Talks on Haiti’s Future Begin With U.N. Shuttle : Caribbean: Mediator assists as President Aristide and coup leader Cedras remain apart. Negotiations are held on a New York island.

Deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his nemesis, army commander Raoul Cedras, shared a small island off Manhattan but did not meet Sunday as formal and intricate negotiations began for a transfer of power back to Aristide.

Special U.N. mediator Dante Caputo, the French-educated former Argentine foreign minister, served as the intermediary between Aristide and the general who ousted him. Caputo did not attempt to bring them together in the first round of talks but told reporters, “I feel it has been positive so far.”

The negotiations demanded great delicacy because a return by Aristide would amount to a surrender by Lt. Gen. Cedras to the pressures created by both the worldwide condemnation of his September, 1991, coup and the economic sanctions of the United Nations and the Organization of American States.

“Gen. Cedras has played a bad hand for a very long time,” Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), an Aristide supporter, told pool reporters on the island, “and it reaches a point where we have to fold it.”

Since Cedras was the key to the crisis, Caputo spent far more time with him than with Aristide on the first day of talks. The U.N. official, who is Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s special representative to Haiti, said that he found “on both sides a common ground” but quickly added that the complicated situation had been discussed only in the broadest general terms.

Still ahead, he said, are working out the precise details of agreements covering the transition, the transfer of power and the creation of conditions for a durable democracy in the impoverished Caribbean country.

Originally scheduled for U.N. headquarters, the site for the meeting was shifted to Governors Island, a U.S. Coast Guard base in New York Harbor not far from the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island and the immigration museum on Ellis Island.

The shift was made by U.N. officials out of fear that Aristide supporters would surround the U.N. buildings and make the delicate negotiations difficult. Yet, even with the change, thousands of Haitian residents of New York massed near the U.N. buildings to cry out their enthusiasm for Aristide and his return.

Aristide and Cedras and their entourages went to the island in separate trips on the Coast Guard ferry. Caputo first met with Aristide for 90 minutes or so and then spent much of the rest of the day with Cedras in a series of three sessions.

The sessions with Cedras took place in a chandeliered room in the Officer’s Club overlooking a golf course. Cedras wore a suit rather than his military uniform, and, at least when photographers were present, looked calm.

In his few statements to reporters, Caputo kept stressing the “basically favorable atmosphere,” but he also made it clear that he felt the fact that the two men had come to the island for talks was significant enough. “It is very positive that we are all together to start the negotiations,” he said.

But another U.N. official cautioned that, while the mood was positive, “Both sides haven’t agreed yet on all the basic principles” needed to start substantive negotiations.