U.S. Said to Drop Bid to Reinstate Haiti President

The United States and the rest of the international community have given up efforts to return ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti and are considering abandoning all but a symbolic economic embargo of the ruling military here, according to diplomats and other sources.

“The whole process is dead,” one international official said. “Any chance of restoring democracy in Haiti is over. We have spent two years trying to solve this. That effort was buried when Malval gave up yesterday.”

He was referring to the failed attempt this week by Robert Malval, Aristide’s prime minister, to convene a conference of Haitian political, military and business elements to formulate a plan to restore Aristide to office.

The proposed conference, supported by the Clinton Administration and the United Nations as the last chance to resolve the crisis, was never accepted by either the military or Aristide. One source reported that Aristide saw the proposal as “a plot by the United States to install Malval as a puppet and reduce his (Aristide’s) influence.”

Malval, a moderate businessman, was named prime minister as part of an agreement reached last July at Governors Island, N.Y., that was supposed to restore the presidency and remove from power the leader of the revolt, army commander Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras.

U.S. Ambassador William Swing denied in an interview Thursday that he had given up on restoring Aristide, a radical Catholic priest who was driven from office in September, 1991, by the army.

“We are firmly committed to restoring democracy here and the return of President Aristide,” Swing said. “We are going to see this thing through.”

However, he acknowledged that there are no new initiatives under consideration and said American policy remains dependent on an agreement that both Aristide’s supporters and his military opponents say is seriously, if not mortally, wounded.

While Swing, who describes himself as “an eternal optimist,” says--at least for public consumption--that Aristide can be returned, most of his colleagues here disagree.

“I don’t know of any informed person here who believes” Aristide will return, said an official in the Foreign Ministry of a heavily involved nation. “I expect my own government to withdraw from the process and call for new elections.”

Malval signaled the end of the agreement and the last chance of returning Aristide on Wednesday when he returned from meeting the exiled leader in Washington, a meeting participants said was marked by anger and animosity.

“I regret to say,” Malval told reporters at the airport, his voice choking with sobs and his eyes filling with tears, “that there will be no national conference.” At the same time, he repeated that he had resigned from office effective Wednesday, as he had vowed to do months ago.

“It is with great sadness that I stand down,” he said before his wife led him away, “because I know we are in a desperate situation. I know that the entire Haitian people expected something of us which I am unable to give.”

That the United States had little more to give was evidenced by Swing, whose on-the-record remarks were couched in terms of wishful thinking.

“We still think the national conference is a good idea,” said Swing, standing alone outside the Port-au-Prince airport minutes after Malval said the conference plan was dead. “We hope it will go forward.”

What some other U.S. officials here and in Washington, as well as other diplomats, think will happen is an undeclared American withdrawal from the whole process “to let them (Haitians) stew in their own juices,” as one envoy put it.

“The only choice left to (the United States),” said a Haitian business leader who had supported the return of Aristide, “is disengagement.”

The businessman quoted an assessment by a former American ambassador here that while “disengagement is a terrible option, worse are the alternatives.”

Other options are usually limited to a total economic and financial boycott or a U.S. military intervention.

The tightening of the embargo would, in the eyes of most observers here, end in starvation and complete pauperization of what is already one of the world’s poorest nations. An American invasion is seen as inconceivable.

One sign of the disengagement, according to many sources, is a plan to bring in a tanker ship full of gasoline and diesel fuel for distribution to hospitals and other humanitarian organizations to alleviate the severe effects of the international embargo, which began in mid-October when the military failed to abide by the Governors Island accord.

“Whatever the motive,” an international official said, “the universal perception here is that the embargo will be broken in effect if not in words.”

This view is fed by another near-universal perception: that any fuel shipment, humanitarian or not, will be stolen by, or otherwise diverted to, the military and its civilian allies. They are blamed for similar thefts in the past.

Adding to the suspicions of a weakening of U.S. resolve is the presence of a State Department official who has been traveling the country to assess the increased damage from tightening the embargo or even just leaving it in place.

“What I think will happen,” a leading Haitian economic expert said, “is that (the Americans) will decide any more will be devastating, and in the name of humanitarianism the boycott must not be tightened.”