Most of the company’s equipment was decades old, some of it pre-World War II vintage. Of its five armored cars, only oneworked. American soldiers, rolling into the Haitian base in their own armored personnel carriers, expected the vanquished to appear suitably downcast. But some Haitians did not seem sorry when the U.S. troops hauled off their old weapons. Smiling and curious, they eyed the Americans’ formidable Bradley fighting vehicles. “We have no problem with this,” said one Haitian soldier. “In fact we feel good, because we’ll learn more from the Americans and be better equipped in the future.” He clearly expected that before the Americans left, they would rearm the Haitians. In the next coup, the Heavy Weapons Company might be able to surround the Parliament with brand-new Bradley fighting vehicles.
The history of American intervention in the Third World would be slightly comical if it weren’t often tragic. Missed signals, misunderstandings, unintended consequences are the norm. At the peace table, America talks past its foes and allies, who are sometimes hard to distinguish. In the field, America can win every battle and still lose the war. So it was last week that the elite units of the U.S. armed forces marched into Haiti like a column of Redcoats, smart and proud - and a little anxious about the stirrings in the shadows beyond.
A last-second deal brokered by former president Jimmy Carter had averted a risky nighttime invasion. Most Americans were glad that their boys had not been required to shoot their way into Haiti. They were puzzled, however, that the Haitian generals- the same ones excoriated by President Bill Clinton as murderous “thugs” -were now described, at least by Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as honorable soldiers. Instead of conquering the Haitian army, American soldiers were put in the position of working alongside Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras’s men, and very possibly defending them from the angry followers of America’s ostensible client, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Clinton’s policymaking has always zigzagged, especially in the foreign arena, but last week it seemed to spin in circles. At times it was not entirely clear who was running the show: President Clinton? Or his ambassador plenipotentiary, former president Garter? An embarrassing public spat between Carter and Secretary of State Warren Christopher did nothing to reassure a public that is already skeptical about America’s role as world policeman and nation-builder. Asked if Carter was operating as a shadow state department, former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski replied, “You can’t be a shadow of something that easts no shadow.”
A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the secret negotiations leading up to the “permissive entry” of U.S. soldiers into Haiti, and the chaotic events that followed, shows that Clinton was in charge, but in his own free-wheeling fashion. As usual he wanted to have it all ways-to be resolute yet flexible, to move with all deliberate speed but in his own time. The consequences may yet be positive for the Haitian people: by the end of last week it was possible for a slum dweller to linger outside “the Cafeteria,” a notorious police-precinct office, without serious risk of being beaten to death-real progress in Haiti. For U.S. troops, greeted as liberators last week, the question was: would they become targets instead? Late on Saturday they did: armed men outside a police station in Cap Haitien opened fire on a Marine platoon. The marines returned fire and killed nine men. One soldier was wounded: he may have been the first American casualty, but he may well not be the last.
In his televised speech to the nation on Thursday, Sept. 15, President Clinton sternly declared that General Cedras had to go, time was up, all diplomacy was exhausted. More than two hours later, he decided to revive diplomacy. At about 11:30 p.m., he called Jimmy Carter, who had been in telephone contact with General Cedras, to launch a last peace mission. Carter had already gone to bed, but he agreed to lead a delegation. He wanted to take with him Gen. Colin Powell and Sen. Sam Nunn, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, two prominent figures who–like Carter–had been essentially at odds with the Clinton administration’s policies on Haiti.
The State Department was very wary of Carter. As sources close to Carter later told NEWSWEEK, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott argued so strenuously against sending Carter to Haiti that “his eyes were bulging out of his head.” Like his boss, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Talbott regards the former president as a meddlesome freelancer. Talbott’s concerns were not unfounded: at the Carter Center in Atlanta, a kind of alternative state department, Carter chats on the phone with Fidel Castro and entertains delegations from such countries as North Korea (page 36).
Administration spinners told reporters that weekend that the Carter team was going to Haiti only to discuss the “modalities” of departure for Cedras and his cronies. Actually, Carter told Clinton that he would need “flexibility,” and Clinton agreed. Carter told NEWSWEEK that his only brief was to arrange for Cedras to leave, which to Carter meant only to leave power, not to leave the country.
