UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARD HAITIAN REFUGEES, EVEN WHEN IT IS CRITICIZED, is often portrayed as a difficult dilemma for well- intentioned policymakers: after all, we only want to stem the tide of refugees while we work out a diplomatic solution to restore President Aristide to Haiti. The U.S. promotes this way of thinking; the Clinton Administration urged Aristide to keep quiet about the refugees in exchange for diligent U.S. efforts to restore democracy. But these "efforts" have been a charade. And U.S. immigration policies are an extension of U.S. foreign policy. In the case of Haiti, that means that the forced return of refugees is part-and- parcel of the U.S. government's efforts to suppress real democracy in Haiti. The whole package is wrapped in a tangle of lies and distortions.

The United States began to interdict Haitian boats in 1981, the same year it began a policy of "indefinite detention" for Haitians at the Krome detention center in Miami and elsewhere. The new interdiction agreement was based on an exchange of letters between the governments of Ronald Reagan and Jean-Claude Duvalier. For the appearance of compliance with international law, the U.S. letter said that Haitians who qualified for refugee status would not be returned. But from the very start, the interdiction "screening" procedure for finding those Haitians who might be genuine political refugees was a mere formality. This is clear in the opening statement that used to be made to interdicted Haitians on board the Coast Guard cutters: "The Immigration Officer will also ask you questions concerning any fears you may have [about returning] ... Meanwhile, the ship will be returning to Port-au-Prince, where most of you will be disembarked." And most of them were. From the start of the program in 1981 until a month before Aristide's inauguration almost ten years later, some 23,000 Haitians were picked up. Eight of them were allowed into the U.S. to apply for political asylum.

In the seven months of Aristide's presidency, from February 7 to September 30, 1991, the number of Haitians fleeing their country dropped drastically. That was perhaps the only advantage for the U.S. government of Aristide's popularity in Haiti (he won 67% of the vote). His popularity posed a threat to the U.S., since Aristide wanted to do things such as raising the minimum wage to 50 cents an hour. U.S. corporations were eager to continue exploiting Haitian labor. So the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) worked behind the scenes in Haiti to defeat Aristide's minimum wage proposal. This proposal and others like it led to Aristide's ouster in late 1991. According to the National Labor Committee, "the first thing the U.S. companies did on returning to Haiti [after the coup] was to fire the union members at their plants"; and today, through a loophole it put in the embargo, the U.S. government itself is buying baseballs assembled in Haiti for U.S. companies by women who "are earning as little as 5 cents an hour."¹

 

HUNDREDS OF HAITIANS WERE KILLED IN THE FIRST DAYS OF THE COUP, AND THOUsands have been killed since then. Military and paramilitary repression is widespread, as the Haitian elites aim to destroy every vestige of the kind of democratic organization that was flourishing under President Aristide and that gave Haitians, as poor as they are, enough dignity and hope that they wanted to stay in Haiti. Understandably, thousands of Haitians tried to flee the killing and torture -- some toward the United States, others to the Dominican Republic, and still others into hiding within Haiti. Predictably, the U.S. refused to use its influence with the Haitian military -- many of whom it has trained, or paid through the C.I.A.² -- to restore a President it did not want. The Bush Administration knew it did not have to go that far to keep Haitians out. It was already functioning according to the logic which attorney Michael Ratner would later spell out in a discussion of Bush's successor: "As long as Haitians were appearing at the borders of the United States there was an important domestic political reason for Clinton to make a serious push for democracy in Haiti. It was one way to stop refugees. But there was another way to stop refugees: interdict them and summarily return them to the hands of their oppressors in Haiti."³

In the early aftermath of the coup, the U.S. soon found its interdiction resources stretched thin. As a result, the "screening" interviews, already biased and inadequate, became more perfunctory than ever. Interviews started taking place at a refugee camp set up on the U.S. Naval base at Guantànamo Bay, Cuba, in late 1991. Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) officials in charge of the interviews often knew little about Haiti; some asylum officers did not know who had led the coup, who was heading the illegal government, or what Aristide's common nickname is.⁴ Yet even with the odds so strongly against them, many Haitians were being "screened in" on the sheer strength of their asylum claims. INS officials in Guantànamo began to get a clear message from Washington: fewer Haitians must be screened in. Again Washington was ignoring the entire concept, grounded in international law, of case-by-case evaluation of potential refugees.

