Making War to Keep Peace (19 page)

In April 1994, Aristide terminated the 1981 treaty allowing repatriation of Haitian boat people, and Randall Robinson, chairman of Trans Africa (a leftist organization that focused on foreign policy issues of concern to African Americans), went on a hunger strike to protest the U.S. repatriation policy. The administration reaffirmed its support for
Aristide and agreed to look into strengthening the Dominican Republic's border with Haiti against sanctions violations. Clinton caused a stir in Washington when he attempted to distance himself from his own administration's policy by voicing support for Robinson's protest. His comments triggered a new wave of refugees. On May 8, the administration agreed that Haitians would be interviewed to determine whether they were political refugees and would not be summarily sent back to their country.

The Clinton administration's actions were not without consequence. A
Washington Post
-ABC News poll released in mid-May 1994 confirmed that public confidence in President Clinton's handling of foreign affairs had declined sharply, with 40 percent approving, 53 percent disapproving, and only 13 percent saying they thought the president had a clear foreign policy.
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The clamor for stronger action against Haiti was rising on the left of the Democratic Party, a faction to which the president was especially sensitive. Clinton's former envoy to Haiti, Lawrence Pezzullo, described the administration's policies as irrevocably headed toward military intervention to restore the ousted Haitian president.
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On May 6, 1994, the administration joined in UN Security Council Resolution 917, which imposed a comprehensive mandatory commercial embargo and an international naval blockade unless the junta departed Haiti by May 21. The blockade included seven U.S. naval warships, frigates from Argentina and Canada, and 650 Marines aboard the U.S.S.
Wasp
. Two members of the Friends of the secretary-general for Haiti, 58 France and Canada, announced that they would not participate in or support a U.S.-led invasion.

The sanctions' cumulative impact on Haiti's economy was overwhelming and devastating. Before October 1991, for instance, there were 145 garment factories; by January 1994, only 44 remained. Before the coup and the sanctions, the assembly industry employed forty-four thousand workers; by May 1994, that number had dwindled to eight thousand.
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But still the Clinton administration moved to tighten the screws. Former president Jimmy Carter later revealed his negative opinion of the sanctions: “I told [General Cédras] that I was ashamed of my country's [embargo] policy.”
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During the summer of 1994, Clinton and his special adviser on Haiti, William Gray, tried with little success to find other countries that would accept Haitian refugees. The effort dramatized Haiti's isolation in the region. Panama backed out of an earlier agreement to accept ten thousand Haitians. Country after country found reasons not to accept the displaced people; they feared the refugees' competition for scarce resources, jobs, and public assistance, and they feared AIDS, which was believed to be more widespread in Haiti than in most other Caribbean and Latin American countries.

Aristide asked the UN for action to restore democracy in Haiti. On July 31, 1994, by a vote of 12 to 0 (Brazil and China abstained, and Rwanda was absent), the Security Council passed Resolution 940, authorizing a multinational force and clearing the way for U.S.-led military action. On August 5, members of the U.S. Senate engaged in a heated debate on Haiti policy. Majorities in both parties opposed a U.S. invasion, and Congress was sharply divided on whether the president had the authority to undertake military action without congressional authorization. A U.S. force had never been used to “restore democracy” or been sent anywhere without congressional authorization.

A clear majority of the American public was opposed to such action, and criticism of Clinton's handling of foreign affairs grew. The deepening U.S. involvement in Somalia made the proposed military commitment in Haiti even less attractive. Clinton spelled out for Congress and the American people several reasons that restoring Aristide to power was in the U.S. national interest: to stop the brutal atrocities that threatened the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians; to secure our borders and prevent a mass exodus of Haitian refugees; to preserve stability and promote democracy in the Americas; and to emphasize the reliability of U.S. commitments.
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Nonetheless, a September 17 ABC News poll showed that 60 percent of Americans opposed U.S. military action in Haiti, and only 31 percent agreed that the situation was a vital American interest.
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The
New York Times
also reported that 60 percent of Americans opposed sending or keeping American troops in Haiti, and 56 percent said that the United States had no responsibility to restore democracy in Haiti.
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AN ENTITLEMENT TO DEMOCRACY?

For several months, the Clinton administration seemed to be preparing for war (although they called it a “peace operation”). By whatever name, what they were planning was an invasion, intended to depose Haiti's unconstitutional government and restore democracy in the form of Aristide. Already the administration had tightened the embargo in an effort to remove Haiti's military government from power. Already it had reinforced Haiti's long, rugged border with the Dominican Republic. Obviously, U.S. military forces would have no problem subduing Haiti's small army, establishing control of ports and government buildings, and installing Aristide in power. But what then?

Would restoring democracy to Haiti mean trying to ensure democratic government, with the rule of law and respect for rights of citizens? Would it mean accepting responsibility for Aristide's use of power? Did the Clinton administration plan to become directly involved in governing Haiti—as UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali had proposed that the United States do in Somalia?

The operation proposed for Haiti would not just replace one ruler with another; it would also aim to build a modern democratic state. But nation building requires a long-term commitment, intimate familiarity with the country, and deep cultural affinities. The United States and the Clinton administration clearly had few of the fundamental requisites for successful nation building in Haiti.

I believed, further, that an invasion of Haiti would be incompatible with American interests. Haiti was not a menace to the United States or the hemisphere. It was not then a center of Caribbean drug trafficking (though that would later change). It did not provide a base for a hostile power. It did not export subversion and revolution. It had not declared open season on Americans, as Manuel Noriega did earlier, nor held Americans hostage, as had Grenada's revolutionary Committee of Safety. It had not engaged in terrorist plots against Americans, as Libya did.

