Haiti’s Military Said to Beat, Kill Some Returnees

State Department officials are investigating allegations that the Haitian military has beaten and killed boat people who were returned to Haiti last November after U.S. officials rejected their claims for asylum.

The charges were made by boat people who were returned, fled again and were intercepted for a second time. They were interviewed recently by U.S. immigration officials and United Nations monitors at a tent city on the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Refugee advocates distributed copies of notes from five U.N. interviews they said they obtained from U.N. diplomats.

Administration officials said they have not confirmed any of the allegations, made by some of the hundreds of people sent back or who returned to Haiti before a federal judge halted such repatriations for several months.

But refugee advocates said that 41 out of 42 of these “double-backers” re-interviewed at Guantanamo appear to be making credible claims, because they were granted provisional asylum status this time by the Immigration and Naturalization Service pending further investigation.

INS officials declined to comment, but U.S. officials confirmed that the 41 are being kept in a portion of the base reserved for boat people whose claims for political asylum are plausible enough that the government takes them to Miami for further screening. The United States will not grant asylum to refugees for economic reasons, and officials say most of the Haitian boat people should be returned because they are seeking a better economic situation, not fleeing political reprisals.

Administration officials, including Secretary of State James A. Baker III, have repeatedly insisted that there was no evidence of reprisals against returnees.

“There is not one single documented case,” Baker told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, “of a repatriated Haitian being persecuted or targeted after their return.”

After a Supreme Court ruling, the U.S. government began again to return Haitians from their temporary Guantanamo camp Feb. 1.

However, other Administration officials and refugee rights advocates have said in recent interviews that the vastly reduced U.S. presence in Haiti since the Sept. 30 military coup ousted an elected president makes these recent allegations difficult, if not impossible, to verify.

The U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince is making an effort to monitor what happens to returnees by asking missionaries and relief organizations to report any human rights violations. But of about 30 staff members left at the embassy, only six are said to be Foreign Service officers who can do such monitoring, a Washington Post correspondent reported from Port-au-Prince. The State Department said last week it was sending two more officers to monitor repatriations.

There are no proven reports of reprisals against specific returnees, diplomats and other observers in Haiti have said, but some of those forcibly returned have gone into hiding for fear of retribution, correspondents have reported.

“We are not a human rights monitoring organization,” said a U.S. official familiar with the situation in Haiti. “The U.S. Embassy can’t check who has been killed or not killed. . . . We’re going to have several thousand people scattered around the country,” the official said, as the repatriations continue. “We’re not going to go ask them all ‘Are you still alive?’ At what point do you stop?” the official asked. “After two months? After four months? After six months?”

Administration officials argue that opponents of the repatriation policy are asking the State Department to prove a negative, an impossible task, in order to halt the repatriations.

But Arthur C. Helton, an official with the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights, said it is “astounding” that the INS would “be crediting reports of mistreatment of Haitian boat people” while the Justice Department and the State Department were “telling the American people and the federal judiciary there is no mistreatment.”