Haitian president opposes US invasion
In a June 25 interview with Scott Simon of National Public Radio, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide emphatically rejected proposals for the US to restore the elected government by means of a military intervention.
"I always said it", Aristide told Simon, "and today I will repeat it again: I am against a military invasion. I am against a military occupation. I am for the implementation of this agreement which we signed on July 3 [1993] at Governor's Island."
"You wouldn't agree with being brought back to power by means of an invasion?" Simon asked. The president answered: "Never, never and never again."
Aristide had been under heavy pressure from Haitian grassroots organisations to back off from earlier positions supporting a US "surgical strike".
"The US administration considers that an invasion of Haiti is its best option", writes UN special envoy on Haiti Dante Caputo in what appears to be a draft — marked "Confidential" — of a May 23 memo to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Caputo reports that "the president of the United States' main advisers are of the opinion that not only does this option constitute the lesser evil, but that [it] is politically desirable. Thus we think that the current opposition of public opinion to an armed intervention will change radically, once it will have taken place. The Americans see in this type of action a chance to show, after the strong media criticism of the administration, the president's decision making capability and the firmness of leadership in international political matters."
According to Caputo, the US plans to "a) set up a unilateral action, a surgical action, with the eventual participation of several countries in the region so as to give it a certain legitimacy; b) put President Aristide back in power; c) it will seek a quick replacement of the armed intervention forces by the [illegible] whose mandate and structure will have been defined beforehand. This strategy would allow it to capitalize on the experience with such an operation, transferring the political cost on the UN."
[Nicaragua Network (New York) via Pegasus.]