Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 4, 1992 TAG: 9202040389
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`GIVE ME YOUR POOR' - EXCEPT HAITIANS
THE UNITED STATES officially deplores the military regime of Haiti, but is shipping a small city of boat people back to that violent land. Shuttling back and forth between American installations and Port-au-Prince, U.S. boats have begun returning hundreds of refugees a day.Fourteen thousand Haitians have fled their homes since the military takeover Sept. 30. Most of them crowded onto small boats with limited stores of food and water, braving uncertain weather and other perils of the open sea in hopes of reaching the shores of America, the world's beacon of freedom.
Oh, no, says Uncle Sam: You folks don't want freedom. You just want a better life. You're economic, not political, refugees. Sorry. Back you go.
It is a remarkable and reprehensible stance, given both Haiti's history and the persistent reports that terror - as usual - reigns there.
In 1990, the U.S. government hailed the landslide presidential election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as evidence of democracy's arrival in Haiti. After the generals threw him out last fall, the United States withheld diplomatic recognition and supported an Organization of American States trade embargo aimed at Aristide's restoration.
Yet the United States is willing, in effect, to do business with the military - to assume its good intentions - by putting at its mercy hordes of unwilling, frightened Haitians. The State Department has "received no credible reports of reprisals" against would-be refugees or those already "repatriated."
Perhaps credibility requires bloodstained documents. Has Haiti under the generals become a kinder, gentler nation? Or, more believably, is what's going on there simply more of what Haiti has suffered for generations?
One can only pray that Haiti has changed, for the U.S. Immmigration and Naturalization Service has not. Most Haitians lack the option of checking in via U.S. Customs after debarking from a passenger ship or airliner. By any means available, they've been trying for years to escape their country's oppressive rule (as well as its pervasive poverty), and for years the INS has turned them back or herded them into detention camps.
In a 1990 case, U.S. District Judge Eugene P. Spellman declared that the service "has routinely engaged in underhanded tactics in dealing with Haitians seeking asylum in this country, and has singled them out for special discriminatory treatment."
Last August, before the current wave of boat people began, the Jesuit magazine America reported: "Between September 1981, when the U.S. detention program began, and Jan. 1, 1991, a grand total of eight Haitians fleeing their country by boat were found by the U.S. government to fit the definition of political refugees - those leaving their country for fear of political persecution."
The trouble with these Haitians is that they're black and poor and numerous. Not the sort, it seems, for whom Miss Liberty lifts her lamp beside the golden door.