How could the Haitians receive fair interviews under these circumstances? They couldn't. So Miami's Haitian Refugee Center filed suit (HRC v. Baker). The government's defense, like its public statements on the issue, was full of lies. To back up one assertion, the United States submitted a declaration of Robert K. Wolthius, identified as Assistant Secretary of Defense. Wolthius "stated in his declaration that he ‘has been closely and regularly involved in the formulation and implementation of U.S. policy concerning the Republic of Haiti.'" When deposed by Haitian Refugee Center attorneys, however, Wolthius admitted "that he had only a vague understanding as to what the policy was, [and] was not involved in formulating the policy." Incredibly, Wolthius had actually "assumed that position [of Assistant Secretary of Defense] for one day and one day only -- the day he signed the declaration."⁵

A more damaging deception came from Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Bernard Aronson. In a sworn declaration, "Aronson makes the dramatic claim that he has ‘credible reports' which suggest ‘that as many as 20,000 more Haitians are massing on one of Haiti's coasts preparing to depart by sea for the United States.' ... In fact, there was, and is, no massing. When deposed on this point Aronson admitted he was not certain and retracted the use of the emotionally laden term ‘massing' . . ." He also refused to identify the source of his claim, saying it was " ‘classified.' "⁶ Someone closer to the scene contradicted Aronson: " ‘I have no knowledge of a mass like that preparing to leave. I don't know how anybody could know that,' said Commander Larry Mizell, the top U.S. Coast Guard officer in Haiti. Many people in Haiti thought the State Department's estimate might refer to La Gonave Island ... a gathering and departure point for thousands of Haitians since [the coup] ... A visit to La Gonave ... revealed no crowds of people visible ..."⁷ Unfortunately, in spite of such corrections, the scare tactic's damage had been done (a pattern of loud disinformation and quiet correction that would be repeated with the C.I.A.-generated, personal attacks on Aristide).

 

IN HRC v. Baker, the government also defended itself by saying that even if the interviews were not perfect under the circumstances, all that international law required was some form of screening to find political refugees, and that the U.S. was doing that. The fact that results were largely predetermined did not seem to matter. In January 1992, too early in the process to know, INS Deputy Commissioner Ricardo Inzunza said that 90% of the Haitian cases from Guantànamo would ultimately be denied (the process was that those "screened-in" would be brought to the U.S., and would then formally apply for political asylum here).⁸ When INS's Chief Asylum Officer, Gregg Beyer, who oversaw the screening decisions, wrote his superiors that "the interviews were ‘increasingly inconclusive' and ‘also of rapidly decreasing validity' ... Beyer's supervisor relieved him of his ... screening responsibilities."⁹ Under the scrutiny that came with ongoing litigation, the screening process did improve temporarily. But the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government.

In May 1992, even the dubious justification used in HRC v. Baker -- that there was refugee screening taking place, regardless of its quality -- went out the window when President Bush issued an executive order that fleeing Haitians be picked up and returned with no interviews at all. In other words, now they were not even given a chance to explain why they were leaving. Candidate Clinton criticized this policy unambiguously: "I am appalled by the decision of the Bush Administration to pick up fleeing Haitians on the high seas and forcibly return them to Haiti before considering their claim to political asylum." President Clinton has continued the policy, and even tightened it by ordering a Coast Guard and Navy blockade to keep potential refugees on the island.

