THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 16, 1994 TAG: 9408160327
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
More than 120 Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station stormed out of their fenced compound Saturday and some fought with military police in an apparent attempt to flee into communist Cuba, military sources said.
Twenty unarmed military police and 45 Haitians were hurt by flying debris, Navy Lt. Jeff Breslau said. Other military sources and an island resident said the refugees threw rocks and swung poles that they had pulled from their tents and sharpened.
One Army MP suffered a broken jaw and another a broken nose, a military officer in Norfolk said. Other MPs had cuts and bruises. Two remained hospitalized Monday. No information was available on the condition of the injured Haitians.
The disturbance began about 9 a.m. Saturday when refugees at Camp Three, one of seven camps at the main refugee compound, began singing and chanting political slogans, said Breslau, spokesman for the U.S. Atlantic Command in Norfolk.
Refugees from other camps joined them and soon those in Camp Three left the boundaries of the compound, going down cliffs fronting Guantanamo Bay and began swimming across. At the same time, refugees in three other camps began throwing objects atcamp guards.
Additional security forces were called and order was restored about 1 p.m. The disturbance involved as many as 750 of the 16,458 refugees living in the camps.
``It's not clear what they were demonstrating about,'' Breslau said. ``They are mainly angry at the policy that keeps them there. They have no idea what's going to happen to them.''
Those who left the camps apparently believed they could reach communist Cuba by swimming across the bay, a distance of about two miles, the military officer in Norfolk said. Instead, they found armed Marines. The naval station, on land leased from Cuba, stretches across the bay.
The swimmers were taken into custody by Coast Guard and Navy ships.
One witness, the wife of a military man, said she learned of the disturbance from a U.S. military man, a member of the joint task force in Guantanamo, who was chasing two young refugees through her back yard.
``I was making the bed when I heard one of the JTF guys yell,'' said the woman, who lives with her two children in the Ocean View dependent housing area near the refugee camp.
She said one military guard was beaten and dragged into the crowd of refugees. Other guards went in and pulled him out.
In a telephone interview, the woman, who asked that her name not be used, said the 25 families living in the Ocean View area were ordered to move to apartments elsewhere on the base. The Navy planned to erect an 8-foot-high, barbed wire-topped fence around the housing complex to provide improved protection.
``They said we might be able to come back in two weeks,'' the woman said.
The Haitian refugees are housed at an abandoned runway on the eastern side of Guantanamo Bay. This summer, as many as 17,000 of them have lived in 1,800 tents along the concrete-and-asphalt strip, which stretches nearly a mile.
The refugees' exodus from Haiti began in May when the United States tightened its embargo on the island nation in an effort to drive from power the military regime that had ousted elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
President Clinton initially announced he would allow refugees to come to the United States while their asylum requests were processed. Thousands of refugees took to rickety boats in hopes of reaching U.S. shores. But Clinton reversed the policy - ordering the refugees kept at Guantanamo. The flood has slowed to a trickle.
The refugees have a standing offer of a free ride home on a Coast Guard vessel, but only 413 had taken advantage of the offer through July.
The joint task force that provides security at the seven camps walks the compound unarmed.
Army Col. Michael A. Pearson, who commands the camps, said in an interview last month that he did not arm the guards because there was no need.
``We're there to help these people,'' he said.
The barbed-wire fences, he said, can easily be moved and are not intended to be barriers, only ``boundaries.'' The United States has worked hard to not make the place appear like a prison, Pearson emphasized.
Minor scuffles, some big enough to be described as riots, have erupted in the camps before now but none has involved injuries to U.S. military members or threatened their dependents. ILLUSTRATION: Map
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