Word: junta
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Just when it seemed that Clinton had finally, after so many false alarms, determined to invade, he seized a startling penultimate chance to talk the junta out. He had just finished his TV address to the nation Thursday night, explaining why he was on the verge of ordering a Haiti invasion -- because there seemed to be no other way to force that nation's brutal military dictators into yielding power. Only minutes after the cameras stopped rolling in the Oval Office, the President sat down with Vice President Al Gore, White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and National Security...
...public was surprised by Friday's overture, policymakers were not. The junta, while publicly professing defiance, had been putting out feelers about leaving for at least two months. All their offers bore conditions unacceptable to the U.S.: that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide not be allowed back, that Jonnaissant, Cedras' 80-year-old puppet president, stay in office, that only one or two of the Cedras-Biamby-Francois trio leave...
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...
Clinton's decision to send a former president and a former Head of the Joint Chiefs to Port-au-Prince last week to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Haitian junta ought to raise serious questions about the uses and abuses of American diplomatic initiative...
Exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said he would encourage supporters in his country's Parliament to go along with an amnesty vote pardoning Haiti's military junta and their police "attaches." Whether he likes it or not, that's a major concession U.S. officials agreed to in former President Jimmy Carter's deal with the dictators last Sunday. Aristide made his stand clear in a meeting with three U.S. Senators -- including one of the Carter team, Georgia Democrat Senator Sam Nunn -- and said he would return to Haiti as soon as U.S. forces there say it's safe...