NEWS ANALYSIS : Aristide’s Silence Is Seen as Disappointment in Pact : Leadership: Those close to supposed beneficiary of Haiti deal say he would seem ungrateful if he complained.

Holed up in an apartment on the edge of Chinatown here watching Cable News Network, ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is the invisible man in the agreement on the future of his tiny Caribbean nation.

Friday, the day after President Clinton went on national television to announce plans to invade Haiti and restore Aristide to the presidency, the diminutive, bespectacled priest was at the White House praising the President at length for his new policy.

But since Sunday, when Clinton’s emissaries signed an agreement spelling out the departure from power of the military junta that ousted Aristide in 1991, there had been no word from the man who was supposed to be the prime beneficiary of the accord.

Analysts who know Aristide and have watched him in Haiti and in exile stressed that his failure to make a statement can only be interpreted as disappointment.

An American who has become very close to Aristide during his nearly three years of exile here says “it would not be helpful to him” if his reaction to the Port-au-Prince accord became public.

“A huge thing has happened and he has not said a word about it--that is making a big deal about something in Haitian terms,” said Amy Wilentz, whose book, “The Rainy Season; Haiti Since Duvalier,” chronicled Aristide’s rise as a rebel priest to spiritual leader of the Haitian people.

“His silence today speaks of his disappointment with this deal,” she said. “He does not want to complain about it because he would look ungrateful. But he does not want to go out to parties and drink champagne because the Haitian people would think he was embracing the amnesty of the men who have caused them so much pain.”

But those close to Aristide loudly criticized the agreement, saying that because it does not require his enemies to depart and instead potentially offers them complete amnesty for their crimes, it does little to further Aristide or democracy in Haiti.

“This agreement does not serve the cause of democracy in Haiti,” Randall Robinson, head of Trans-Africa, an African American lobbying group, said in a news conference.

Robinson called it “impractical folly” to send Haiti’s first democratically elected president back home and expect him to build a democracy when the military Establishment that ousted him is still in place and his enemies retain their assets and cannot be judged for the crimes they committed while in power.

Burton Wides, counsel to Aristide in Washington, told the Associated Press that the exiled president believes the agreement will allow more bloodshed because it gives the Haitian military leaders until Oct. 15 to step down.

“They’ve got four weeks to bump off as many of the people who might be helpful to the pro-democracy forces as they can in the coming (legislative) elections,” Wides said. “It gives them another four weeks of the killing fields.”

Michael Barnes, Aristides’ American lawyer, stressed that while he was briefed on the negotiations by Clinton foreign policy adviser Anthony Lake and William H. Gray III, his special envoy to Haiti, Aristide was in no way a participant in the talks.

Silence is a relatively new tool for Aristide, foreign policy analysts and observers said. He learned it from many frustrating months of trying to influence the fate of Haiti, they said, like a player without cards in a three-way game with U.S. policy-makers and the Haitian military regime.

Aristide came to the United States with a reputation for moving people with potent sermons, encouraging them to stand up against the ruling elite. “Everyone knows his speech is his most powerful weapon,” Wilentz said.

But his three years in exile have taught him the need for quiet diplomacy.

After signing the Governors Island accord, an agreement that would have brought him back to power last October, Aristide complained of being in a “diplomatic straitjacket,” recalled Laurie Richardson, a political analyst who lobbies on behalf of Haiti’s democracy movement.

Aristide had been elected with 67% of the vote in a contest supported by the American government, yet he felt the terms of the 1993 accord were being dictated by U.S. negotiators and Haitian military commander Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras.

Aristide also responded to that agreement with silence.