Face Up to Haiti’s Ruling Thugs

News reports have confirmed that at least 23 people, and possibly more, were killed last weekend in a Haitian military attack on Gonaives, a center of political support for exiled civilian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The bloody incident occurred during a military sweep aimed at rousting partisans of Aristide from the seaside city, about 100 miles from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

But while the number of dead is surely appalling to the average American, it will come as no surprise to human-rights specialists who have closely monitored the situation in Haiti since September, 1991, when Aristide was ousted in a military coup. Several human-rights groups reported last week that about 3,000 Haitians have been killed in political violence since then, 150 of them since the start of this year alone. There has also been a surge in disappearances of political activists and in the number of rapes blamed on Haitian soldiers.

The long Haitian crisis became a political embarrassment for President Clinton when he was forced to take back his campaign criticism of former President Bush, who had ordered the U.S. Coast Guard to return Haitian refugees intercepted at sea to their homeland. Once in the White House, Clinton opted to maintain that very policy lest he encourage a flood of Haitian refugees to this country.

His embarrassment grew worse last year when the Haitian junta reneged on an agreement brokered by the United Nations that would have allowed Aristide to return home last October. That was followed by a humiliating retreat when a small but noisy Haitian mob kept a boatload of unarmed U.S. military trainers from landing to help enforce the U.N. agreement. Now comes the Gonaives massacre.

This political and diplomatic embarrassment has become a human tragedy. It is time for the U.S. government to take off the kid gloves with which it has been dealing with Haiti’s military thugs and impose the toughest economic sanctions possible on the Haitian regime, including a total blockade on oil. That must include pressure on the neighboring Dominican Republic, from which black-market oil is still being smuggled into Haiti. To claim that tougher sanctions will hurt only Haiti’s poor is disingenuous. They are already suffering far more than U.S. sanctions can hurt them.