Duvalier Refused Entry Into U.S. as ‘Undesirable’

WASHINGTON — An apparent move by the French government to send exiled Haitian leader Jean-Claude Duvalier to the United States was halted Sunday when U.S. officials declared him to be “an undesirable.”

Duvalier’s preparations to leave France were made known Saturday night by his lawyer, Sauveur Vaisse, and by officials at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, who reported that Haiti’s former president-for-life had booked seats on an Air France flight to New York City.

But U.S. officials said they refused to accept Duvalier, who has been in seclusion in the luxury L’Abbaye Hotel in the town of Talloires in the French southern Alps since he and his family fled Haiti aboard a U.S. Air Force plane Feb. 7.

“I know for certain that he is not coming here,” declared State Department spokeswoman Anita Stockman. “We continue to work with the French to find him a place of asylum.”

A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Paris said that Duvalier has no visa and will under no circumstances be permitted asylum in the United States. “Under U.S. law,” he said, “Duvalier is inadmissible and an undesirable.”

He said that the U.S. government thought Duvalier would pose a security risk because of the large number of Haitian exiles in the United States who fled his brutal regime. In addition, he noted that the United States has an extradition treaty with Haiti and that the exiled leader might be subject to extradition if he entered the country.

French Premier Laurent Fabius said the French stressed in writing to the United States that the Paris government had accepted Duvalier into that country only temporarily, and “if no solution was found, it would be normal that he leaves for the United States.” He said France grants the right to asylum to “the persecuted,” and noted that in the case of Duvalier “it is more a matter of a persecutor.”

For his own part, Duvalier has expressed a strong desire to stay in France. In answer to a written question submitted to him by the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, he said that he agreed to leave Haiti “only if I could go to the only country where I would feel in a sufficiently calm atmosphere.”

According to State Department spokeswoman Stockman, U.S. and French officials are talking with the government of Liberia and other countries about accepting Duvalier and his family. She declined to identify the other countries.

Vaisse said that a representative of the French Foreign Ministry met with Duvalier on Saturday night to try to persuade him to seek asylum in Liberia, but the former Haitian dictator declined to do so on the ground that the Monrovia government could not guarantee his safety.