The Clinton Administration defended Bush's 1992 order in the Supreme Court and won (Sale v. Haitian Centers Council). The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) called the decision "a setback to modern international refugee law which has been developing for more than forty years." In March 1993, the Organization of American States declared the interdiction program a violation of international law. When the exiled Aristide government announced a January 1994 conference in Miami to be entitled "Democracy: The Solution to the Refugee Crisis," the Clinton Administration did not like the focus. It pressured Aristide, and the conference was instead called "Democracy: The Solution to the Haitian Crisis," focusing on the Governors Island agreement, signed in July 1993, and according to which Aristide should have already been back in Haiti. Still, the conference did recommend that the Haitian government end the interdiction "agreement." In April 1994, in the context of increasingly brutal murders of Aristide supporters in Haiti, President Aristide -- finally -- announced that in six months the interdiction agreement would be abrogated by Haiti; as the legitimate president he can do this, and the last legal "justification" for the interdiction program will be gone. Legalities are not likely to matter then any more than they do now. In the course of repeated warnings to the courts throughout both series of litigation to stay out of foreign policy, the executive branch has acknowledged that its need to return the Haitians is precisely foreign policy: "this exodus ... is threatening our foreign policy interests ..."; and "[t]he course of our foreign policy and immigration enforcement may not be dictated by hastily-crafted judicial intervention." ¹⁰ (This is not to say that the refugee policy is not also a response to perceived domestic political considerations -- only that the two cannot be separated. And I say "perceived" because the architects of the anti-refugee policies which seem to respond to the public's general anti-immigrant hysteria have themselves played a large role in provoking that hysteria in the first place.)

 

ONCE AGAIN, INSTEAD OF PUTTING PRESSURE ON THE HAITIAN MILITARY TO END repression, the U.S. is likely to renew its lies to the American people about the refugees in order to justify returning them to potentially deadly circumstances. One lie Clinton has been telling, in the same words Bush used, is that the policy of return is meant to "save lives" by discouraging Haitians from leaving by boat. But the Haitians know what choice they are making when they decide that the dangers in Haiti are greater than the dangers of escaping. When Haitians are returned, the U.S. shows its concern for their lives by handing them directly over to the Haitian military on the docks at Port-au-Prince. Arrests of returning Haitians, while U.S. embassy officials watch, are commonplace by now. In a September 1993 cable to the Secretary of State, the embassy described a typical "interrogation" witnessed by embassy officials on the dock: it "appeared to be a ‘fishing expedition' for persons considered troublemakers by the police and probably designed to intimidate the returnees." Since February, the military has not allowed U.S. officials or the U.N. Civilian Mission to visit the detained returnees, some of whom are reportedly taken to Anti-Gang headquarters, the branch of the Haitian police run by Lt. Col. Michel François, widely considered to be at the center of the coup and its subsequent repression.

But the U.S. will continue to claim that returned Haitians are not targeted. This claim, like the more general downplaying of the violence on the island, as human rights groups have pointed out, serves as a wink to the Haitian military, while it "justifies" the policy of forced return. When the U.S. makes this claim, it is worth recalling that in 1992 the UNHCR publicly confirmed it had evidence of certain returnees being persecuted, and that the U.S. government had this information as well; and that the UNHCR was then prohibited from doing its own interviews of Haitians at Guantànamo without a U.S. military presence.¹¹ The U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince does do some monitoring of repatriates (only because it was embarrassed into doing so after Aronson falsely claimed, in February 1992, that such monitoring was taking place, when in fact the embassy staff had been greatly reduced as a result of the violence). A study of embassy records of this monitoring "reveals that its primary purpose is to discredit repatriates' stories."¹²

One leader of monitoring missions has been INS intelligence agent Gunther Wagner. Wagner served in the German Army during World War II, and then went to work for the U.S. Army Security Police; he became a naturalized American citizen, and did counterinsurgency work in Vietnam, and then was an advisor to Somoza's secret police in Nicaragua. In the 1980's he became administrator of the INS's Krome detention center in Miami.¹³ In Haiti, Wagner has been responsible for some 600 repatriate interviews, and "knows next to nothing about Haiti and very little about U.S. refugee law," according to human rights groups. His technique involves checking in with the local military commander, identifying his "team" in a public place, and asking if anyone knows of any returnees in the area. "Wagner discounts the claims of people he interviewed who said they were in hiding: ‘If an individual talked to me, in public, and tells me that he cannot go out because he has to be afraid to be arrested, then he would not have been in my presence, he would not have been in the village square or in the neighbor's house to talk to me.'"¹⁴

