Haiti: Hostage to Violence

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Somewhere in northern Haiti: a lone human-rights worker sifts through a stack of Polaroid pictures. Photos of men beaten so badly that chunks of flesh are missing from their buttocks. Pregnant women with deep bruises on their bellies. Young girls gone vacant-eyed after rape. The pictures, the man says, are proof of brutal government repression in Haiti, in this case the coastal city of Gonaives, against supporters of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the President ousted in a 1991 military coup.

Horrific as the pictures are, observers for the U.N. and the Organization of American States returned from Gonaives last week with even grimmer detail. In the predawn hours of April 22, they reported, soldiers and paramilitary gunmen surrounded Raboteau, a slum where Aristide support runs strong, and shot down men, women and children as they fled toward the sea and their fishing boats. Because many bodies were lost at sea, the observers could not give an exact death toll, but witnesses claimed that at least 28 people had died. Soldiers hastily buried some victims in shallow graves that were soon dug up by pigs and dogs.

In Washington, where Aristide languishes in exile, the Gonaives killings finally forced the Clinton Administration to revise yet again its ineffective Haiti policy. The U.S. called on the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution imposing a worldwide embargo, more sweeping than the sanctions in force for the past six months, unless members of the junta in Port-au-Prince resigned or left the country within 15 days; the clock would start ticking the moment the resolution passed. "We're not alone in being frustrated, irritated, furious about what is going on in Haiti," said Madeleine Albright, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. The proposed sanctions would stop most trade and all travel to Haiti with the exception of regularly scheduled flights. In view of rising malnournishment and disease on the island, however, food and medicine shipments would be exempt. In addition, some 600 Haitian soldiers, policemen and their families would be barred from going abroad and their assets would be frozen worldwide.

The first casualty of the new Haiti policy, however, was not the Haitian military but Lawrence Pezzullo, Washington's special envoy to Haiti, who was forced to step down. After a year on the job, Pezzullo had come to symbolize the Clinton Administration's ambivalence toward the military leaders. In Port- au-Prince he had become so irrelevant that the Haitian army no longer bothered to show up for meetings with him. A frustrated Pezzullo admitted recently that the U.S. had been trapped into playing "rhetorical gymnastics with the military."

The U.S. proposal for sharper U.N. action still sets no date for Aristide's return and provides no real muscle to remove a junta whose members are getting rich smuggling in fuel and food from the Dominican Republic, in defiance of the existing U.N. ban and a voluntary OAS trade embargo. Senator Christopher Dodd, an advocate of tougher sanctions who recently returned from a trip to . Haiti, believes new U.N. measures will not be enough. With dissatisfaction over Clinton's Haiti policy mounting in Congress, a senior Administration official admitted that no option, not even military intervention, was being ruled out. In the past the Pentagon has balked at the idea of using force.