At the first fractious meetings in Port-au-Prince, it did not appear that the generals were going anywhere. Discouraged, Carter called his wife and all-purpose partner-in-peace, Rosalynn, at dawn on Sunday. She urged him-as had a Haitian insider hours earlier-how important it was to get to Cedras’s wife, Yannick, who is widely rumored to be the power behind the throne (and mistress of the Haitian army’s hard-line Chief of Staff Brig. Gen. Philippe Biamby). At their midnight meeting, General Cedras had complained about staying up the night before, making sure that the American leaflet drops over the capital were not bombing raids, and that he had missed seeing his son on his 10th birthday. At breakfast, Carter seized on an invitation to visit the Cedras home in Petionville, the ruling-class suburb of Port-au-Prince.
Mrs. Cedras was in a mood verging on hysteria. She announced that she and her children had pledged to die rather than give up. Carter was crushed. “I thought it was over,” he later recounted. But Cedras’s 10-year-old son wandered in, and Carter took him on his knee and gave him a blue pocket knife, with a Carter Center insignia, which sells for about $4 in the gift shop. Meanwhile, General Powell launched into a moving speech about the honor of soldiers. Mrs. Cedras, the Americans noticed, softened a little.
Carter had been given a deadline of noon to depart the country, deal or no deal. Though Carter did not know it, the American invasion of Haiti was scheduled to begin a minute after midnight. Carter asked for, and received, a three-hour extension from Clinton. In the White House at 1 p.m., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili told the president that if the 82d Airborne was to drop into Haiti that night, it had to start loading its gear into planes. “Pack ’em,” the president said. Clinton’s aides were impressed with his cool. Neither they nor the president realized that by sticking to the invasion schedule, Clinton was boxing himself into a corner.
A few minutes after he told the Pentagon to get ready, Clinton received a fax of a proposed peace agreement worked out by Garter and the generals. It was full of holes. Cedras and Co. agreed to leave power, but only after they had been given amnesty for their crimes. Christopher and Clinton insisted on a departure deadline. Furiously, Talbott typed out a modified agreement, inserting a departure date of Oct. 15. At his desk, President Clinton tried to divert himself with The New York Times crossword puzzle. The grandfather clock in the Oval Office kept ticking, past the 3 p.m. deadline.
At about 4 in the afternoon, General Powell called Clinton. Don’t worry about the wording of the agreement, Powell told the president. Once U.S. troops landed, their commanding officer, Lt. Gen. Henry H. Shelton, would be “king of the island.” Still, the time passed; at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the paratroopers climbed into their planes. At about 5:30, General Biamby burst into the Port-au-Prince bargaining session to warn of a trap. He had learned, through a fax sent from informants in North Carolina, that the American para-troopers were moving out. A half hour later, Clinton spoke to Carter and ordered him to break off the talks and leave within 30 minutes. Clinton did not tell Carter, but he was afraid that the American delegation would be taken hostage in the pre-invasion confusion. On an American carrier offshore, a Delta Force team secretly readied a rescue operation.
The meeting between the Americans and the Haitian generals adjourned across the street, through an increasingly restive Crowd, to the office of President Emile Jonassaint. Although supposedly a figurehead, it was Jonassaint who brought the generals to their senses. “We’ll have peace, not war,” he declared. Cedras and Biamby just glared; they refused to sign the document themselves. At Powell’s insistence, however, they gave their word as soldiers that they would abide by the agreement.
Back at the White House, Clinton and his aides were not happy that Cedras had refused to sign. They considered Jonassaint to be an illegitimate president. Was Cedras’s refusal a deal breaker? The White House knew that Aristide, who was already complaining of a double cross, would feel sold out. But with the planes heading for Haiti, there wasn’t much time. Wanting to believe that Cedras and Co. were men of their word, Clinton took the deal. While speechwriters feverishly prepared a 9:80 p.m. address to the nation, Clinton and his team feasted on double-cheese pepperoni pizzas in the Roosevelt Room.