The distortions in one particular Wagner report were revealed by someone in a position to know. On March 11, 1992, Wagner visited the town of Anse-a-Galets on the Haitian island of La Gonave. A cable from the embassy to the State Department describes Wagner's findings: "The INS team debriefed 67 repatriates, and a number of other persons including the local army commander and resident priest. All agree there have been no killings or violence, but some shooting in the air. La Gonave has been one of the quietest spots in the country after the coup and remains very calm. The priest had a poster of Aristide prominently displayed on his front door. The priest expressed no fear of the military. There were no claims of reprisal or persecution." Thinking he was the priest mentioned, the Reverend Bill Quigley, an American who has worked on La Gonave for thirteen years, wrote a response to Wagner's report; it turns out that the "resident priest" was Quigley's housemate, but the value of Quigley's response is still clear. Reverend Quigley writes that the poster on his front door was of Michael Jordan. He had a poster of Aristide inside the house, and believes he could get away with this (displaying or even possessing pictures of Aristide has brought many Haitians beatings or worse) because the house belonged to two Americans, "not because there was a climate of calm on the island." Quigley also writes that "[t]he murder of 3 men in 3 separate incidents [on La Gonave] by the Haitian military is well documented," and that a particular Haitian military officer (whom Quigley names) often "arrested without warrant, had the soldiers beat anyone arrested for whatever reason, [and] held for whatever time he decided." Concerning fear, he explains that to "survive under military rule after your Ambassador had urged you to leave the country ... you don't express this to strangers who come to your house on a visit." Finally, he says that "[t]here were few reprisals of returning boat people on the Island because the military continued to collect the fees as the people departed a second and third time." In other words, the widely- reported military extortion was more profitable in this area than killing.

The reason Quigley's account exists is that he wrote it in support of a Haitian asylum applicant. INS asylum adjudicators typically receive "advisory opinions" on individual applicants' claims from the State Department's Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs (BHRHA). In a May 1993 opinion, the BHRHA repeated the embassy's report of Wagner's findings almost verbatim. Quigley wrote "to correct and re-focus" the record. But how often can that happen?¹⁵

 

EACH YEAR, THE STATE DEPARTMENT SUBMITS ITS Country Reports on Human Rights Practices to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A reader without other sources might think that the State Department is being fair, just as she might think the embassy monitoring reports are fair. Certainly the section on Haiti in the 1993 Country Reports mentions a lot of violence and repression. But a February 3, 1994 letter to the State Department from Ian Martin, former Director of Human Rights for the United Nations Organization of American States International Civilian Mission in Haiti, points to some distortions. Martin was with the United Nations/Organization of American States International Civilian Mission in Haiti during the time reflected in the State Department report. He writes that he "believe[s] that the report tends to understate the death toll. Perhaps more serious however is the way in which it minimizes the extent to which killings can be assumed to have been politically motivated ..." He adds "that the extent and political character ... of disappearances" for a given period are "seriously downplayed." Also, the State Department "seriously understates the failure of the military to respect the terms of reference of the [civilian] Mission over access to detainees ... Most regrettable however is the absence of any reference to what we described in our report as ‘persistent threats made against people apparently because of their contacts with the Mission or because the fact that they had been the victims of human rights violations has been made public by the Mission and others." The State Department also uses this opportunity to raise the old Aristide-advocates-violence flag again; Martin responds: "I don't know what incident the writer has in mind in stating that a Mission vehicle was stoned by a pro- Aristide mob; neither the Executive Director of the Mission nor I can recall any incident which could be so described. Certainly it is quite wrong to give the impression that the Mission was intimidated in its work at any time by pro-Aristide groups . . ."

The U.S. will continue to claim that most Haitians are "economic" refugees, even though they are not even interviewing those fleeing, and even though, in other contexts, U.S. officials cannot help but admit how bad the political repression is. An anonymous U.S. embassy official recently told the New York Times, "Every report is modified and diluted until every bite is taken out."¹⁶ In December, when Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, John Shattuck, called for a review of the policy of return without screening, he was reportedly reprimanded. But the dissenting voices are becoming harder to silence.

