Haiti: Pushed to The Edge

Most of Haiti was asleep last week when Emile Jonassaint, the island's octogenarian puppet President, went on television at 2 a.m. to announce a national state of emergency. The country, Jonassaint declared, was "faced with extreme danger, denigrated, ridiculed, humiliated, strangled." Warning of "invasion and occupation," the President installed in office by his military handlers last month suggested that fellow Haitians might look for protection to the voodoo god of thunder.

It will take more than the almond-syrup libations with which voodoo priests placate the god's wrath to save Haiti from U.S. anger if the thugs who run the country do not voluntarily give up power. The once lackadaisical trade embargo is beginning to bite now that U.S. ships are forcibly halting all sea traffic and the land border from the Dominican Republic has been virtually shut down. Two new measures aimed at toppling the strongmen who deposed democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 -- suspension of all commercial air traffic from the U.S. beginning this Saturday, and a freeze on Haitian assets, including bank accounts and credit cards -- have provoked panic and pain.

The Clinton Administration hopes to succeed by driving a wedge between the military men who control the government and the business elite who support them. "Up to now," says Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, "because of the slipshod nature of sanctions enforcement, an awful lot of the Haitian establishment not only could live with the embargo but, perversely, quite a few were profiting from it."

That is no longer the case. As bills piled up on their desks, businessmen spent most of the week frantically shifting money around by phone. Some, waiting in long lines at the bank, scanned local papers for advertisements offering special U.S. flights or Florida mortgages. "The fact that there are no planes is a major psychological blow," said a Port-au-Prince entrepreneur. "The freezing of bank accounts is killing businessmen. Some who were opposed to Aristide returning are finally sobering up."

The other prong in Washington's strategy is the credible threat of military intervention. No one knows whether Clinton will follow through with an invasion, but the steady drip of leaks has created an atmosphere of frantic speculation that, combined with a dearth of hard facts, makes for effective psychological war. Amid all the uncertainty, Port-au-Prince is swept by sensational rumors, such as last week's report that the U.S. embassy had been passing out iridescent paint so that Americans could identify their homes to invading troops.

Washington is prepared to wait some weeks while sanctions strangle the economy, also watching to see whether a rattled elite decides to work out some skin-saving deal. But increasing numbers of Haitians are convinced that if sanctions fail to dislodge the military, the President's tough posturing may have made invasion inexorable. Even though Clinton has yet to make a decision, there is a growing consensus that he has pushed matters to the point where he cannot afford to back down. "There's almost no way out," said former Ambassador to Haiti Ernest Preeg, "except military intervention."