“Recall, recall,” the order blared through the crowded Joint Operating Command Center aboard the USS Mount Whitney floating off the Haitian coast. The 61 planes launched by the 82d Airborne swung back toward home. At the White House, the spinning had already begun. Vice President Al Gore, speaking as a “senior official” on background, told the TV anchors over a phone hookup that General Cedras was expected to leave the country.
This was news to General Cedras. On Monday morning he called on Garter, who assured him that he was under no obligation to leave Haiti. With reporters, Garter waxed on, declaring that it would be a violation of Cedras’s human rights to send him into exile. As State Department officials tried to stifle their cries of “I told you so!” Carter went on to blithely tell reporters that he was “ashamed” of the administration’s Haiti policy and that he had suggested to Cedras that he come to Atlanta to teach Sunday school. All through the week Carter continued to talk to Cedras on the phone; by Thursday Cedras was telling Dan Rather that it would be unconstitutional for him to leave the country.
Meanwhile, President Aristide sulked in his apartment in Washington, refusing to say anything publicly.’ He didn’t trust Cedras and feared that his life would be in danger if he returned with the members of the junta still at large in Haiti. It took numerous tries by Clinton, national-security adviser Anthony Lake and others to convince Aristide that he had not been betrayed. Finally, on Wednesday, Aristide issued three public “thank yous” after a 21-gun salute at the Pentagon.
The U.S. military had a new, vaguely defined mission, an “intervasion,” as officials called it. All through the ranks, the U.S. military was more than a little cynical about the change in plans. In Port-au-Prince, the 10th Mountain Division clambered out of its choppers and fanned out in full battle dress, trailed by crowds of smiling civilians, Operation Restore Democracy had formally become Operation Uphold Democracy. At the Pentagon, colonels on the Joint Chiefs made a play on Operation Just Cause, the 1989 invasion of Panama. They called the Haitian takeover Operation Just Because.
In his suite in the E-Ring of the Pentagon, General Shalikashvili worried about “mission creep.” In Somalia, American troops had gone from guarding food-distribution centers to “nation-building” and ended up in vicious fire fights with the warlords. “Shali” was determined that his men not be caught in the middle of a Haitian civil war. He ordered the troops not to intervene in “Haitian-on-Haitian” violence unless it threatened American forces.
This policy lasted less than 48 hours. On Tuesday crowds of Haitians poured out of the slums of Cite Solell to cheer the arriving American troops and jeer at police. That was “provocation” enough. Using a variety of weapons–tree limbs, metal helmets, tire irons, clubs, batons–the police charged the crowd. A house painter named Benykel Dede lacked the presence of mind to run and was beaten to the ground. His dead body would grace the front page of The New York Times the next day.
Watching the grim film on the nightly news, White House aides knew immediately that the policy had to change; it wouldn’t take much CNN footage to persuade Congress to cut off the whole operation. By midday Wednesday the rules had been amended for American troops: they were free to intervene to protect Haitians from murdering each other. So much for Shali’s fears of mission creep, but many grunts welcomed the new license. The heavily armed, highly trained soldiers couldn’t bear to just stand by and watch thugs with clubs beat up women and children.
The American line was getting tougher. A thousand American MPs arrived to patrol alone, supplementing Haitian police-two to three MPs to each Haitian policeman. Radio Metropole, the capital’s leading station, played over and over a tape of U.S. Embassy spokesman Stanley Schrager stating, “We are not partners. It is we who say what we expect from them. It is we who have 15,000 troops on the ground.”
In a private meeting on Wednesday morning, General Shelton, the American commander, warned Cedras to tell his goons to lay off. This order assumed that Cedras controlled his goons, which the CIA doubts. Intelligence sources told NEWSWEEK that the beatings by police on Tuesday were probably ordered by police chief Lt. Col. Michel Francois, though he proved more cooperative with American authorities later in the week.
Old habits are hard to break. On Wednesday morning a plainclothes thug named Harry went to see Jean Julien, a slum dweller who was refusing to pay his usual extortion fee. Julien ran and Harry gave chase, pumping bullets down a narrow alleyway. One of the bullets gravely wounded a 12-year-old boy. Jean stopped running and gave up. Harry whacked Jean on the head with his pistol butt. “You are Lavalas,” he said to Jean, using the term for an Aristide supporter. “Before the Americans get here, we’ll kill the whole lot of you.” Harry, one of the Anti-gang attaches–sinister gun-toting paramilitaries- grabbed his victim and dragged him, bleeding, to the Anti-gang offices. It was business as usual-but not quite. Attracted by the commotion, a group of journalists followed, demanding to see the suspect. After about an hour Jean was released.
