Aristide Calls U.S. Refugee Policy ‘Racist’ : Haiti: U.S. officials rebuff attack by exiled president. Refugees will still be returned home.

Haiti’s exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide denounced President Clinton’s policy toward his country Thursday as “racist” and “a cynical joke,” furiously going public with an increasingly bitter rupture.

But Clinton Administration officials said they have no plans to change their policy of forcibly returning refugees to Haiti, where the military regime’s death squads have killed more than 200 Aristide supporters.

After a formal review of the issue, Clinton has instead decided to ask the United Nations for an escalation of economic sanctions against the Haitian military, the officials said.

Clinton will ask the United Nations to authorize the U.S. Navy to enforce a near-complete embargo of trade with Haiti and to impose an international freeze on the assets of Haiti’s military leaders and their supporters, a White House official said.

Until now, the Navy has had the authority to stop only shipments of fuel and weapons into Haiti. And while the United States has frozen the assets of some Haitian leaders, many other countries have not.

But reports of those impending changes were not enough to soften the anger of Aristide, who has been increasingly critical of the Administration’s tough handling of the refugees.

“It’s a cynical joke,” he said of the Administration’s position. “It’s a racist policy. It’s really a way to say, ‘We don’t care.’

“Today (in Haiti) we have pigs eating the corpses of people killed by the military,” he told reporters. “How many murders does it take to create a holocaust?”

White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, told of Aristide’s attack, responded mildly.

“He’s the duly elected president of that country and we’ll continue to work with him,” she said. “That doesn’t mean he’s going to support everything that we do.”

Only a few hours after his news conference, Aristide met with two senior Clinton aides, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, and delivered his message directly.

But he added that his criticism was aimed at Clinton’s policies, not at the President himself, a U.S. official said.

Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest who campaigned to empower Haiti’s impoverished majority, was elected in 1991 and overthrown by a military coup later that year.

The Administration’s official position is that he should be returned to power, but officials have been increasingly impatient with Aristide for rejecting any compromise under which he would share power with his opponents.

At the same time, Aristide and his supporters in Congress have been increasingly angry with the Administration for continuing to return refugees to Haiti without a hearing, despite the political murders.

Six members of Congress were arrested Thursday afternoon when they briefly blocked the sidewalk in front of the White House to protest the refugee policy. The congressmen, who included Reps. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland) and Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.), were handcuffed with plastic bracelets and led away by the U.S. Park Police after only a few minutes.

Aristide recently announced that he plans to cancel the treaty under which the United States is allowed to return the refugees, but the agreement legally remains in force for six months after his notice.

“We don’t want to encourage a huge exodus of people on unseaworthy vessels,” a White House spokesman explained.

“It’s not a policy that any of us like,” another official said.

But critics charge that some of the returned refugees have been imprisoned, beaten or even killed by the military.