Haitian’s Flight Shows Democracy’s Slide

For two days last month, they hunted the frail old man.

Seat by seat, the police searched every commercial jet leaving Port-au-Prince’s airport for the United States. They tore through cars crossing the remote Dominican border and pored over surveillance tapes from cameras outside diplomatic compounds here.

They wanted Leon Manus at all costs--and, by his and most others’ reckoning, they wanted him dead.

All because Manus, the president of Haiti’s independent election commission, had refused to validate election results that gave former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s party sweeping victories.

But even though the 80-year-old jurist had been warned that assassins were coming to his house, senior U.S. officials, who knew about the threats, spent two days debating how far to go to protect Manus’ life.

In the end, his relatives say and U.S. officials privately confirm, Washington staged a clandestine operation to evacuate Manus and bring him to safety in the United States. But the long hours of indecision reflected the Clinton administration’s struggle over how far to disengage from Haiti, six years after a military intervention and a $2.3-billion effort to restore democracy here.

Even now, the State Department officially refuses to confirm or deny the U.S. role in rescuing Manus, presumably fearful of jeopardizing what little sway Washington still has over Aristide and his handpicked successor, President Rene Preval.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher has said only: “[Manus] and his wife entered on valid U.S. visas they already had in their possession. Our understanding is it was entirely their decision to leave Haiti.” But he added that Manus’ departure “says a lot about the difficult situation in Haiti.”

Another State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration still believes that it can influence Preval and Aristide, despite their defiant response to international criticism in the elections’ aftermath.

Although the official acknowledged that “frustration levels are high” within the administration at a time when “traditional policy tools don’t seem to respond,” he added that U.S. attempts to engage Preval’s government “are an indication that we are going to be the last to close the final door here.”

That door appears only slightly ajar.

The last permanent U.S. military presence here ended in January. The State Department has been drawing down its ambitious police-training mission after spending tens of millions of dollars in an attempt to create a new police force that the opposition asserts has been spending as much time rounding up its members as chasing criminals.

“There has been a ratcheting down of assistance levels that would have happened regardless of the elections,” the State Department official said. “But what we’re hearing from Capitol Hill now is: no new money . . . unless the secretary [of State] or the president can certify the parliamentary elections have been free and fair.”

U.S. taxpayers, after all, paid for these elections--$23 million for everything from new voter-registration cards to the ballots themselves. But all attempts to get Preval’s government to re-count the first election round have had no effect.

Aid Hasn’t Brought Democracy, Critics Say

The election funds were part of a steady flow of U.S. largess to Haiti aimed at rebuilding the nation and its institutions. The administration has listed as successes the new police force; new roads, bridges and other infrastructure; and a higher voter consciousness, which led to an impressive 66% turnout in the first election round in May.

But opposition leaders, Republican lawmakers in Washington and even members of Aristide’s Lavalas Family party say that the aid has so far failed to institutionalize democracy here and that it hasn’t brought sustainable development.

Those critics also assert--and the administration concedes--that the overwhelming majority of the more than $2 billion spent here didn’t stay here. Rather, it financed the U.S.-led 1994 military intervention--dubbed Operation Restore Democracy--going to military salaries, contractors and the United Nations.

Yet despite that costly U.S.-led military and civilian effort, which drove out a junta and restored Aristide to power, opposition leaders, business executives and intellectuals here now conclude that there are more signs of a budding dictatorship than a blossoming democracy.

Manus was just one of many Haitians threatened with death before, during and after two rounds of U.S.-funded elections that ended with the Lavalas party’s many legislative and local victories July 9. More than a dozen opposition candidates and supporters have been killed. Others have been in hiding.

Most observers predict yet another round of desperate Haitian rafters and asylum-seekers flooding Florida’s shores this year, especially if the U.S. and the international community make good on threats to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Haiti. Already this year, the U.S. Coast Guard has stopped more than 1,000 Haitians en route--more than in all of 1999.

“To leave Haiti entirely on its own means [that] a lot more boat people are going to start heading to America again, washing up on the Bahamas and all over the beautiful tourist islands of the Caribbean,” said Jean Yves Jason, an opposition candidate who was defeated by a Lavalas candidate in his race for Port-au-Prince mayor.

