If democracy is viewed as a human right shared by all persons, and the world community has an obligation to use force when necessary to protect this right, then it is also appropriate to use force to depose any government that achieves power by force and violates its citizens’ rights. By acting against the government of Haiti on these grounds, we would logically be committed to act again if the Haitian government did not respect the rights of Haitians. As it turned out, Aristide did not respect the rights of Haitian citizens, but too little attention was paid to that threat at the time.
Resolution 940 built on the precedent established in the mandatory economic sanctions imposed on Haiti in June 1993. It justified ousting Haiti’s military rulers, basing its argument on domestic conditions. (The nation’s humanitarian situation had deteriorated; violations of civil liberties had increased; the condition of refugees had deteriorated; a UN team monitoring human rights had been expelled.) The resolution implicitly endorsed a right to democracy, and made clear that this right overrode the prohibitions in the UN Charter against the use of force (except for self-defense and collective self-defense), and against intervention in the internal affairs of states.
This idea of a right to democracy was appealing to Americans, many of whom believe that all people should govern themselves democratically. But should we overthrow governments because we disapprove of them? Should we risk American lives? And why Haiti? Why not Cuba? Presidents justify their policies, especially decisions to use force, in terms of the nation’s basic values and established practices. The Clinton administration prepared Americans for military action in Haiti by emphasizing that an illegitimate government must be forced out of power and democracy restored. But the case Clinton made for U.S. intervention would seem to have applied far more clearly to Cuba than to Haiti.
Thomas Franck foresaw a day when the global community would guarantee democracy as a legal entitlement. But he also believed that “the collective use of military force to protect the people’s right to democracy is an extremely remote bridge which need not be crossed at present.”67 This was precisely the bridge Clinton and Christopher were ready to cross; the mystery was what they intended to do when they reached the other side.68
Justifying Intervention
It was disturbing, in that summer and fall of 1994, to hear Clinton administration spokespersons call the planned military operation a “police action” rather than a war; they seemed to be evading the constitutional requirement for congressional consent and treating the Security Council resolution as sufficient grounds to spend half a billion dollars and risk American lives. It also seemed cynical for a government that endlessly sought a negotiated peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina to speak of having exhausted all alternatives to the use of force in Haiti. In fact, the U.S. government had discouraged the efforts of Venezuela and other Latin American governments to resume talks, even though the Cédras government repeatedly indicated its willingness to negotiate. Administration officials even cited the U.S. military action in Grenada as a precedent, an especially inapt and objectionable analogy. The Reagan administration’s 1983 military action in Grenada was conducted under the treaty of alliance with the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OEC), and in the face of a clear and present danger to more than six hundred American students held prisoner by a band that had already murdered Grenada’s prime minister and cabinet. In fact, a comparison of the situations—Grenada in 1983 and Haiti in 1994—is a textbook illustration of the difference between problems that do justify the use of force and those that do not.
The situation in Haiti posed no urgent threat to the lives of Americans. In Grenada, the American students were trapped in an atmosphere of extreme violence. On October 19, 1983, Grenada’s Marxist prime minister, Maurice Bishop, and five members of his cabinet were shot in cold blood by Bishop’s Cuban-trained deputy, Bernard Coard. Coard imposed a round-the-clock shoot-on-sight curfew and closed the airport, trapping some one thousand American citizens, including several hundred American medical students who were held incommunicado under guard. The U.S. government obviously had an urgent interest in bringing this crisis to a swift and safe conclusion.
Haiti had no strategic importance to the United States. The situation in Grenada was quite different: the country had been transformed into a base for the projection of Soviet and Cuban military power in the Caribbean. The largest airstrip in the Western Hemisphere was nearing completion under Cuban auspices, and the flow of military traffic to and from Grenada was causing widespread anxiety among Grenada’s island neighbors. Their fears were confirmed by the discovery after the invasion of eight hundred armed Cuban troops and six warehouses filled with advanced Russian weapons. In addition, secret treaties were discovered between Grenada and the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea that included plans to make Grenada a major base for guerilla operations in the Caribbean basin.
Haiti posed no threat to the peace and security of the region, but the United States and most Caribbean nations perceived Grenada as a threat. The prime ministers of Jamaica, Barbados, and Dominica had appealed to the United States and the United Nations for help. With eloquent, data-rich presentations, they described the destabilizing effects on the region from the extension of Soviet-Cuban power to Grenada. The weapons caches and secret documents discovered there offered ample justification for these concerns.
Moreover, surprise was not a necessary element of the Clinton plan for deposing the government of Haiti, but secrecy and dispatch were needed to save the American students in Grenada. The Reagan administration did not consult with Congress or seek UN authorization to invade Grenada. (There was never any question of going to the UN. It was the height of the cold war, and the Soviet Union would certainly have vetoed any action against a communist state.)
