Infighting, Fear Keep Haitian Returnees at Sea

The first contingent of Haitian refugees destined to be forcibly returned to their homeland by Bush Administration immigration policy was kept at sea Sunday, victims of bureaucratic American infighting, Haitian government fears and a lack of dockside readiness.

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Steadfast carrying 154 Haitians judged ineligible for political asylum in the United States is due to arrive here about 9 a.m. today (6 a.m. PST), 35 hours after the vessel left the American military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the refugees had been detained. Normally the voyage from Guantanamo to Port-au-Prince takes 12 to 14 hours.

Various sources and officials here and in Washington said the Steadfast left port Saturday night despite the fact that the American Embassy here had said it would be impossible for the returnees to be received back home until this morning at the earliest.

However, these sources said, some State Department officials authorized the Steadfast to leave Guantanamo to give the appearance that the repatriation had begun so as to justify an Administration contention that an immediate return was necessary. U.S. officials had called for the emergency measure to prevent a predicted new wave of Haitian boat people and ease alleged overcrowding at the Guantanamo base.

“The fact is,” said one Administration official in a telephone interview from Washington, “the embassy was right and there was never a determination to unload the refugees before Monday.

“Some people here,” he said, “thought that if the ship went to sea they could force the issue. It didn’t work.”

The 154 are the vanguard of as many as 12,000 Haitians who had attempted to reach the United States after a military coup Sept. 30 plunged this always volatile country into violent chaos, exacerbated by a subsequent international economic embargo that has pushed the already poverty-stricken nation into virtual ruin.

Another 250 Haitians departed from Guantanamo on Sunday night on the Coast Guard cutter Bear and are due to arrive here Tuesday morning.

Although about 3,000 Haitians have been judged to be potential targets of political persecution, justifying hearings in the United States on their claims for refugee status, the rest were ruled to be economic refugees and therefore ineligible for American asylum.

Early attempts to return them to Haiti were halted in mid-November by a federal district judge in Miami, but the U.S. Supreme Court, responding Friday to State Department assertions that delaying the return created an emergency, ruled that forced repatriation could begin while legal challenges to the policy were sorted out by lower courts.

At the base of today’s confused situation was a twisted series of events that began Friday when the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta was reported to have issued a ruling allowing the repatriation. Within hours, however, the court said there had been a “clerical error” and that no ruling had been made.

This led to an emergency petition by the State Department to the Supreme Court, asking for immediate permission to begin repatriating the Haitians. Department officials argued that 20,000 Haitians were “massed” on the beaches ready to attempt the trip to the United States.

This, the department argued, would lead either to thousands dying at sea or overflowing the Guantanamo facilities if they were rescued by the Coast Guard. The court accepted the argument. But foreign journalists have found no massing of potential refugees, and other officials have said that they have no evidence that such a number is preparing to flee.

Sources here said that U.S. Embassy officials made three trips to the Haitian Foreign Ministry on Friday to convey the conflicting developments in the United States, with the final meeting settling on this morning as the time for the landing of the first contingent of refugees.

“We gave them so many mixed signals that we couldn’t go to them again and say there had been yet another change,” one source said about the attempt by the State Department to land the first group earlier than expected today.

He said that the Haitian government already was suspicious that the United States might use return of the refugees as a cover for military intervention in this country, in spite of assurances that the operation was intended solely to repatriate the Haitians now camped at Guantanamo.

“They already were exasperated,” said one official about the Haitian government’s frame of mind Friday and Saturday, and another change of policy would have risked losing permission to return the boat people.

“Rushing the thing was not the way to go,” one source said. “The first unloading has to go as smoothly as possible” and that means making certain that the returnees are not dumped into Port-au-Prince after dark. He was alluding to fears and claims that the refugees would be subject to violence by pro-government forces, actions more easily carried out after dark.

He said the Steadfast could not have made port here before late afternoon Sunday and that dockside processing would have delayed release of the refugees until after nightfall.

In addition, it was explained, neither the American Embassy nor the Haitian Red Cross could have assembled the facilities to process the returnees and prepare them for trips to their homes before today.

American officials here are sensitive to charges by Haitian support groups and human rights organizations in the United States and elsewhere that the repatriated refugees will be harassed, if not harmed. Increasing their sensitivity is the acknowledged reality that it is nearly impossible to monitor the returnees’ welfare after they scatter to their homes around the country.

The U.S. Embassy has so few staff members that it cannot monitor the security situation in Port-au-Prince, let alone the rest of Haiti, the officials say, adding that the national Red Cross is even worse off.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said that the refugees’ fears of persecution are unsubstantiated and that the Pentagon foresees no difficulty in returning them home.

“The reason they fled Haiti is primarily for economic, as opposed to political, reasons,” Cheney said on the CNN program “Newsmaker Sunday.” “The charge that somehow their lives are threatened back inside Haiti has not been substantiated.”

He also said: “I don’t expect that we’ll have any difficulties in getting the job done. The United States military is oftentimes given difficult jobs. This is not a problem we created; it’s one we inherited.”

Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this story.