Some Haitians Hope to Help Rebuild Land

Jason, who recently emerged from hiding for the first time since ruling party supporters threatened to kill him and his family after the first round of elections, said some of his supporters already have left this impoverished country for America.

Like many educated Haitians, Jason already has a U.S. visa. But he and many others say they have chosen to remain here to help rebuild their homeland.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a new kind of Haitian rafter--people with U.S. visas in their passports and money in their pockets who fear they’d be stopped [by the police] from leaving at the airport,” Jason said. “And if people who have money are leaving the country, what do you expect from the people who don’t?”

Among those who have left in recent months is Manus’ nephew, Olivier Nadal, president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce.

“I’ve been very vocal against the [Haitian] government for the past 12 months--locally and throughout the world. They tried to control me and the Chamber of Commerce, and they couldn’t,” Nadal said in an interview in Miami, where he is living with his family. “So they threatened to kill me, my wife and my kids.”

For Nadal and other opposition leaders, Aristide, who has ambitions to return to power in presidential elections later this year, lies at the root of the problem.

“Aristide wants total power,” Nadal said, an allegation that supporters of the former Roman Catholic priest deny.

“To have total power, you have to eliminate every obstacle,” Nadal said. “And opposition parties and voices are obstacles.”

After the most specific of the death threats, Nadal said, he too was evacuated by the U.S. government. He said he was secretly driven across the Dominican border behind the tinted windows of a U.S. diplomatic car several months ago.

Despite U.S. efforts on his behalf, Nadal criticized the secrecy surrounding his uncle’s escape, calling Washington’s Haiti policy “a total failure.”

“I believe they don’t want to recognize the truth about what is happening in Haiti,” he said. “President Clinton made it clear [that] Haiti was a foreign policy victory, a victory for democracy. So everything that comes out of Haiti is just put in a box, then in a drawer and closed.”

The Clinton administration has, in fact, criticized the recent polls, though not as strenuously as the European Union or the Organization of American States, which was the official international election observer during the first round and boycotted the second.

In response, Preval’s government has asserted that the nation’s election commission is an independent body that signed off on the results and that the government cannot overturn its final determination, which gave Aristide’s party 18 of the 19 Senate seats at stake.

But that wasn’t Manus’ final determination.

The elder statesman delivered his bottom line from U.S. soil June 21.

Account of U.S. Clandestine Operation

Four days after his mysterious departure, Manus issued a 20-paragraph statement declaring, in part: “My safety was seriously endangered because I would never agree to certify the last incorrect electoral results, which did not conform to the electoral law.

“At the top governmental level, unequivocal messages were transmitted to me on the consequences that would follow if I refused to publish the false final results. Also, groups of individuals claiming to belong to one political party began to threaten to engulf the capital and provincial cities in fire and blood, destroying everything in their path.”

The Haitian government denies that any threats were made.

Manus, like the State Department, has not spoken publicly about his departure. But his relatives in the U.S. say he gave them a detailed account after arriving in Miami on June 17 on a commercial flight from Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. The account was confirmed by several U.S. officials.

Nadal said that his uncle met with Preval at the presidential palace and spoke to Aristide by phone the night of June 15--and that Manus left the palace believing that he would be killed the following day if he failed to announce the results as instructed.

A Haitian working for the U.S. Agency for International Development was dispatched in a U.S. diplomatic car the next day to fetch Manus at his home, where he and his wife hurriedly packed. Surveillance videos later aired on Haitian state television showed the U.S. diplomatic car then entering the German ambassador’s residence.

Manus remained there for hours while U.S. officials debated the next step in saving his life: whether to take the bold step of evacuating him from the country or to negotiate his safety with the Haitian government.

Amid U.S. indecision, Nadal said, his uncle eventually was moved to another diplomatic residence, where he waited out the night and much of the following day. Finally, he and his wife were taken to a remote area on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, the capital, where, Nadal says, a helicopter took them to the Dominican Republic.

During the negotiations, Manus explained to a diplomat why he had refused to certify the wrong results: “If I was 40, I would have done it, because I would know that I had my entire life to work to make it right. But I haven’t enough time left to make amends for this.”