The U.S. says that it has "in-country" processing centers so that Haitians can apply for refugee status before they leave Haiti. It will not mention how few Haitians in real danger have access to these centers, or the number of Haitians who have been arrested or disappeared while their applications were pending, or that two of the three centers are within sight of a military headquarters.¹⁷ But several unnamed INS officers recently spoke to the Miami Herald about in-country processing, and it is clearly as much a sham as the Guantànamo processing was. One officer summed up interviewers' attitudes by saying, "No one ever gets in trouble for denying a claim." Another said that the unreasonable demands on applicants "could lead to the result that the only qualified refugees would be dead ones." One INS employee put his doubts in writing for his superiors, and now he is seeking federal protection as a whistle-blower in order to save his job.¹⁸

Meanwhile, all of this refugee processing is supplying U.S. government agencies with detailed information on individual Haitians and on Haiti's popular democratic organizations. Information on screened-out applicants was collected from the INS at Guantànamo by the State Department and by the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince. INS even tried to withhold individual Haitian activists' names, but the State Department did not respect this attempt at confidentiality.¹⁹ A March 1992 State Department cable says that the information was for "monitoring" of returnees (again, less than a month earlier, ABC News had reported that "there is no real monitoring system at all"²⁰). Cables from the same period mention that a "master list," "name- retrievable" database, and "regional profiles" are being set up, all for the diligent monitoring of repatriated Haitians' safety. Coast Guard logs with the names and addresses of interdicted Haitians are routinely handed over to the Haitian authorities, who proceed to fingerprint returnees.

There is at least one documented precedent for the U.S. helping a repressive government to target activists which the U.S. is deporting. In the 1980's, the FBI worked with the INS to pass confidential information from Salvadoran asylum applications to the Salvadoran National Guard. The FBI even provided the Salvadoran military with scheduling information on deportations.²¹ Although the U.S. does not officially recognize or support the Haitian military regime (as it did the Salvadoran one), it has covertly supported the Haitian regime, and has de facto recognized it for some time in order to facilitate the repatriation of Haitian refugees. Gretta Tovar Siebentritt of Americas Watch says she has seen no evidence that U.S. officials share information from the in-country processing (ICP) files with Haitian authorities, but that "there's no way that they can protect that information." Another source told me he knows of people removing papers from the ICP centers without scrutiny. Siebentritt says it is troubling that ICP officials do not even consider the whole issue a problem.²²

According to a September 29, 1993 memorandum from the INS Asylum Division Director, "we frequently receive requests from the FBI and CIA to review the files of asylum applicants." The memo was distributed with a legal opinion from the Justice Department's Office of General Counsel on the question of such disclosure. The legal opinion, according to the memo, "concludes that information contained in the asylum files may be disclosed to FBI and CIA officials when the need to examine such information is in conjunction with a U.S. Government investigation concerning a criminal or civil proceeding." It cannot be disclosed, however, "for the purpose of gathering intelligence unrelated" to such investigations. Needless to say, the FBI and CIA do not depend exclusively on legal channels of information. It would be worthwhile to know precisely what led the Justice Department to issue this opinion right now.

 

IN HAITI RIGHT NOW, MILITARY-BACKED VIOLENCE IS GETTING WORSE. RAPE, WHICH used to be rare there, has become a political weapon. Other new techniques of repression include burning down entire neighborhoods, and mutilating bodies -- sometimes by "facial scalpings" -- then leaving the bodies in view as warnings to other Aristide supporters. Meanwhile, in March, the United States was pressing Aristide to accept a plan for reconciliation that failed to include a date for his return. "We are encouraged by the parliamentary proposal because it has broad-based support," said Lawrence Pezzullo, Washington's Special Envoy to Haiti (at the time). Under questioning by a Senate committee, Pezzullo admitted that this plan originated in the State Department, not in the Haitian parliament. USAID, through the Center for Democracy, financed the Washington visits of Haitian politicians who came to "negotiate" the proposal; one of them, Frantz-Robert Mondé, "a former member of the Tontons Macoute, was chosen president of the Haitian Chamber of Deputies, which is now dominated by supporters of the military dictatorship."²³ At least ten officers in that military have received training in the U.S. since the coup, according to Pentagon documents which contradict earlier Defense Department denials. The neo-Duvalierist, quasi-political group FRAPH (Front pour l'Avancement et le Progrès d'Haiti), essentially an extension of the army, and responsible for much of the escalating repression, has a presence in practically every section of Haiti now. And there is testimony that Fort Dimanche, the notorious torture center in Port-au-Prince, shut down under Aristide, is now functioning again.²⁴

