Christopher Urges Haiti Talks but No Halt of Embargo : Caribbean: Army chief’s offer to meet ousted president should not stall sanctions, he says.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher called Tuesday for renewed negotiations between Haiti’s military government and its ousted president but he said the army chief’s last-minute offer of talks must not interfere with the tough new economic sanctions imposed on the Caribbean nation at midnight.

Christopher said it is important for exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the international community to engage in negotiations with Lt. Gen. Raul Cedras and other leaders of the de facto government. But Christopher suggested that the embargo may be the best way to bring the military leaders to the table.

Cedras, referring to Aristide as “president,” offered late Monday to meet with him to discuss ways to end Haiti’s political chaos. The bid is an apparent attempt to head off a worldwide embargo on fuel and weapons shipments to Haiti combined with a freeze on Haitian government financial assets held abroad. The sanctions, voted by the U.N. Security Council, took effect at midnight Tuesday.

“I see a purpose of continuing to engage (Cedras) and the other leaders of Haiti in a negotiating process,” Christopher said in an interview. “But I do not want to be lulled into a sense of false security” by the army chief’s stated willingness to talk.

At the United Nations, diplomats predicted that U.N. mediator Dante Caputo will soon arrange a face-to-face meeting between Aristide and Cedras. Venezuelan Ambassador Diego Arria said Aristide has agreed to the talks and that Caputo seeks a weekend meeting on the Caribbean islands of Aruba or Bonaire.

One ambassador said Caputo wants to avoid holding the talks at U.N. headquarters in New York because “Aristide can get 100,000 Haitians to demonstrate in New York streets, and that is not conducive to good negotiations.”

The Security Council voted last week to impose the oil embargo and other sanctions if Aristide--deposed in September, 1991--was not restored to office within seven days, a deadline that ran out Tuesday. Although Haiti has survived 19 months of a largely ineffective embargo voted by the Organization of American States, the U.N. embargo is expected to be much more rigorously enforced.

In Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, supporters urged Aristide to begin negotiations.

“Aristide has got to talk to Cedras. Otherwise the crisis will be prolonged,” a 32-year-old leader of an underground pro-Aristide neighborhood organization told the Associated Press. The man was identified only as Claude.

A prominent leftist and former ambassador, Max Sam, said Cedras has no choice but to take an active role in talks after the resignation June 8 of the nominal civilian prime minister, Marc Bazin, the AP reported.