U.S. Sending Boat People Back to Haiti

The Bush Administration Monday abandoned its plan to find third-country homes for Haitian boat people who have been streaming toward the United States in recent weeks, and ordered the Coast Guard to begin shipping the Haitians back to Port-au-Prince.

News of the forced repatriations, the first since the Sept. 30 military coup which ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected leader, drew an immediate outcry from both lawmakers and Haitian advocacy groups. Critics have long charged that the Administration’s treatment of Haitians is both racist and inhumane.

But Administration officials concluded that giving refuge in the United States to those fleeing Haiti in the weeks following the coup would prompt a massive migration of Haitians to South Florida seeking to escape the island nation’s poverty, worst in the Western Hemisphere.

The growing numbers of refugees swamped a plan to have other countries in the region provide temporary refuge in United Nations camps, the State Department said.

The first 224 of almost 2,000 refugees interdicted at sea since Oct. 29 arrived in the Haitian capital Monday afternoon aboard the cutter Confidence. Most had come from the town of Petit Goave, south of Port-au-Prince, and had been held at sea or on the beach at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, Cuba, for six days.

Another 53 refugees who were found to have credible asylum claims were flown to Miami, according to the U.S. State Department.

“Returning Vietnamese, Russian Jews, Cubans, Nicaraguans and others back to the repressive countries from which they were fleeing would have been unthinkable,” said Sen. Connie Mack, the Florida Republican. “How can we justify it for Haitians? The only moral response to the Haitian policy can be one of outrage and indignation.”

Said Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), “We would not say no if the refugees were European.”

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, said through a spokesman that she hopes that “all governments will avoid unilateral measures forcing asylum seekers back to Haiti.”

Arthur C. Helton, director of the refugee project for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, called the Administration’s decision a “shameful solution.” He added: “Returning the Haitians at this time can only target them for persecution as having fled the current regime.”

A State Department spokesman denied that. “We do not believe that those individuals returned to Haiti will be subject to persecution there,” the spokesman said. “There is no history of such persons being persecuted.”

The Ronald Reagan Administration began interdicting Haitians at sea in 1981 as they attempted the 600-mile crossing to the United States, usually in rickety wooden sailboats. During the past 10 years, almost 24,000 Haitians have been picked up and returned, ruled to be fleeing economic conditions, not political persecution, and thus ineligible for asylum. Only 28 were allowed into the United States after U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officers declared them to be possible political refugees.

In the hopeful euphoria that followed Aristide’s inauguration in January, the refugee stream dried up. But on Oct. 29, nearly a month after the coup sent Haiti tumbling back into turmoil, the first 19 boat people were spotted by the cutter Steadfast in the Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba.

The coup, along with a subsequent U.S.-backed international economic blockade, caused the Administration to temporarily suspend its policy of automatically returning Haitian refugees. In the weeks that followed, hundreds more men, women and children came. All were held at sea, camped on the decks of four Coast Guard cutters.

Last week the State Department announced that Belize, Venezuela, Honduras and Trinidad and Tobago would accept some boat people. But the number each country agreed to take was small, and on Monday the Administration gave up.

“We regret that it now appears the safe haven plan will not be sufficient to deal with the magnitude of the problem,” said a State Department spokesman. “We fear that any action by the United States to bring large numbers of Haitians without claims to asylum to the United State would create a massive outflow, resulting in large numbers of deaths on the high seas.”

Cheryl Little, lead attorney for the Haitian Refugee Center here, said the State Department decision to return the Haitians “reaffirms the double standard that exists” in the treatment of Haitians compared to other refugees, particularly Cubans.

Times staff writer Kenneth Freed contributed to this story from Port-au-Prince.