Supporters of democracy in Haiti are in an impossible position. If they remain in Haiti, they face the threat of brutal military and paramilitary repression. If they flee, they flee into the hands of the U.S. sponsors of that repression, and they must face the threat of an immigration policy here which is a crucial part of the killing in Haiti. By raising our voices against interdiction and the forced return of Haitians, we will send a message to the U.S. government and the Haitian rulers. Ironically, that is the best chance of ending an exodus from Haiti in the long run. In the short run, it is what we must do to save Haitian lives.

April 1994

POSTSCRIPT

A POWERFUL REGIME, IN DEFIANCE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, has been committing piracy ("illegal violence at sea") and sending all its victims to its semi-independent collaborators, who have a long record of murder and torture. Now the powerful regime, in an apparent concession to its critics, has announced that it will only send 19 of every 20 victims to the killers.

This is essentially the change in refugee policy announced by the Clinton Administration this week. Near the end of May, according to the announcement, interdicted Haitians will no longer be returned directly to Port-au-Prince. Instead, they will be interviewed ("fairly quickly," says Clinton) on board Navy ships, and perhaps also in third countries, if such arrangements can be made. Those Haitians determined by interviewers to be political refugees will be brought to the United States for asylum, and the others returned to Haiti. This may sound like an improvement over previous policy: to an extent it is if it saves some lives. But even more lives may be at stake in the longer run, since the real goal of the policy shift is probably to diffuse the recently increasing criticism, while minimizing substantive change. Thus, along with the shift in refugee policy, Clinton has announced the replacement of Haiti advisor Pezzulo with William Gray III, president of the United Negro College Fund, and the Black Congressional Caucus -- which had been leading the intermittent criticism of Clinton's Haiti policy from within Congress -- quickly applauded the choice of Gray whose weakness is reported to be that he knows little about Haiti.

As for the new shipboard asylum screening interviews, deputy National Security advisor, Samuel Berger, is already confident that 19 of every 20 Haitians will be found to be "economic" refugees. I leave aside for now the problematic distinction between "political" and "economic" refugees. How does Berger already know the outcome of the screenings (though administration "estimates" of the approval rate already dropped from 10 percent to 5 percent within two days of the President's announcement)? The estimates are apparently based on current approval rates for in-country screening, a system which even U.S. immigration officials describe as a charade, as detailed above. Now, a version of this charade will take place on board ships, reducing the slim chances of fair interviews even further. Back in 1990, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights concluded, quite simply, "The conditions under which the interviews [of interdicted Haitians] occur make accurate fact-finding impossible" -- and this was before Coast Guard ships were overwhelmed by the large numbers of post-coup refugees. These new interviews, like earlier ones, are clearly intended as "a `formal' validation of a predetermined result." (HRC v. Baker).

But even all this discussion of the new screening process is a diversion. We must simply protect Haitians who are fleeing. Of course this would cost money. It also costs money to maintain the Coast Guard and Naval blockade Clinton put in place; and the refugee camp at Guantanamo costs money; and the interdiction process itself has cost money for over ten years; and it has cost money to support a succession of military dictatorships in Haiti and to train Haitian officers in the U.S. But who has been asking about these costs?

 

OF COURSE HAITIANS ARE LIKELY TO SEEK REFUGE in large numbers, since they are being murdered, tortured, raped, and disappeared in large numbers. But when people like Senator Bob Graham of Florida talk about his state being overrun with Haitians, do they also mention the numbers of Cuban immigrants welcomed here on an almost daily basis, who are immediately released from INS custody? The point is not that those people should be turned away, though that may more likely happen than changing the double standard by allowing the Haitians in. The point is that we hear little about the numbers of Cuban rafters because immigration policy is suited to foreign policy objectives. Under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, most Cubans who get here can simply apply for residency after one year.

