American troops in Haiti - 23 September 1994

Last Tuesday something happened in New York City that for most of the past 50 years has been a very grand annual event when the 22 miles of highway between midtown New York and Kennedy Airport are scanned by police helicopters and patrolled by more radio cars than on any other day of the year, also a day when not too many years ago, five or six hundred correspondents from around the world came in here to celebrate the day and to report it, the opening day of a new session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, the body in which every member nation is represented.

This year the assembly will draw more heads of state and prime ministers than ever in its history, which sounds impressive, but it's not surprising since at its founding 49 years ago it had 50 member nations. Today, it has 184 sovereign states some of them no bigger than the Isle of Wight, many of them with an economy so poor that the United Nations embassy here can afford at best a hotel room, office and a secretary.

That's probably the most vivid reflection of an historical process that when the United Nations was founded few of us dreamed of, namely an end to the idea, to the fact of empire, a system of ruling the world or a great part of it that lasted an astonishingly short time. Look at a map of 1876 and you see that seven-eighths of the Dark Continent blank, sustaining presumably its own life, its own peoples but in 1876 only a dribble of white men had ever seen any of the huge interior. Only 36 years later, 1912, the whole continent, every mile of it except two independent pockets had been chopped up and parcelled out between the British, French, Belgians, Germans, Portuguese, Italians and Spanish. Go another 36 years and they've all almost all retreated and left the colonised millions to run themselves.

At the time, we assumed that the splendid alternative to imperial rule would be self-rule in the form of democracy. Well today, of the 184 sovereign nations in the UN, there maybe 20-odd, 30 at most you could call democratic, most are run by dictators benign or absolute. Among the original 50 UN members was Haiti, a small Caribbean island that fought for and won its independence from France in 1804 and ever since has alternated between various tyrants to the number I believe of more than 80. We never guessed way back there at San Francisco in 1945 that the day would come when the New York Times would carry the news of the annual General Assembly opening in half a column on an inner page, because it had to keep six pages open for eight correspondents to file separate reports from Haiti.

What was so special about Haiti, why had President Clinton prepared and finally mounted an invasion – at the last minute defined as a peacekeeping force – to restore democracy, he says, "the whole adventure has been given a name, not Overkill or Tropical Storm, simply Operation Uphold Democracy". The first point to make about President Clinton's avowed aim is that he keeps talking about restoring democracy to a country that's never had it, upholding also suggests propping up a structure that's wobbling, but in 190 years as an independent republic, Haiti has been independent only of France and has lurched from one tyrant to another.

The president's one hold on the truth to justify his slogan – and it's a very fragile hold, like a Titanic survivor clutching at a floating deck, quite – is that Father Aristide is the first president democratically elected, he was promptly overthrown in a bloody coup, fled into exile and the latest of the tyrants, General Cédras, returned to the traditional procedure of ruling by intimidation, brutality, murder and torture. Mr Clinton said as much only a week ago, but then he yielded to the begging voice of former President Carter who had met General Cédras four years ago when he, Mr Carter, was down there supervising the election.

Mr Carter, you may recall, begged the Clinton administration earlier in the year to be allowed to go to North Korea, talk to the old leader and persuade him to stop the process, which can and is meant to lead to nuclear weapons. Well, the North Koreans said at the time they would soon start reporting their nuclear installations and the disposal of their spent fuel. Mr Carter was applauded on all sides, except on the side of the White House.

Ex-presidents – like ex-presidents of athletic and golf and tennis associations – are expected to stay out of sight and let the new man conduct the next championship. Mr Carter, however, has in the past decade been invited to go and be a neutral observer of elections in countries that are, like Haiti, only barely acquainted with elections. Mr Carter's apparent success in Korea evidently prompted him, while President Clinton was denouncing General Cédras as a bloody tyrant, to call the White House frequently and say, in effect, I know the man, let me go and talk to him and maybe we can arrange a peaceful outcome.

Well, as you all know, the president gave in and without much hope of a Carter outcome sent the former president with the former top military man in the United States along with the present chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And you've heard how at the end of 20 hours of talk with General Cédras and his aides, President Clinton said, "hold, enough, get out of there before nightfall". How Mr Carter begged for another hour or so and how he then announced by nightfall that he had come to an honourable agreement with General Cédras who had agreed to step down from the presidency by 15 October to allow elections, much handshaking all round and almost simultaneously hand-wringing in Congress and the White House by people who shared President Clinton's view of Cédras as a tyrant.

There came a 24-hour pause when no senator, no congressman dare say he was sorry about the agreement, which would save the lives of young Americans and young Haitians. Mr Carter was widely touted as inevitable candidate if not a shoe-in for the next Nobel Peace Prize; and it came out that Mr Carter himself after his efforts in North Korea was a little miffed that he hadn't already got it. Well, Mr Carter's hour of glory was brief.

There was the dreadful evening of Tuesday, when we saw what Mr Clinton had meant by a brutal national police force, the Haitian police bashing and murdering protesters. Aristide fans being dragged off into alleys and beaten up and American soldiers standing by impotent to punish the very demons they'd come to protect the people from. The American soldiers had no rules of engagement except not to fire unless fired upon.

By Wednesday, the House had passed a supporting resolution and so did the Senate, but the debate in the Senate was humdinger of protest now against the terms of what I should guess most senators believe to be an unworkable agreement, if not unworkable, many declared, then simply outrageous because it gives the great job of restoring stability to the very man who had stabilised the chaos by brutal repression, because it naively trusted the Haitian parliament to grant general amnesty to all the murderous cronies of the generals because it does not require General Cédras and his men to leave the country. Suppose, asked a senator in Wednesday debate, suppose Mr Aristide arrives stays safe in his country that elections go forward, General Cédras runs and is elected what then, must we standby the man, a man denounced by the president of the United States as a tyrant of Hitlerian dimensions, the man we spent two years arranging to overthrow and throw out.

The Senate resolution, while approving the peaceful invasion and yearning for an early day when the United Nations 17 other nations take over, declares that American troops must come home as soon as possible, whatever that means. What they're all saying and said it out loud last week before Mr Carter's coup was that an invasion would be a mistake. Two thirds of the American people thought so too. Now they pray that the peacekeeping will remain kept, but are already glum about the terms of the Carter agreement, they keep remembering the disastrous failed humane mission of Somalia, they wonder if anything like a democracy can be imposed on a nation, which has running water for only 30% of its people, 75% unemployed in which a million or two live literally on garbage dumps, a nation in which there is one doctor for every 10,000 humans.

I sense a feeling, too, which cannot be measured by a poll because it would entail confessing that Mr Clinton had done what so many had blamed him for not doing. In other words, the best answer to why did the president go in there is I think he could no longer take the general charge that he rattled a sword in Bosnia, saw Somalia returned to his old chaos had been brutally lampooned for a years blustering over Haiti and decided that if he bumbled and retreated there, he would loose all credence among his own people as a world leader. As Haiti goes between now and the first Tuesday in November, so indeed may go the congressional elections and the popular prestige of President Clinton.

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