Haiti Refugee Surge Strains U.S. Facilities

Encouraged by reports of more lenient treatment by U.S. immigration officers, nearly 3,000 Haitian refugees have set sail in recent days for the United States, swamping the ship-borne processing arrangement that the Clinton Administration set up to handle a much smaller number.

In response, President Clinton ordered the reopening of a refugee center at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to cope with the unexpected surge of Haitians.

The Coast Guard said it picked up 1,486 Haitians on the high seas Monday, the highest one-day total yet recorded, and 786 over the weekend. Coast Guard crews intercepted at least 20 more refugee boats Tuesday and picked up at least 612 more emigrants--”but we’re still counting,” spokesman Jack O’Dell said.

The four-day total of at least 2,884 was more than the number of Haitian refugees intercepted in all of 1993.

The increase in refugees took U.S. officials by surprise and prompted President Clinton to convene an emergency meeting to find ways to handle the problem.

The President, as he has done on many previous occasions, appealed to Haitians to remain in their country while applying for asylum. “I would note that the safest and best thing . . . to do is to apply at the in-country processing center,” he said.

“There has been a significant increase in refugees, perhaps as a result of political repression in Haiti and perhaps (because of) anxiety over tougher sanctions.”

But other officials said a more immediate cause appeared to be reports sweeping Haiti that U.S. officials are under orders to grant political asylum to more refugees than before.

Officials confirmed that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has been granting formal refugee status to a much higher percentage of Haitians than before Clinton revised his policies last month. But they said the change was not deliberate.

A month ago, Clinton revamped his Haitian refugee policy--changing its focus from returning Haitians forcibly to their homeland to setting up three shipboard processing centers in Jamaica. But if the new policy has the unintended result of encouraging an even larger exodus than before, Clinton will suffer yet another embarrassment.

State Department spokesman Michael McCurry said that the proportion of Haitian applicants granted refugee status has soared as high as 40% in recent weeks, compared with 5% earlier this year.

McCurry said part of the change probably is attributable to increased work by private human rights groups that help Haitians apply for refugee status, which requires that an applicant prove “a well-founded fear of persecution.”

Another factor, he said, is that the INS has focused on processing “those who have got the best case” for refugee status, a practice that may inflate the percentage admitted.

Richard L. Kenney, an INS spokesman, said the agency also may be approving more Haitian applications because of “better training and better information about conditions on Haiti.” Previously, human rights groups had accused the INS of turning down too many Haitians who had good cases for refugee status.

But Kenney insisted there has been no general order to the INS to approve more Haitian applications. “There has been no direction like that,” he said. “There are a lot of variables that go into these numbers. . . . Asylum isn’t a mathematical process. It’s a one-on-one process. Those percentages don’t have anything to do with anyone’s chances of being approved.”

Not all emigrants who are approved as refugees are admitted to the United States, he noted. The Administration has been seeking help from other countries in settling certified refugees. And the Coast Guard is still returning hundreds of Haitians to their homeland each week--those who fail to convince INS officials that they are fleeing political persecution.

Nevertheless, officials said, reports of the increased percentage approved for refugee status already have circulated around Haiti and appeared to be encouraging more people to flee.

U.S. reporters in Haiti say emigrants are increasingly heading to sea in boats as small as 30 feet--suggesting that they are not aiming to make the 700-mile voyage to Florida but merely are trying to get far enough for the Coast Guard to pick them up.

The Coast Guard has 15 cutters and patrol boats ferrying refugees to a U.S. Navy hospital ship and two leased Ukrainian passenger liners anchored off Kingston, Jamaica. There, the refugees are interviewed by INS and U.N. officials.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s exiled president, said he cannot ask his countrymen to stop fleeing while a military dictatorship rules. “Given the escalating violence and repression, it would be immoral to ask people whose very lives are at risk to stay in Haiti,” he said.

Aristide, who has given conflicting statements in recent weeks over whether he would support U.S. military intervention to topple the military regime, refused to give a clear answer to the question Tuesday in a session at the National Press Club.

“Democracy must be restored, not through military intervention, but through the implementation of the (1992) Governor’s Island agreement,” under which the military agreed to step down, he said.

Asked about reports from Haiti that Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the military strongman, may retire from his post in October, opening the way for a possible compromise solution to the impasse, Aristide rejected the idea as “a . . . maneuver to waste time.”

State Department spokesman McCurry also dismissed rumors of Cedras’ retirement as “singularly unimpressive.”

Clinton’s special ambassador for the Haitian issue, former Rep. William H. Gray III, told a Senate subcommittee that the Administration believes stepped-up economic sanctions have had some effect in shaking the military regime.

“We are seeing signs of progress in the last four weeks,” Gray told a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “There are clear signs of dissatisfaction in the military. There are clear signs among supporters of the coup; some have even called for the coup leadership to step down. That has never happened before until we started tightening the sanctions.”

Gray said the Administration would continue tightening sanctions and indicated that the next step would be to cancel all non-immigrant U.S. visas now held by Haitian citizens.

But if the sanctions fail, he warned, the Administration might turn to military action.

“Is the military option on the table? Yes, it is,” he said. “Is there an imminent action about to be taken? No, it is not. But that option is there on the table and we will assess the effect of sanctions each day, each week, to see if there is a change in the Haitian situation.”

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, U.S. diplomats introduced a resolution that called for an expansion of the U.N. peacekeeping operation in Haiti “after the departure of the senior Haitian military leadership.”

The resolution, discussed by the Security Council in closed-door consultations, would ask Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to propose plans by July 15 for a force large enough to help “assure order,” provide security for democratic government officials and organize legislative elections.

After the meeting, an ambassador said that some of his colleagues on the council were uneasy with the resolution because they did not know if the United States was, in effect, asking them to authorize a U.N. follow-up operation to a possible U.S. invasion of Haiti.

Times staff writer Stanley Meisler at the United Nations contributed to this report.