Jamaica Agrees to Let U.S. Hold Haitian Hearings

The Clinton Administration has won agreement from Jamaica to set up a facility on the Caribbean island to support shipborne immigration hearings for Haitian refugees fleeing their country by sea, officials said Tuesday.

The agreement, which may be announced as early as today, will come as a major relief to the Administration, which has been searching for a home for the refugee processing operation ever since President Clinton announced his new hearing policy more than three weeks ago.

Under the proposed arrangement, Haitian boat people will still be plucked from the Caribbean by the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy, officials said. But instead of being forcibly returned to Haiti, where a military dictatorship has used increasingly brutal tactics of repression, the refugees will be housed on ships moored off Kingston, the Jamaican capital, they said.

Once on the ships, the refugees will be interviewed by American immigration officials to determine whether they meet U.S. standards as political refugees--meaning a well-founded fear of individual persecution.

But most of the refugees will never actually step ashore in Jamaica, one official said. Jamaica has offered to resettle only about 100 refugees, even though the Coast Guard has picked up as many as 5,000 a month. “What the Jamaicans are offering is basically the needed onshore facilities to support the ships,” he said.

Unless other permanent homes are found, many of the refugees will probably still be returned to Haiti, he noted.

The ships will include both a U.S. Navy hospital ship and at least one Ukrainian cruise ship that the Defense Department is chartering for the operation, the officials said.

The ships may be in place and the operation begun as early as next week, they said. The cost of the operation will be borne by the United States, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and other donors, officials said.

U.S. officials carried on intensive talks with both Jamaica and the British-ruled Turks and Caicos Islands, but settled on Jamaica because its facilities were better, they said.

Clinton’s special envoy for Haiti, former Rep. William H. Gray III, arrived in Jamaica Tuesday to go over the details of the arrangement, and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott was expected to arrive in Kingston today.

“The formal announcement may be waiting for Talbott’s arrival,” one senior official said.

Clinton ordered the change in refugee policy May 8, under pressure from liberal Democrats in Congress, civil rights groups and activist Randall Robinson, who waged a hunger strike on the Haitians’ behalf.

But officials were somewhat embarrassed after the fact to acknowledge that they did not have agreement from any Caribbean country to host the refugees or even the immigration hearing operation.

Nevertheless, both Jamaica and Turks and Caicos cautiously expressed interest.