All over Haiti, the police and military, once free to work their will, began to shrink back. At the port, a truckload of Anti-gang attaches pulled up where a crowd had gathered to talk to some soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division. U.S. Army Pvt. Richard Ostrander stood up with his machine gun on a tripod at his feet and gestured at the thugs. “Thank you for coming. Now have a good day and move on,” he shouted. A shocked hush fell over the crowd and the attaches hesitated. Two more American soldiers stood up, M-16s at the ready, and the attaches hurriedly drove off. The crowd applauded.
Over the coming weeks, the U.S. occupation force will move to weed out the 25 percent or so of the Haitian military it considers to be “bad apples.” The Americans will also try to register and buy back weapons from the attaches. Whether this will work is not clear. “We sure can’t do it in the States,” noted General Potter, the Special Forces general who led the hand-over of the Haitian Heavy Weapons Company at Camp d’ Application. Pentagon officials told NEWSWEEK that its own estimates of Haitian arms inventories do not match those being supplied by the Haitian military. Pentagon officials believe the army and police are hiding their best automatic weapons–M-16s and Uzi submachine guns–in their homes or in rural caches or, worse, distributing them to the attaches. In earlier weapons exchanges in Nicaragua and El Salvador, a Pentagon official noted, “all the rusty smoothbore rifles showed up. All the automatic weapons stayed buried.”
The Haitian military cannot be blamed for wanting to hang onto some form of self-defense. After all the atrocities, the people of Haiti wish to kill them. In what may have been a taste of things to come, a crowd assembled outside the airport last week noticed a Haitian security man who had neglected to wear his gun. A dozen people set upon him, knocking him down and kicking him. He got up and ran to the relative safety of police lines, as the mob showered him with stones. There will be more mobs in the weeks ahead–and American soldiers are likely to be caught in the middle.
Was the deal negotiated with Haiti’s military leaders: 32% A good thing for both the U.S. and Haiti 11% A good thing for the U.S. but not necessarily for Haiti 38% Not a good thing for either country FOR THIS NEWSWEEK POLL, PRINCETON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES INTERVIEWED 801 ADULTS BY TELEPHONE SEPT. 22-23, 1994. THE MARGIN OF ERROR IS +/- 4 PERCENTAGE POINTS. SOME RESPONSES NOT SHOWN. THE NEWSWEEK POLL copyright 1994 BY NEWSWEEK, INC.
Could a peaceful agreement with Haiti’s military leaders have been reached without the Immediate threat of a military invasion, or was the military threat necessary? 18% Peaceful agreement could have been reached 74% Military threat necessary THE NEWSWEEK POLL, SEPT. 22-23. 1994
Carter, Powell and Nunn land in Port-au-Prince and go to General Cedras’s headquarters to begin negotiations.
Garter delegation dines with Haitian businessmen. One Haitian insider urges Garter to talk to Cedras’s wife who strongly opposes the junta’s yielding power. In a nighttime phone call, Rosalynn Garter makes the same point.
Carter, Nunn and Powell visit the Cedras home, where they meet Mrs. Cedras and soften her opposition to the talks. Garter holds the Cedras’s 10-year-old son on his knee.
Clinton orders the invasion to start at midnight. Back at army headquarters, the two sides hammer out a deal. Garter faxes a copy of the proposal to the White House, but Clinton rejects it because it contains no deadline for General Cedras to step down.
Powell calls Clinton and urges him to accept the deal. Powell argues that it would effectively put the U.S. military in charge of the country. Clinton insists on a specific date for Cedras to relinquish power.
General Biamby receives a report that U.S, forces are ready to go. He bursts into the negotiations and snaps: “We can’t trust the Americans.” He demands that the talks be broken off. Carter appeals to the Haitians to continue, and the negotiators go to Haitian President Jonassaint’s office.
