Targeting the Wrong Crowd : Get tough with Haiti’s goons, not its refugees

President Bush is reacting with unseemly anger, and troubling naivete, to criticism of his decision ordering the Coast Guard to return all refugees who flee the political and economic turmoil in Haiti to that troubled island. No matter how he tries to explain it, the sudden change in Haitian refugee policy is inconsistent with other U.S. policies towards a military regime that ousted a popularly elected president, and it sends mixed signals to the thugs who currently control the government in Port-au-Prince.

Bush said the refugees who crowd onto small, leaky boats for that trip are in grave danger, and that anything the Coast Guard can do to keep them from drowning on the high seas is easily defensible on moral grounds. On that there can be no argument. But there are obvious weaknesses in the other explanations Administration officials offer for the policy change.

The President believes that most of the thousands of Haitians trying to make the dangerous sea passage to Florida on leaky, overcrowded boats are economic rather than political refugees. “I am convinced the people in Haiti are not being physically oppressed,” Bush told an audience this week. Well, it’s not at all that dear. About one quarter of the more than 12,000 Haitians who have been picked up at sea since the crisis began have been able to establish what the State Department calls “plausible grounds” for political asylum. That is a much higher-than-average percentage for asylum claims, and it suggests that some people in Haiti are truly in danger.

Additionally, the refugee policy seems to contradict the decision by the United States and other members of the Organization of American States to isolate the Port-au-Prince regime because it is not a legitimate government. By being inconsistent on this point the Bush Administration is doing no better than governments elsewhere in the hemisphere, and world, which condemned the coup that ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide but have since allowed a trade embargo against Haiti to leak like the proverbial sieve.

Returning Haitian refugees to Port-au-Prince only solves a short-term problem. The long term problem--which caused this dangerous exodus in the first place--is a corrupt and brutal military regime that is widely detested by its own people.

If the U.S. government is going to get tough with Haitian refugees, it must get tougher with the thugs who oppress them, too.