Haiti: Threat and Defiance

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More and more, the face-off between Haiti's military rulers and the U.S. White House looks like an elaborate game of chicken. From the American side comes a steady escalation of military and political pressures designed to send Haitian Army Chief Raoul Cedras and his cronies this message: We don't want to invade Haiti, but if that's the only way to get rid of you, we will. From Cedras and company comes a series of nose-thumbing moves adding up to this reply: Come on -- we dare you. But the game has not reached the point at which the final collision becomes inevitable; there is still time for either side -- or both -- to swerve away.

The Clinton Administration, to be sure, several times a day denies that an invasion is "imminent" and even blames the U.S. news media for spreading a contrary impression. At the same time, though, it keeps up a steady rolling of war drums. Pentagon officials last week willingly described what sounded like invasion-rehearsal exercises by Marines on Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas 200 miles north of Port-au-Prince and by soldiers of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Pentagon also announced the arrival on station of a new command ship for the 14-vessel flotilla standing ready near Haiti: the U.S.S. Mount Whitney. Crammed with communications gear and sprouting a forest of antennae, it is one of two U.S. ships designed specifically to serve as a floating headquarters for an amphibious invasion.

On the political side too, the Administration seemed to be going through preparatory exercises and building a case for intervention. Madeleine Albright, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., announced that Washington had signed up 12 Latin-American and Caribbean countries to contribute troops to a post- Cedras peacekeeping force in Haiti. (She may have gone too far. A White House official later said the 12 "were countries with whom we have had conversations. They have not necessarily agreed to participate.") Meanwhile, the State Department put out additional reports of murders and rapes committed by the Haitian regime.

Cedras answered with defiant words and acts. In interviews with American reporters, he insisted that unless the U.S. recognized the government of his puppet President Emile Jonassaint, not even an invasion would force him to resign. Asserted Information Minister Jacques St. Louis, who lived for many years in the U.S. and served in the American Navy during the Vietnam War: "We are not talking anymore because we have nothing new to say. We will not discuss the departure of the military leaders. It troubles me that I might have to fight the uniform I once served in, but Haiti is my country."

The Cedras regime summarily booted out nearly 100 human-rights monitors sent by the U.N. and the Organization of American States, contemptuously delivering to their headquarters in Port-au-Prince a plain white envelope containing a single sheet of paper ordering them to get out within 48 hours. They did, to the applause of some of Cedras' tough-talking supporters. "These people were poison," says Mireille Durocher Bertin, a lawyer. "They poisoned Haitian society with their lies and unverified reports."