Garter reports to Clinton that the deal is “almost there.” Clinton warns: “This is uncomfortable for me. I am going to have to order you out of there in 30 more minutes.” Carter presents an amended agreement to Jonassaint that includes an Oct. 15 deadline for the junta to step down. The Haitian president accepts it, declaring: “We’ll have peace, not war.”
U.S. commanders launch 61 planeloads of troops from three American bases.
Clinton endorses the deal and recalls the planes.
BY COL. DAVID H. HACKWORTH
In PORT-AU-PRINCE last week, an American military policeman needed to make a phone call. A Haitian cop told him to simply break into any private home and commandeer the telephone. “I just couldn’t convince the guy that’s not the way we operate in the U.S.,” recalled the MP, SgL John Howard. Encounters like that quickly convinced our troops that the current crop of Haitian cops has got to go. These punks have been abusing their own people for so long that they can’t tell right from wrong. Witnessing Haitian-style brutality has been by far the toughest part of Operation Uphold Democracy for the soldiers who came in primed for an invasion but ended up settling in to what one grunt has christened the “Haitian Vacation.”
Our warriors were disgusted by having to work alongside Raoul Cedras’s thugs. “The slime could rub off,” said Cpl. Roger Brogdon on Tuesday, the day troops at the port had to stand and watch while Haitian cops with clubs tore into celebrating Haitians. But by then the rules of engagement (ROE) were changing fast enough to make a soldier’s head spin. “My guys are blown out by all the confusion,” said one company commander. I heard a captain tell his troops, “We must work with these [policemen], not against them.” But an hour later an infantry commander said, “if I see a Haitian cop attacking civilians, I’ll stop it.” By the weekend the ROE provided that the troops could “step in and install order,” said Col. Barry Willey, a command spokesman. The troops would make a “judgment call” to stop the loss of life, he said.
That’s asking a lot of a soldier. The years of official brutality in Haiti have stoked a potential firestorm. On Thursday I saw a mob of 300 people gather outside a police subprecinct on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince to protest the arrest of a teenager. The head punk, a guy with a pistol stuck in his belt gangster style and an Uzi on his lap, said the bloodied lad had threatened a cop. The crowd started to chant. The head man grabbed his pistol and ordered his men to level their rifles. The crowd stood its ground. I expected to witness a massacre. Suddenly a pickup truck loaded with about a dozen cops roared up. They sailed into the crowd, crunching heads with clubs and rifle butts. They seemed to enjoy beating the people. It was the most vicious police assault I’ve ever seen. Yet the mob looked ready to bust down the cinder-block police hut and have a hanging party. I’m sure scenes like that are repeated daily in out-of-the-way comers of this ravaged country. And it will be that way until the police force can be rebuilt from the ground up.
When the thugs are not around, the sheer enthusiasm and joy of the people over the arrival of the U.S. troops is wonderful to see. They want to dig soldiers’ foxholes and fill sandbags- I went out with one patrol assigned to recon a village near the Port-au-Prince airport. We started out in a tight, disciplined diamond formation. With each step the patrol took, it picked up more followers. The deeper we went into the village, the more the crowd grew. They chanted “Vivel’ Amerique!” They threw the soldiers kisses. Before we got back to base, the patrol had been swallowed up by the sea of joyous people. Little kids were walking hand in hand with tough soldiers wearing flak jackets and carrying assault rifles. The operation was more of a carnival than a patrol. “At least the ‘folks here aren’t hostile,” said Sgt. Tim Driscoll, a veteran of the Somalia campaign. “We appreciate that.” Replacing the goon squads is the best way to return the compliment.
title: “Under The Gun” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-31” author: “Roger Scott”
That’s when–to paraphrase a song by rapper Jay-Z, who’s facing legal woes of his own–blood began to drip in the club. Combs brandished a gun, and one of his artists, a rapper known as Shyne, drew a 9mm Ruger and opened fire, according to the Manhattan prosecutor. Three bystanders were hit, though none fatally. Moments later, Combs and Lopez fled the club in an SUV, along with a driver and one of the rapper’s bodyguards, an ex-convict once imprisoned for shooting at a cop. With police in pursuit, Puffy and company allegedly ran at least 10 red lights. When the cops finally pulled the SUV over, they say they spotted a stolen 9mm in the vehicle. Combs was charged with three gun-related felony counts. Shyne, whose real name is Jamal Barrow, faces three counts of attempted murder. Authorities cleared Lopez; Combs and his associates were released on bail.
