Still Punishing the Victims

By CATHY BOOTH/OUANAMINTHE

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."

The military, meanwhile, has allowed right-wing paramilitary groups to wage a campaign of terror in pro-Aristide neighborhoods. In the capital's Cite Soleil slum, dead bodies are left in the streets daily, sometimes with their < faces peeled off and limbs missing. Over the past two months, observers with the U.N.- OAS civilian mission report 106 killings, 35 disappearances and dozens of rapes involving women under 20. Much of the violence is blamed on FRAPH, or the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, the modern-day successors to the feared Tontons Macoutes. "The level of repression and violence is rising daily, and the police just seem to stand by and tolerate it," says Colin Ganderson, the mission's director.

The military has used the embargo to become richer and more powerful: it now controls state monopolies like electric service, phones and port facilities. "The military has probably got hernias laughing at the embargo," says an irate relief official. Despite the U.N. naval blockade, U.S. sources estimate as much as a third of the pre-embargo gasoline supply is flowing in by land and sea from the Dominican Republic. So much gasoline comes across the Massacre River on the northern border that locals jokingly refer to the area as "Kuwait." For a bribe, Dominican soldiers turn a blind eye to traffickers.

Human-rights observers charge the U.N. is being hypocritical by posting ships around Haiti, then not enforcing the border crossings. "The United Nations knows the border is like a sieve, and yet it's allowed the Dominican Republic to violate the embargo, keeping the military alive," said a human- rights observer. In one day last month observers counted 40 trucks piled high with drums containing an estimated 66,000 gal. of gas leaving the border at Ouanaminthe. Last week the "four friends" agreed to push for U.N. monitors along the 240-mile border, and Jaoquin Balaguer, the aging President of the Dominican Republic, promised Dodd to shut the border "in due course."

Haiti's assembly industry, given special license to export clothes to the U.S. despite the embargo, is suffering from the collapse of the electric system. Its work force has shrunk from 60,000 to fewer than 8,000. "The embargo is a poison that's killing us all, first the innocent and now factory owners like myself," says clothing-factory owner Georges Barau Sassine. Public services have all but disappeared. With garbage collection halted, the U.S. pays to clean the streets of Port-au-Prince at a cost of $2 million annually to American taxpayers.

Embargo supporters argue that Haiti's deterioration will eventually undermine the army. But as the embargo drags on, Haitians both rich and poor feel increasingly abandoned. There is talk in Washington and Port-au-Prince of letting the crisis -- and the embargo -- run its course until Aristide's five- year term expires in early 1996. In the office of one businesswoman hangs a calendar that symbolizes Haiti's despair: each day is marked off with a giant X -- to keep track of the time remaining in Aristide's presidential term. At last glance it was 666 days and counting.

With reporting by Ana Martinez/Santo Domingo and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington