Word: haitian
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While waiting for the outcome of the Carter mission, both sides speeded up preparations for a fight. Clinton spent part of Saturday in the Pentagon's secure "tank" reviewing details of the assault. Secretary of Defense William Perry assured the public that resistance, if any, from the Haitian armed forces could be overcome "in a matter of hours, at most a day or two." Even so, he added somberly, there would be casualties, both American and Haitian...
...Haiti, there were reports Friday that some of the country's 7,000 soldiers were already shedding their uniforms and melting into the civilian populace. But that could have been in preparation to fight rather than to give up; some Haitian Americans insisted that if it came to war, Cedras and others would hide in the mountains to conduct a guerrilla campaign against U.S. troops, concentrating sniper fire on white soldiers. Some Haitians even maintained that the voodoo gods were on their side: they had sent Frank Corder's plane to crash into the White House lawn last Monday...
Instead the President concentrated heavily on convicting the Haitian junta of a long list of atrocities. He spoke of "people slain and mutilated, with body parts left as warnings to terrify others. Children forced to watch as their mothers' faces are slashed with machetes." Permitting so brutal a regime to stay in power in defiance of its earlier agreements to get out would endanger continuation of a trend toward democracy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, said Clinton, and might well unleash a new flood of refugees: "300,000 more Haitians -- 5% of their entire population -- are in hiding...
...next day Clinton produced Aristide before cameras in the White House to allay some of the fears that the Haitian's reputation as an anti-U.S. leftist and rabble-rousing demagogue have stirred. Speaking in careful English -- his native language is Creole French -- the slightly built Roman Catholic priest declared, "We say no to retaliation, no to vengeance." To dispel any thought that the U.S. might be installing by force a new President-for-life, Aristide pledged to abide by his country's constitution and yield his office to an elected successor in February 1996, when his five-year...
...next 17 months or so, the U.S. must pin its hopes on Aristide. His 1990 election victory gives him an aura of legitimacy no other Haitian figure can come close to matching; the U.S. can hardly pretend to be restoring Haitian democracy if it backs anyone else. If he is a leftist and no admirer of the U.S. -- well, in a perverse way, that makes American intervention easier to defend against possible cries of Yanqui imperialism. Instead of overthrowing a populist reformer to install a military dictatorship friendly to the U.S., Washington will be doing the exact opposite...