Administration Called Slow to Condemn Abuses in Haiti

Human rights groups charged the Clinton Administration on Saturday with using abuses such as death-squad assassinations and gang rapes to justify invading Haiti at the same time it turns a blind eye to such atrocities elsewhere.

“We’re glad the Administration has finally come to see in all its true horror the extent of violations in Haiti,” said James O’Dea, director of the Washington office of Amnesty International. “But it has been slow to reach that conclusion and has thrown up a lot of questions in the last couple of years about the accuracy of reports on abuses.”

Other groups suggested that Clinton was cynically citing human rights abuses to defend invasion preparations that are widely held by the U.S. public to be an unnecessary commitment of force.

“To use human rights as the main rationale for an invasion of Haiti is to suggest that abuses are new,” said Mary Healy, executive director of the Washington Office on Haiti, an independent and nonprofit monitoring group. “If human rights were the issue, then they should have been invoked much, much earlier to change the situation.”

In Clinton’s address to the nation Thursday night, he cited repression and abuses by Haiti’s security forces as the chief reason for invading Haiti and ousting the regime of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, who overthrew the democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September, 1991.

“Cedras and his armed thugs have conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests,” the President declared. “As the dictators have grown more desperate, the atrocities have grown ever more brutal.”

He also cited reports that 300,000 people, or 5% of Haiti’s population, had fled into hiding for fear of the regime’s brutality.

According to State Department officials, the cases and figures cited by Clinton are based on human rights reports assembled by the State Department from documentation and field reports put together not only by the U.S. Embassy in Haiti but also by human rights monitoring groups.

The non-governmental groups say they check and cross-check every case before citing it. A U.N. official said the United Nations now insists on three corroborating accounts of all cases.

“We know that there has been a pattern of assassination, killings, mutilations, beatings, torture in prison and extrajudicial killings,” said John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights. “These have been well documented over the past three years since the coup against Aristide.”

Clinton used some of that documentation, including gruesome photos of Haitians--presumably Aristide supporters--who had been killed with machetes.

The single recent skeptical note was sounded in April by the U.S. Embassy in Haiti.

In a cable to Washington, the embassy disputed the figures that were then being cited by Aristide, his supporters and human rights groups as exaggerated propaganda. It claimed that the violations were not as serious as reported.

“The Haitian left, including President Aristide and his supporters in Washington and here, consistently manipulate or even fabricate human rights abuses as a propaganda tool,” said the embassy cable to Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

The cable specifically cast doubt on “the sudden epidemic of rapes” by Haiti’s security forces to punish and intimidate women with direct or indirect ties to Aristide or his supporters.

“For a range of cultural reasons . . . rape has never been considered or reported as a serious crime here,” it said.

It said Aristide’s forces were being “wittingly or unwittingly assisted by non-governmental human rights organizations” and the U.N. Civilian Mission, which then monitored human rights violations.

The 10-page memo was drafted by the embassy’s political officer in charge of monitoring human rights and was reportedly signed by U.S. Ambassador William L. Swing.

After the cable was leaked, U.N. officials and human rights groups were outraged and demanded an official apology.

They referred to a report issued just weeks earlier by the State Department citing a spectrum of abuses, including many documented by groups such as Human Rights Watch, a joint mission by the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and Amnesty International.

Swing said the cable did not reflect the embassy’s position--despite his signature. And Shattuck later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the cable did not represent the U.S. position.

The episode reflected an underlying tension between human rights groups and the Administration on the issue of atrocities in Haiti and throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Some groups challenge the President’s contention that the island nation is the worst violator in the Americas.

“Does he look at the rest of the region?” O’Dea asked. “Does he know that thousands of children die from death squads on the streets of Brazil? And his Administration pushes hard for security assistance to Colombia in the face of tens of thousands of killings by military and paramilitary forces? What has he done to express his outrage there?”

O’Dea and others noted that human rights is not on the agenda for the summit of hemispheric leaders scheduled for December.

“We have a real battle in this hemisphere getting human rights on the agenda,” O’Dea said. “So when the President invokes human rights in context of intervention in Haiti, he does a real double disservice to victims in places like Colombia and Brazil by ignoring their plight.”

Since the flap over the U.S. Embassy’s human rights cable, human rights groups and U.S. officials agree that the human rights situation in Haiti has seriously deteriorated.

In a July report, Human Rights Watch documented dozens of cases of rape designed to terrorize the regime’s opponents. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recorded 66 cases of politically motivated rape by Haitian security forces during the first five months of 1994.

And in a report issued Tuesday, the State Department said human rights violations in Haiti were now “comparable to the notorious regime of Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier.”

Observers agree that 3,000 Haitians were killed between the 1991 coup and February, 1994.