Similarly, Jews and other religious minorities in the former Soviet Union benefit from special treatment. The in-country refugee processing for them is based on a lower standard of proof of persecution than would normally apply, as a result of special legislation which applies only to them. Their approval rate hovers around 95 percent; the approval rate for Haiti's in-country processing is approximately 5 percent (some put it even lower) -- and the State Department is currently manipulating that number upward by narrowing the pool of those allowed to apply in the first place. In fiscal year 1993, that 95 percent approval rate for refugees from the former Soviet Union meant 50,924 people. But that was not portrayed as an immigration crisis. A boat of 400 Haitians, on the other hand, is national news, even while the White House decides what to do with them.

Recent policy shifts do not change the fact that Haitians are victims of political persecution at home, and victims of racism and political powerlessness here.

May 11, 1994

NOTES

1. National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America, Haiti After the Coup: Sweatshop or Real Development?, April 1993; "Nation's Labor Leaders Urge Clinton to Impose Tougher Sanctions," April 11, 1994; "An Open Letter to President Clinton," April 1994. return

2. "Key Haitian Leaders Said to Have Been in CIA's Pay," New York Times, Nov. 1, 1993; "CIA Formed Haitian Unit Later Tied to Narcotocs Trade," New York Times, Nov. 14, 1993. return

3. "Refugees and Democracy in Haiti: An Intertwined Struggle," Center for Constitutional Rights, (January 1994). return

4. Petition for Writ of Certiorari at 9, Haitian Refugee Ctr. v. Baker, cert. denied, 112 S. Ct. 1245 (1992). return

5. Ibid at 19. return

6. Plaintiffs' Application to Stay the Mandates of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Pending Certiorari at 36-7, Haitian Refugee Ctr. v. Baker, 949 F.2d 1109 (11th Cir.), cert denied, 112 S. Ct. 1245 (1992). return

7. "Haiti exodus prediction questioned," Miami Herald, Jan. 31, 1992. return

8. Cheryl Little, "United States Haitian Policy: A History of Discrimination," New York Law School Journal of Human Rights, Vol. X, Spring 1993, Part Two, 315n. return

9. Petition for Writ of Certiorari at 10, Haitian Refugee Ctr. v. Baker, cert. denied, 112 S. Ct. 1245 (1992). return

10. Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, oral argument before U.S. Supreme Court, March 2, 1993; and U.S. Government's Emergency Motion for Stay Pending Appeal of U.S. District Court's Preliminary Injunction, found in pleadings of Case. No. 91-6060, Haitian Refugee Center v. Baker, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. return

11. Little, 303n. return

12. Americas Watch and National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, Half the Story: The Skewed U.S. Monitoring of Repatriated Haitian Refugees, June 1992, 6. return

13. "Who is Gunther Wagner," Washington Office on Haiti, Feb. 1994. return

14. Half the Story, 6-9. return

15. Thanks to attorney Merrill Smith, Church World Service, Miami, for providing the pieces of this account. return

16. "A Rising Tide of Political Terror Leaves Hundreds Dead in Haiti," New York Times, April 2, 1994. return

17. See generally, Americas Watch, National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, and Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, No Port in a Storm: The Misguided Use of In-Country Refugee Processing in Haiti, Sept. 1993. return

18. "U.S. leaves Haitians no way out," and "INS officer who spoke out is now fighting for his job," Miami Herald, April 17, 1994. return

19. John Canham-Clyne, "Haiti: Phoenix Rising," The Progressive, April 1994. return

20. Nightline, Feb. 24, 1992. return

21. Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats, and the FBI (Boston: South End Press, 1991). return

22. Author interview, April 19, 1994. return

23. "Latest tool of terror in Haiti: rape," Miami Herald, April 13, 1994; Amy Wilentz, "Haiti's Death Mask," New York Times, March 24, 1994; " ‘Haitian' proposal was made in U.S.A.," Miami Herald, March 9, 1994. return

24. Human Rights Watch/Americas and National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, Terror Prevails in Haiti: Human Rights Violations and Failed Diplomacy, April 1994. return

Contents of No. 17

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