The Grenada invasion was applauded by a large majority of the American public but denounced in the UN by the Soviet and nonaligned blocs, and in Congress by liberal Democrats. The CBC, which later urged action in Haiti, strenuously denounced the liberation of Grenada—even after the American students shared their terror on national television. Top officials of the Clinton administration expected that once the military landed in Haiti, the American public would rally around, and the action would prove to be a source of new political support for President Clinton.
But the American people have an acute sense of what is and is not in the national interest. A majority opposed risking American lives to restore Aristide to power, because they knew Haiti was no threat to the United States. While few Americans approved of the military government in Haiti, most knew that Haiti had had a series of bad leaders, and they did not want the United States to assume responsibility for the quality of government in Port-au-Prince. Most Americans oppose the use of military force except when a vital U.S. interest is at stake, and no one had made a persuasive case that Aristide’s return to the presidency was such an interest. When the administration decided to use military force in Haiti, it was only the latest example of a growing habit of discounting public views and values in making foreign commitments. The public had shown little support for committing American forces and resources to the various peacekeeping activities, yet the Clinton team remained enthusiastic about pursuing them.
The administration’s plans to invade and occupy Haiti also failed to meet traditional standards of international relations and law. The UN Charter—which is to international law what the U.S. Constitution is to American law—explicitly prohibits “the use and threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” (Article51) and forbids intervention in the internal affairs of states except in self-defense, collective self-defense, or where there is a serious threat to international peace and security. In keeping with the traditional view of many liberals on the unacceptability of the use of force, the prohibition against using force in international relations was the heart of the UN Charter, the crucial norm, the very basis of a civilized world. International lawyer Louis Henkin spoke for many when h
e wrote, “The UN Charter—an epitaph to Hitler—is not neutral between democracy and totalitarianism, between justice and injustice, or between respect for human rights and their violation….[But] those fundamental goals are not to be pursued by force.” No one had ever suggested that violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights created grounds for using force.
In Iraq, intervention to provide humanitarian assistance to the Kurds and Shiites threatened by Saddam Hussein’s forces was justified because these massive violations of human rights—on the borders of Iran and Turkey—constituted a serious threat to international peace and security. The government of Haiti constituted no serious threat to Haiti’s only close neighbor, the Dominican Republic, and the human rights violations in Haiti did not threaten international peace and security.
Military intervention also violated the charter of the Organization of American States. The Santiago Declaration, adopted by the OAS on June 5, 1991, was sometimes said to justify intervention to preserve democracy because it defined representative democracy as “an indispensable condition for the stability, peace and development of the region.” But the Santiago Declaration did not authorize force to restore democracy, in Haiti or anywhere else. The states of the Western Hemisphere have always been extremely sensitive about their sovereignty, and they have a special aversion to U.S. intervention, with which they have had extensive experience. In fact, Haiti endured U.S. military occupation from 1915 to 1934. Major Latin American states had already made it clear in the UN and the OAS that they opposed U.S. military intervention to return Aristide to power. France, a permanent member of the Security Council, also opposed military intervention.
The Clinton administration’s Haiti strategy had its origin in views Clinton’s appointees brought with them to the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Defense. These views concerned broad issues of sovereignty and its limits, peacekeeping and war making, cooperative security and collective restraint, as well as democracy and how to expand it. These ideas constituted a new theory of international relations and global engineering, but because the concepts were discussed in specialized journals and introduced one or two at a time rather than as a doctrine—and because they did not fit familiar Right-Left, liberal-conservative categories—they drew little attention or scrutiny, even as they exerted a major influence on U.S. foreign policy.
Those who subscribed to this new doctrine put their faith in a set of interlinked ideas: the decline of sovereignty, the doctrine of failed states, an interventionist imperative, and the legitimacy of multilateral force. The core principle was the conviction that sovereignty was an outdated concept, no longer appropriate to an interdependent world in which many important problems transcend state boundaries and states were “collapsing” at an unprecedented rate. In 1992, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali wrote, “[T]he time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty…has passed; its theory was never matched by reality.”69 Global realities, it was argued, required more activist international approaches. If the notion of sovereignty was outdated, for instance, it was not necessary to respect Article 2.7 of the UN Charter, which asserts, “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” (A 2002 Foreign Affairs article by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun illustrates the further development of thinking on the limits of sovereignty.70)
Hand in hand with the decline of sovereignty came the rise of the doctrine of failed states. The failed state was seen as a threat to its neighbors and to international peace and security.71 Failed states “imperil[ed] their own citizens and threaten[ed] their neighbors with refugee flows, political instability and random warfare” and “their problems tend[ed] to spread,” thus making them appropriate objects of UN military action.72 This postulated link between failed states and international peace was used to justify the Security Council’s claim of jurisdiction over the internal problems of states and its authorizations of international force to deal with them. Because democratic governments do not engage in aggressive wars and so must be preserved, this new doctrine held, the UN (or the United States) should be allowed to force as a necessary strategy to protect international peace and security.
