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CLINTON DASHES HAITIANS' HOPE OF FAIR TREATMENT

By G. Dunkel

When Bill Clinton was running for president, he appealed to broad
progressive sentiment in the U.S. when he repeatedly promised to
reverse George Bush's "cruel policy of returning Haitian refugees
to a brutal dictatorship."

The reactionary and racist double standards of the U.S.
government are nowhere more glaring than in the way it handles
immigrants from the Caribbean: opening its arms to Cubans who
have succumbed to the economic pressure of the U.S. blockade (it
calls them political refugees and gives them asylum), while
incarcerating and sending back those fleeing the bloody
dictatorship in Haiti (they are called economic refugees and are
excluded).

Now Clinton himself is guilty of the same cruel policy.

He has supported the sending of a U.S. flotilla to the waters
around Haiti, where these 18 to 20 ships, a dozen airplanes and
helicopters are now stopping Haitian boats as soon as they reach
the high seas.

Clinton even gave a speech announcing his support of this naval
action in order to have the Voice of America beam it to Haiti to
discourage any Haitians who might be considering fleeing their
country.

At the same time, these U.S. ships are doing nothing to enforce
the UN embargo that is supposed to be aimed at convincing the
Haitian generals to allow back the popular elected president they
overthrew, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Reports from Haiti indicate
that the harbor at Port-au-Prince is full of commercial vessels
delivering all manner of goods, including the strategic energy
source, petroleum, in violation of the embargo.

HAITIANS ANGRY

"The Haitian community in New York was very upset" at Clinton's
reversal, says Maude LeBlanc, acting director of the paper Haiti
Progres and a leader of the Tenth Department, which represents
600,000 Haitian exiles. She feels that press reports on thousands
of boats being readied to sail to Miami in time for Clinton's
inauguration were probably exaggerated in order to give Clinton
an excuse for changing his position.

According to LeBlanc, "Stopping ships on the high seas, removing
their passengers, then destroying the ships and returning the
passengers against their will is an act of war." It is an act of
war that the biggest, most powerful country in the world, the
United States, is carrying out against the poorest country in the
Western Hemisphere, Haiti.

In Haiti, the reaction is even stronger. A Haitian taxi driver
told a reporter, "I'm still angry. That Clinton guy is just a
macoute." (The macoutes are the armed paramilitary thugs who
terrorize the people.)

RACIST EXCLUSION

Many Haitians have been held for months and even years in the
Krome Detention Center in Miami. A number have been on a hunger
strike, protesting the racist nature of their continued
imprisonment. By contrast, Cubans who illegally flew into Miami
recently on a hijacked plane were almost immediately released.

LeBlanc pointed out that in the seven months President Aristide
was in power, only a few hundred Haitians tried to flee to the
U.S. In the 18 months since the military coup, 35,000 to 40,000
Haitians have tried to make the voyage, and 25,000 more have fled
to the neighboring Dominican Republic. It wasn't the economy that
suddenly went bad, it was the political situation.

Those leaving take enormous risks, worsened by their fear of
being apprehended by U.S. Coast Guard and Navy vessels. A few
survivors picked up by Cuban ships told of a shipwreck of a
freighter the first week in January in which over 400 Haitians
are believed to have died.

Ever since the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was forced to flee
after turbulent mass struggles five years ago, the U.S. has been
trying to re-establish the status quo. Its front man, the banker
Marc Bazin, lost the election to Aristide and, despite all kinds
of backroom maneuvering, hasn't been able to establish a stable
government.

So-called elections were just held for the Haitian senate and
turned out to be a complete bust. With the vast majority of the
people boycotting this exercise in political deception, many
polling sites were deserted.

                               -30-

Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 West 21st
Street, New York, NY 10010; e-mail: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org or
workers@mcimail.com.



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