Army’s Puppet Challenges Haiti Accord : Politics: Figurehead leader won’t quit to pave way for exiled President Aristide to return.

Joseph Nerette, the figurehead president of Haiti’s military-run regime, on Friday defied an internationally arranged agreement to return ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power and end a choking economic embargo.

Saying he would not resign his post, Nerette told the National Assembly that the agreement “violates” the Haitian constitution and is the result of unacceptable foreign interference in Haiti’s internal affairs. His speech, which came after concerted efforts by supporters of the agreement to persuade Nerette and his puppet, Prime Minister Jean-Jacques Honorat, to step down, signaled a major blow to hopes of returning Haiti to constitutional rule.

The agreement was signed Feb. 23 and appeared to solve a five-month dispute over how to bring Aristide back without setting off brutal reaction by his enemies, particularly the army.

Part of the agreement was a promise by the Organization of American States to end a hemisphere-wide economic embargo that has virtually destroyed Haiti’s organized economy and driven large segments of the society to near-starvation.

Nerette, 77, an obscure judge when the military put him in office, has no power base of his own and no influence, even among Haiti’s rich and business classes who backed the anti-Aristide coup. So diplomats and Haitian political experts said Friday that Nerette’s defiance reflected opposition to the agreement from within the army.

“This way, the Aristide agreement can be killed without the military taking the international blame,” one European diplomat said.

The accord was in serious trouble last week when Gen. Raoul Cedras, the army chief, published a letter saying he had reservations about the plan’s constitutionality. Cedras’ action, complete with a pledge to stay neutral in a debate, came as a near mortal blow and another nose-thumbing act by the man seen by the U.S. Embassy as the key to ending the crisis.

He had been the subject of intense, personal lobbying by U.S. Ambassador Alvin Adams over the last week. But “I don’t know what the Americans can be thinking,” one diplomat said. “Cedras does not want Aristide back, and he doesn’t care what Adams wants.”

Nerette’s defiance also came after supporters of the accord promised him financial rewards, including a large house in a wealthy neighborhood, according to foreign and Haitian sources.

But these sources noted that opponents of the accord have more to offer, pointing to a share of Port-au-Prince’s cement business already given to Nerette. The diplomatic and Haitian sources also assert that Nerette’s wife and Honorat’s wife profited from the sale of an oil shipment that arrived here two weeks ago in defiance of the international embargo.

Opponents are reportedly trying to ensure that the agreement is defeated in the assembly, although the House of Deputies passed the accord in a preliminary vote last week. Sources within the assembly say that, to influence the vote, a key senator received $10,000 to $12,000 last week in a meeting in the Dominican Republic with opponents of the accord.

Legislators who support the agreement also say in private talks that Nerette and Honorat told them that neither they nor the military would accept ratification of the accord, promising, in the words of one senator, “brutal reaction.”