Haiti was a perfect match for this new approach to third world policy: a failed state to which the international community could restore democracy. The proposed mission, which won multilateral authorization, was an occasion for the altruistic use of American power in a location close to home—an operation that would not be too dangerous or too expensive. The convergence of the Clinton team’s doctrine and the problems in Haiti—along with the enthusiasm of key Democrats—paved the way for intervention and suggested how easily this new ideology of international altruism could be used to justify a military action in virtually any less-developed country.73
THE CARTER-JONASSAINT DEAL AND OPERATION UPHOLD DEMOCRACY
Clinton’s top priority was to remove General Cédras from the presidency and restore Aristide. During the summer of 1994, pressure for U.S. military action grew on the left and in the CBC. Even as he was preparing for war, however, Clinton rather reluctantly asked former president Jimmy Carter to head a mission that included Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) and General Colin Powell to try to resolve the problem and avoid a military confrontation.
On September 17, Carter, Powell, and Nunn arrived in Port-au-Prince to meet with Haiti’s leaders. They persuaded Cédras to agree to the Carter-Jonassaint Accord (signed by Emile Jonassaint, Haiti’s military-appointed civilian president). The accord provided that the military troika (Cédras, army chief of staff General Philippe Biamby, and Lieutenant Colonel Michel François) would take “honorable retirement” by October 15; that the government of Haiti would cooperate with U.S. armed forces and hold legislative elections promptly; and that UN sanctions would be suspended without delay.74 The dictators told Carter that they would leave and permit Aristide to return to power. Clinton’s last-minute diplomatic effort had narrowly averted a military conflict.75
By the time Clinton called off the planned invasion, paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne were already on their way to Haiti. The New York Times described the reaction aboard the U.S.S. Eisenhower:
[S]enior commanders said Sunday night and throughout the day that the plans for what the troops would do were extremely fluid, indeed uncertain. The situation, in fact, was changing so swiftly that the [ship]’s skipper, Capt. Mark A Gemmill, ordered his helmsmen to make continual adjustments so the ship’s antenna could pick up the sometimes flickering CNN broadcasts. Many young soldiers and junior officers gathered in the First Brigade’s headquarters shook their heads as they watched President Clinton’s speech announcing that an agreement had been reached for the Haitian military rulers to leave, and that American troops would have a security role rather than go in as an invasion force.76
On September 19, U.S. troops began to land in Haiti as an occupation force rather than an invasion force. They encountered no resistance. By sundown, almost three thousand troops from the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division were on the ground, the lead elements of the twenty-eight-nation multinational force in Phase 1 of what was dubbed Operation Uphold Democracy. On September 21, Clinton dispatched one thousand military police to supervise the Haitian police. Before the end of the week, more than twenty thousand U.S. troops, including eighteen hundred marines, were in Haiti.
As in Somalia, the Haiti mission consisted of two distinct phases. Phase 1, carried out by U.S. forces and a few troops (266) from nearby Caribbean islands, removed General Cédras and his administration and replaced them with President Aristide. That mission was carried out with virtually no bloodshed, thanks in significant measure to the negotiations by Carter, Nunn, and Powell.
Phase 2—restoring democracy—was undertaken by a multinational force assembled by the secretary-general.77 Participants in the MNF included approximately two thous
and peacekeeping troops, police monitors, and translators from Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, Panama, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Vincent, Trinidad, Argentina, Bolivia, Belgium, Britain, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Israel, Ghana, and Belize.78
Congress reacted badly to Clinton’s decision to send troops to Haiti, whatever their assignment. In a joint resolution, the House and Senate declared that the president should have sought congressional approval for military operations in Haiti and urged the “prompt and orderly withdrawal” of U.S. troops.79 But the troops would not withdraw for some months. The tasks assigned to the American forces—maintain order and provide security for Aristide—were problematic. It was hard to keep supporters of the military and supporters of Aristide from engaging in acts of violence against one another, and difficult to provide stability and order in a country where political violence was entrenched.80
NATION BUILDING IN HAITI
Establishing a new government is always difficult, especially after a violent rupture with a previous regime. Should those responsible for the violence be punished for mass murder, rape, or torture? At what point should the slate be wiped clean? These questions were being asked in Haiti, as in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and Russia. French scholar Raymond Aron says that it is always prudent to “prefer the limitation of violence to the punishment of the presumably guilty party.” Clinton took this approach when he accepted the Carter-Jonassaint Accord. Carter, Nunn, and Powell recommended trading the pleasures of revenge for a chance at national reconciliation, understanding that even against an adversary as small and weak as Haiti, war was never to be undertaken lightly.
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