NEWS ANALYSIS : Pressuring Haitians Backfires, U.S. Finds : Caribbean: Envoy stirs hornet’s nest with hints of an invasion and remarks viewed as racially insulting.

The United States, frustrated by its inability to bend Haiti to its will, is mixing not-so-subtle threats of a possible military invasion with comments that many Haitians see as racially insulting to their mostly black country.

The suggestion of a military intervention and the remark that upset many here occurred this month when Robert Gelbard, a senior State Department official, met with key Haitian political and business leaders at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Alvin Adams.

Gelbard’s goal was to shock the Haitians into accepting a Washington-backed plan to end a political and economic crisis under way here since September, when the military overthrew the elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country’s first democratically elected president.

“I have established that Haitians have one less chromosome, that of compromise and consensus, and on the other hand, one additional chromosome, that of conflict and dissension,” Gelbard, a deputy assistant secretary of state, told some of Haiti’s top politicians and business leaders.

Although Gelbard hoped to sway minds here, key citizens and diplomats said that no one believes there will be a U.S. invasion of Haiti in advance of this fall’s American presidential elections.

This skepticism, added to the shock over Gelbard’s April 4 remarks about Haitian chromosomes, has created a result that is just the opposite of what he wanted, sources said. Instead of frightening the current rulers, the regime was spurred to announce its intent to create a government without involvement by the United States, the Organization of American States or those sectors who support Aristide’s return.

In fact, in the days after Gelbard’s visit, leaders of the de facto government made several tough public statements. They employed a common racial epithet for blacks, saying that it best fit the American view of Haitians; they also declared they would no longer deal with foreign whites.

“What has happened,” said one Haitian economist and supporter of the United States until now, “is that Gelbard has made it impossible for people like me to back the American plan. People wonder why Haiti is so heavily targeted (for international sanctions) while the coup in Peru and the military takeover in Algeria bring no punishing embargoes. Well, the answer to many is in what Gelbard said: Haiti is small, weak--and black.”

But, as Gelbard has found, the puppet government here is dug in--just how stubbornly so was exemplified Thursday in an interview with President Joseph Nerette, the 67-year-old lawyer who was picked out of obscurity in the days after the coup and told he was president.

When asked how he intended to end the crisis and his country’s international isolation, he raised his head and proclaimed: “What we are planning on doing is forming a consensus government that, with Parliament, will represent the Haitian public.”

When asked how a representative government and consensus could be put together without Aristide, who won 67% of the vote in the last election, Nerette set his jaw and rambled, saying Aristide was removed legitimately, even if the constitution prohibited it. He asserted again that the ousted president is a criminal who must stand trial if he returns from exile.

Besides the intransigence Gelbard has encountered with the civilian puppet government, he also has failed to obtain any movement from the real center of power here, the army. He talked to Raoul Cedras, the army commander, “but there hasn’t been any change in the military’s position,” said one dinner guest. “And it is the army that is the key to all of this.”

Gelbard’s visit “was a dreadful mistake,” said a European diplomat. “It just solidified the defiance.”

The diplomat said that Haitians in recent days have told him that they see Gelbard’s remarks as continuing historic, American attitudes belittling Haiti. Those views date even to the beginning of the century and were put into concrete effect when the U.S. Marines invaded Haiti in 1915 and occupied the country until 1934. During that period, the Marines banned even their appointed Haitian government officials from American clubs because they were black.

Referring to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s quoted use of a racial epithet about Haitians in 1913, one Haitian senator observed this week: “Just as Bryan said they thought we were less than human then . . . they evidently still think (this is) so.”

Marc Bazin, a guest at the dinner where Gelbard made his remark, explained: “To have said what Gelbard did was shocking. To talk to us about chromosomes is very insensitive. . . . He was saying that when God made the world he gave black Haitians the wrong chromosomes (and) a basic defect. . . . I was flabbergasted.”

But Bazin’s remarks may be self-serving. That is because one of Gelbard’s aims, officials said, was to tell Bazin that Washington sees him as a major obstacle to a Haitian settlement because of his alleged manipulations to try to win control of a new government.

U.S. officials here say that Bazin wrongfully claims that, if Haiti holds out against American pressure, he will be approved as prime minister because the United States privately thinks he is the best person to lead the country. “We wanted to make it clear that he has no standing with us. . . , “ an American official said in a telephone interview from Washington.

Gelbard said he does not remember making the remark about Haitian chromosomes. But he acknowledged that he was extremely hard on the Haitian military and its rubber-stamp government.

Other guests and State Department sources said he told the Haitians they have until an OAS meeting on May 24 to accept a U.S.-supported plan to end the crisis “or else.”

While ambiguously saying the Bush Administration is not planning an invasion, Gelbard said there is much public support in America for a U.S. strike against Haiti; he also said there is backing in the U.S. Congress for action. This all stems, he said, from the Haitian government’s rejection of a proposed solution to the crisis, a plan that has OAS support.

The plan involves the appointment of a U.S.-approved prime minister and the ultimate return of exiled Aristide, whose nine months in office were seen by the military and the business elite as a campaign to destroy them. The plan has foundered because opponents have found unacceptable the proposed prime minister--Rene Theodore, a leader of Haiti’s Communist Party, but also a proclaimed free-market moderate.