Military No-Shows Don’t Faze Haiti Meeting’s Backers

Officials in the government of exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide expressed hope that a three-day conference that began here Friday would hasten the return of democracy to that troubled Caribbean nation, despite the apparent refusal of any leaders of the entrenched military regime to attend the meeting.

Herve Denis, Aristide’s minister for information and culture, said that the purpose of the conference is to rally international support “for a political solution” to the crisis in Haiti, where a clique of military strongmen has ruled since Aristide’s overthrow in September, 1991.

Among the 250 people expected at the conference are many business people and politicians from Haiti as well as Lawrence A. Pezzullo, President Clinton’s special adviser on Haiti.

Denis said that he is not surprised by the failure of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras or any of his representatives to show up. “The military doesn’t respect their commitments; we are used to it,” he said.

Nonetheless, Denis and Jean Casimir, Haiti’s ambassador to Washington, told reporters in a briefing that the conference would be useful in reaffirming the commitment of both Aristide and the Clinton Administration to a 3-month-old oil and arms embargo that is causing increased hardship in Haiti for both the poor and the business elite.

“The embargo will cause the population to suffer a little more, but that will drive out the military,” Casimir said. “The embargo is the only way to create the conditions to change the social and political situation.”

Aristide also could use the weekend meeting to settle on a replacement for Prime Minister Robert Malval, a respected businessman who resigned last month. He remains in Port-au-Prince as acting prime minister.

Despite some signs that the Clinton Administration’s support for Aristide, a leftist priest who became Haiti’s first democratically elected president, had been flagging in recent months, the Administration has signaled its approval of the conference by sending Pezzullo.

Aristide is to address the conference today.

One plan to restore democracy to Haiti was reached in an agreement signed on Governors Island in New York Harbor in July. In that pact, Cedras was to relinquish power and Aristide was to be returned to the presidency Oct. 30. But Cedras reneged on his promise to resign, and Aristide decided it was too dangerous to return to Haiti.

Since then, the embargo has been reimposed and the Haitian impasse has grown more intractable.

When Aristide first proposed a Miami conference, its announced focus was refugee issues. But Administration officials persuaded Aristide to broaden its scope to include the means to a political settlement of the Haitian crisis--and to invite the military rulers as well as opposition Haitian politicians and business people.

Casimir told reporters that the military had tried to intimidate many Haitians to keep them away from the meeting. “The minister of finance’s house was sprayed with bullets to frighten her,” he said. The minister, Marie Michele Rey, was not injured. But she is not coming to the conference.