More Heat on Haiti’s Cohorts : Those circumventing sanctions must be targeted

The United States today will ask the U.N. Security Council to renew economic sanctions against Haiti and the military junta that refuses to allow exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to return. But new sanctions will be no more successful than previous ones unless both the United Nations and Washington come down hard on any countries that try to get around them.

For more than two years the military and police officials who seized control of the government in Port-au-Prince have held virtually the entire world at bay by playing cynical diplomatic games. They went so far as to negotiate an agreement for Aristide to return last October; then, at the last moment, they reneged, humiliating the Clinton Administration when a boatload of unarmed U.S. troops sent to help enforce the agreement was prevented from landing by a pro-junta mob.

As illustrated in that incident, the United States is reluctant--understandably--to use force against a much weaker nation. And both the United States and the United Nations have been hesitant to impose truly harsh economic sanctions against one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere.

Last Tuesday President Clinton may have set himself up for another humiliation when he publicly announced he is considering military force as an option for resolving the Haitian crisis. Tough talk like that should not be used unless Washington really means it, and experience in both Haiti and Bosnia suggests it does not. Economic sanctions remain the only real option.

Arguments that sanctions hurt only Haiti’s poor are disingenuous. The poor, the vast majority of Haitians, already are suffering, not just from poverty but from repression by a government desperately afraid of ceding power to any popularly elected civilian. Sanctions can be targeted on the military and the small elite class. The new sanctions proposal seems to do that, banning travel outside Haiti by 600 top officials and government supporters and freezing their financial assets abroad.

The United Nations must also be prepared to pressure the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. A recent U.N. report concedes that past sanctions against Haiti were ineffective because of a “significant trade” in oil from an unnamed “border country.” That trade must be stopped, and stopped cold, before anyone seriously considers using military power against Haiti. As was proved in South Africa, with patience and firm application economic sanctions can work against a pariah regime.