Duvalier Ordered Out--but Will Go to Riviera

The French government said Thursday that it has handed Jean-Claude Duvalier, the ousted dictator of Haiti, an official order expelling him from France, but it did not enforce the order because no country has been willing to accept him.

Instead, the government handed him a second order that will put him under a kind of house arrest on the fashionable French Riviera, a spokesman for the External Relations Ministry said. Duvalier is expected to leave his secluded hotel in Talloires in the French Alps today for the new home, about 25 miles from Nice on the Mediterranean coast.

Duvalier, brought here from Haiti in a U.S. Air Force transport plane a month ago for what was described as a refuge limited to one week, has thus managed to prolong his stay in France. But his status is officially illegal.

Asylum Appeal Rejected

This was made clear once more by Premier Laurent Fabius who, questioned about the new legal moves in the midst of the French parliamentary election campaign, said, “We don’t want the dictator to remain on our soil.” Duvalier, 34, applied for political asylum last month but was rejected.

Haiti’s new ruling National Council said last week that it will seek to extradite Duvalier from France but has made no formal effort so far to do so. The French government, however, does not have an extradition treaty with Haiti.

“We cannot expel him unless we have a country that will accept him,” the French spokesman said Thursday. “What can we do? If we took him to the Spanish border, for example, Spain would not take him, and he would have to stand there with one foot on each side of the border.

“But we handed him the expulsion order today,” the spokesman added, “just to let him know that as soon as we find a country that will take him, he will have to go.”

With Liberia and other African countries rejecting him, with the United States insisting that there is no place for him there and with Duvalier himself refusing to ask for asylum anywhere but France, the French government has found his presence a lingering embarrassment. The embarrassment has provoked a good deal of tension between France and the United States.

U.S. Criticized

Fabius, in a television interview 10 days ago, said that the refusal of the U.S. government to take Duvalier back “was not correct on their part.”

It is not clear how restricted Duvalier, his wife, and their six children will be by the order that officially “assigns him to residence” in the village of St. Vallier de Thiey near the town of Grasse in the French administrative district of Alpes-Maritimes. But he definitely will not be allowed to leave the district.

Agence France-Presse, the French news service, reported that the expulsion and the house arrest orders were promulgated by the Ministry of Interior three weeks ago but were not delivered to the Duvalier and his entourage until Thursday.

Duvalier, who is trying to force France to keep him, has filed suit against the French government, accusing the French of violating his human rights and those of his family, and of endangering their health by restricting their movements. His lawyer, Sauveur Vaisse, said the government is trying to isolate the Duvaliers, not allowing them to leave their hotel or talk with the press. The government argued that the court was not competent to take up the lawsuit, but the judges have agreed to hear the case in Paris on April 8.

Hotel’s Lawsuit

A second lawsuit had been filed by the manager of the Talloires hotel, who maintained that the government’s insistence that the hotel be used exclusively by the Duvalier party was ruining his business. The government says that the Duvaliers are paying $17,500 a day for use of the hotel.

Duvalier owns several homes in France, including a chateau outside Paris, an apartment in Paris and a villa in Nice, but he evidently does not own anything in the village of St. Vallier de Thiey. French newspapers reported that he probably will rent a residence there.