The saga continued throughout the week. On Thursday, Lopez reportedly told a grand jury that to her knowledge Combs never had a gun, though she apparently admitted she wasn’t looking at him when the shooting began. Now the entertainment industry is speculating that the rapper’s latest brush with the law will not only further damage his foundering career, but also strain his relationship with Lopez. “Jennifer was under a lot of pressure before this to separate herself from Puffy because her people were worried that something like this would happen,” says a close friend. “The people around her have repeatedly told her that you can’t be Hollywood’s sweetheart if you’re running from the cops.”
Combs’s troubled end to 1999 is not a stunning development. Still, the year certainly wasn’t scripted to unfold this way. He was supposed to play a major role in Oliver Stone’s current film, “Any Given Sunday,” but he pulled out of the project because of scheduling conflicts. In April, Combs and two associates were charged with assaulting a fellow record executive. The rapper got off with a day of anger-management training and a payment to the victim. But then Combs’s business world began to founder. Some of his top artists, including Mase and The Lox, have quit the label. And Puffy’s second album remains a solid dud compared with his megahit debut CD in 1997. Now, one of victims from the shooting, Julius Jones, has filed a lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from Puffy and his label, among others.
Puffy and his camp say he will overcome the current legal woes. “I want to make sure this is 100 percent clear. I had nothing to do with the shooting,” said Combs at a packed news conference last week. “I think it is terrible that people were hurt that night.” In an interview with NEWSWEEK, his attorney, Harvey Slovis, said of the night in question, “Money was thrown, but not at him. There are no allegations that Shyne’s action is related to Puffy at all.” Still, Slovis added that a lot of people don’t seem to like Puffy: “People look to start things with him.” As for the gun found in the Bad Boy-owned SUV, Slovis said Puffy had no idea it was there. The rapper and Lopez had traveled to the club in a limo, but were ushered into the SUV by the bodyguard when the trouble began.
Combs’s associates disagree about why he seems to run into so much trouble. Some say it comes with celebrity. Puffy was a hit not only with hip-hop’s edgy elite but with the posh crowd in the Hamptons: everybody from Busta Rhymes to Ron Perelman pulled strings to get into his parties. But even some of the rapper’s associates acknowledge that Puffy invites some of his problems. Some intimates are puzzled by his loyalty to associates with troubled pasts, like the ex-con bodyguard and Shyne, whose attorney declined to comment. Although Combs signed Shyne more than two years ago, the 21-year-old rapper has yet to release an album. Shyne crashed his new Mercedes soon after joining the label; a friend died in the accident. A few months ago, after Shyne was involved in a fight, somebody shot at him in Puffy’s recording studio. “Puffy has to address issues of personal growth and change,” says Combs’s publicist, Dan Klores. “Then you can begin to address the matter of [people’s] perception of him.”
For now, those perceptions are hurting him. Combs’s current efforts to raise money for an Internet venture could be derailed. “It doesn’t help,” says Slovis, “that he was at a place where someone was shot.” Lopez’s advisers certainly agree. They are seeking to put distance between her and the rapper. She has an endorsement deal with L’Oreal, and a source close to the star says that her managers are now trying to assure the nervous cosmetics giant that she won’t have further fiascoes involving Combs.
Klores told NEWSWEEK the couple checked into room 801 at the swanky Peninsula Hotel under the alias “Rios” after they were freed from jail. He says they were affectionate, and that Lopez helped plan Combs’s press conference. Reports that the couple hadn’t been together, he insisted, were “100 percent erroneous.” Lopez’s confidant paints a more ambivalent picture: “It’s tough for her because she does really love Puffy. He has what she likes–determination and aggressiveness. But she also knows it might be a choice between a doomed relationship and a doomed career.” As for Puffy, he may well end up with both.
