Haiti Names Prime Minister, Asks OAS Talks

The post-coup government on Friday named as its prime minister Jean-Jacques Honorat, a human rights activist who once served under Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier.

Honorat immediately proposed negotiations with the Organization of American States concerning the conditional return to power of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He did not specify what conditions might be arranged to restore the 38-year-old priest-president as the OAS has demanded on pain of imposing economic sanctions against Haiti.

“The return of Aristide (without conditions) is extreme--the position of the army (opposing his return) is the other extreme,” Honorat told reporters, adding, “Negotiations will be needed to find a middle position.”

Prospects for renewed talks between Honorat and the OAS appeared doubtful, however, because the 34-nation organization has refused to recognize Aristide’s ouster or the naming of Supreme Court Judge Joseph Nerette as his successor. Instead, the OAS has imposed economic sanctions and a trade embargo aimed at the restoration of Aristide as president.

“No one has any plan or solution,” said an embassy official. “We are taking it one day at a time.”

But experienced diplomats acknowledged that it will be difficult to assure Aristide’s security from his opponents in the army without a substantial protective force. “No one wants the president in a strongbox,” said the ambassador of one OAS country.

A majority of the National Assembly, many business leaders and most political party officials also have opposed Aristide’s return.

Honorat, who heads a human rights group formed after his 1986 return from exile in New York, was one of the leading critics of Aristide’s record in protecting civil liberties. He was director-general of tourism under Papa Doc Duvalier in the late 1950s but was expelled from Haiti by his son Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier in 1981.

An intellectual with degrees in law and agronomy who speaks English and Spanish in addition to his native French, Honorat, 60, has been a favorite of diplomats in the past. But he incurred the wrath of many embassies in the OAS by accepting a post with the new regime.

Interviewed earlier in the week, Honorat showed a group of journalists pictures of the bloody corpses of five young men who had been taken into custody by police and killed before the coup. He charged that Aristide covered up the investigation of the deaths to protect a police lieutenant he liked.

But Honorat was ambiguous about the scores of deaths of civilians at the hands of army patrols since the Sept. 30 coup. “They (soldiers) were shooting at people without a cause but not without a reason,” Honorat told reporters.

People who died of bullet wounds were rampaging in the streets, destroying stores and looting, Honorat said. He also said civilians, disguised in military uniforms they could buy in the markets here, also were shooting at people in the turmoil that followed the forced exile of Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected leader.