis in a "non-constitutional way."

A provision in Haiti's constitution could have allowed
Aristide to step aside and cede powers to a council of
ministers, but Aristide's opponents opposed that unless the
process was guaranteed by the United States, which was
unwilling to trust Aristide, Pastor said.

((Reporting by Carol Giacomo, editing by Stuart Doughty))




AlertNet news is provided by Reuters



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