There was only one conceivable ground for invading Haiti, and that was to implement some sort of “Brezhnev doctrine” for democracies, invoking the principle that no democracy could be overthrown. But Haiti had only the weakest claim to ever having had a democratic government
in the first place, and the prospects were not bright that Aristide would govern by constitutional means if he returned to power. During his first term, he consistently undermined the rule of law, violated constitutional practices, ignored established institutions, shut down parliament (where he did not have a majority), and relied on mobs and a private gang of enforcers—on the model of Papa Doc's Tonton Macoutes—to attack his opponents. By violating democratic norms and human rights standards, Aristide had forfeited his claim to constitutional rule. As George H. W. Bush noted at the time, restoring Aristide might not be the same as restoring democracy—he could prove as difficult as Haiti itself to deal with. On the other hand, the military rulers had violated Haiti's constitution and had no claim to legitimacy.

One of the fundamental questions at issue was the existence of a right to democracy, or a right to be governed democratically, by rulers chosen in free elections. Did Haiti have such a right? The Clinton administration thought so, and tried for many months to rouse support in the international community for action to depose the military government and restore Aristide. These efforts, and the political skill of chief U.S. delegate Madeleine Albright, produced Security Council Resolution 940, authorizing “the use of all necessary means” (that is, force) to achieve this end. But was this force to be provided and paid for exclusively by the U.S. government?

Weeks of effort to persuade other governments to contribute netted little. Canada turned down an appeal to join the expeditionary force, but offered to send peacekeepers. France and Venezuela, both in the Group of Friends, declined to participate in the multinational force (MNF). Among European allies, only the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands agreed to participate in the military phase. Other countries agreed to contribute troops, including Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Israel, Jordan, and a number of Caribbean and Central American nations. Eventually, twenty-eight nations would contribute about two thousand peacekeeping troops, police monitors, and translators to the U.S.-led MNF.
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The largest contribution, of five hundred troops and one hundred police monitors, came from Bangladesh.
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The Clinton team justified its plan to invade Haiti on grounds that force was required to restore democracy. It offered other supporting
arguments, mainly that the Cédras government had violated the civil rights of Haitians and had failed to carry out the decisions of the UN Security Council and the provisions of the Governors Island Agreement. But the fundamental justification for the use of force was a postulated “right to democratic government” of which Haitians had been deprived.

Resolution 940, the first action of its kind, constituted a significant expansion of the Security Council's jurisdiction over the internal affairs of member states. The idea of a right to democracy, which could be imposed by force, was a dramatic departure from previous theory and practice. International lawyers, notably Thomas Franck, whose work was an important source for the ideas and arguments of Morton Halperin and other Clinton administration officials, had written of an emerging democratic entitlement and right to democratic governance.
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Franck argued that the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the disappearance of Marxism-Leninism as a competing paradigm for understanding the world and legitimizing political action, had resulted in a global move toward democracy and a new global ethos in which all persons enjoy all democratic rights and under which only democratic governments are legitimate.

If democracy is viewed as a human right shared by all persons, and the world community has an obligation to use force when necessary to protect this right, then it is also appropriate to use force to depose any government that achieves power by force and violates its citizens' rights. By acting against the government of Haiti on these grounds, we would logically be committed to act again if the Haitian government did not respect the rights of Haitians. As it turned out, Aristide did not respect the rights of Haitian citizens, but too little attention was paid to that threat at the time.

Resolution 940 built on the precedent established in the mandatory economic sanctions imposed on Haiti in June 1993. It justified ousting Haiti's military rulers, basing its argument on domestic conditions. (The nation's humanitarian situation had deteriorated; violations of civil liberties had increased; the condition of refugees had deteriorated; a UN team monitoring human rights had been expelled.) The resolution implicitly endorsed a right to democracy, and made clear that this right overrode the prohibitions in the UN Charter against the use of force (ex
cept for self-defense and collective self-defense), and against intervention in the internal affairs of states.

This idea of a right to democracy was appealing to Americans, many of whom believe that all people should govern themselves democratically. But should we overthrow governments because we disapprove of them? Should we risk American lives? And why Haiti? Why not Cuba? Presidents justify their policies, especially decisions to use force, in terms of the nation's basic values and established practices. The Clinton administration prepared Americans for military action in Haiti by emphasizing that an illegitimate government must be forced out of power and democracy restored. But the case Clinton made for U.S. intervention would seem to have applied far more clearly to Cuba than to Haiti.

Thomas Franck foresaw a day when the global community would guarantee democracy as a legal entitlement. But he also believed that “the collective use of military force to protect the people's right to democracy is an extremely remote bridge which need not be crossed at present.”
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This was precisely the bridge Clinton and Christopher were ready to cross; the mystery was what they intended to do when they reached the other side.
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Justifying Intervention

It was disturbing, in that summer and fall of 1994, to hear Clinton administration spokespersons call the planned military operation a “police action” rather than a war; they seemed to be evading the constitutional requirement for congressional consent and treating the Security Council resolution as sufficient grounds to spend half a billion dollars and risk American lives. It also seemed cynical for a government that endlessly sought a negotiated peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina to speak of having exhausted all alternatives to the use of force in Haiti. In fact, the U.S. government had discouraged the efforts of Venezuela and other Latin American governments to resume talks, even though the Cédras government repeatedly indicated its willingness to negotiate. Administration officials even cited the U.S. military action in Grenada as a precedent, an especially inapt and objectionable analogy. The Reagan administration's 1983 military action in Grenada was conducted under the treaty of
alliance with the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OEC), and in the face of a clear and present danger to more than six hundred American students held prisoner by a band that had already murdered Grenada's prime minister and cabinet. In fact, a comparison of the situations—Grenada in 1983 and Haiti in 1994—is a textbook illustration of the difference between problems that do justify the use of force and those that do not.