Haiti: Still Punishing the Victims

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LIKE AN ARMY OF ANTS, HAITIANS BY the hundreds scurry up and down the dusty banks of the Massacre River with their gallon plastic jugs. Their day's work done, they head home carrying vessels filled with a precious pink fluid: gasoline smuggled across the river from the Dominican Republic. For the people of Ouanaminthe in northeastern Haiti, the daily trek has become an economic necessity since last October, when the United Nations reimposed a fuel embargo against the country's recalcitrant military rulers.

The embargo is nearly six months old, and the military is still in power -- awash in gasoline and profits, thanks to the porous border with the Dominican Republic. The reality of oil-embargoed Haiti is nowhere more evident than in the capital of Port-au-Prince, which suffers from traffic jams. Though the brightly colored "tap tap" jitneys used by the poor are disappearing as gas prices soar, the military and the monied still manage to race around town in their Range Rovers and Toyotas tanked up on $150 of smuggled fuel. "The embargo exists in name only. They sell gasoline like chocolate bars on the streets," says an angry Senator Christopher Dodd, just back from a trip to the island.

Trade and travel sanctions imposed by the U.N. and the Organization of American States were designed to punish the military and its elite backers for overthrowing President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991. Yet even a modicum of money buys a pleasant life-style in Haiti. Ships from Europe keep stores in middle-class Petionville stocked with Italian artichoke hearts and Georges Duboeuf wine from France. Last December the so-called friends of Haiti -- the U.S., France, Canada and Venezuela -- warned the military that they would seek a worldwide U.N. embargo on all commercial goods to Haiti unless progress was made to restore Aristide to power by Jan. 15. That threat proved hollow, however. Desperate to get rid of the Haiti problem without touching off a new exodus of refugees, the Clinton Administration has drifted from one version of a peace plan to another, apparently moved more by shifting public pressures than by events. Late last month Vice President Al Gore tried to sell Aristide on a plan that would leave Haiti's most powerful man, Port-au-Prince police chief Lieut. Colonel Michel Francois, in place without setting a date for the President's own return -- a retreat from the Governors Island accord signed last summer.

It is Haiti's poor, already the poorest in the western hemisphere, who bear the brunt of the embargo. Food prices have doubled, putting staples like rice, beans and oil beyond the reach of many. Relief officials at CARE describe the current situation as the worst since the 1950s, with moderate and severe malnutrition plaguing some 20% of preschool children. Doctors report a rise in tuberculosis cases and an epidemic of anthrax. "The embargo must be lifted," says Christiana Dormestoin, who scrounges food for her four children. "We're poor people. We only want to feed our children. We don't care about politics."