NEWSWEEK: How do you see this period of relative calm playing out, and what is the role of Sunni fighters paid by the Americans to help keep the peace? HASHEMI: There is improvement in security, no doubt about that. Hopefully we can make it sustainable. We have to support the Awakening movement now; if the government does, I think there will be a genuine chance to have sustainable security.
Support them how? We don’t want to give the impression that we are deliberately trying to mislead the government or our partners in the political process [while] behind the scenes trying to encourage or develop some kind of underground militias. So we are very interested to see all those youngsters become part of the police, part of the Iraqi Army and subject to government control.
A lot of the Sunnis active in the citizens’ groups have expressed hostility to existing Sunni parties like your Islamic Party of Iraq (IIP). Why is that? This is something normal and I can’t say that the IIP is the exclusive representative of Sunni Arabs. But we are the most active political party and we have to listen to our people. Some of the people are quite angry because we couldn’t make our promises materialize. Unfortunately our ministers … have been deprived of the opportunity to serve their constituency.
Aren’t you frustrated though that the Sunni Awakening movement seems so antagonistic, particularly in Anbar where it began, and where the Islamic Party has also been strong? I don’t want to make an issue of this at this particular time. But I think history is going to be written this way: the IIP was the first political entity in Anbar to exercise some sort of self-defense, before the tribes began to take care of that. This is just part of the burden that we have to shoulder. We knew from the beginning we had to pay a high cost for that, and my family paid a cost for that. This is just part of our belief in democracy and the new Iraq.
In Anbar, the tribal leaders are boycotting the provincial council, complaining of dominance by the IIP. They even pulled out of the council over it. I don’t know why. We gave them seats on the council; they got what they asked for. If they want to make a change, in three or four months there will be an election. They should try to make an election campaign until then. That’s it. We should respect democracy.
Is there a danger that this sort of squabbling could give an opportunity to Al Qaeda to regain ground? Definitely. They will try their best to take advantage of any division in the tribes or whoever might be in the political process. But rest assured, I’ll try my best to mitigate and pacify any sort of differences. Everybody now has first to stabilize and try to fight the extremists. Everybody should work toward this goal, and be relaxed and flexible in addressing minor issues. The problem is that this region has been hijacked by Al Qaeda and other terrorists and everybody is betting on violence to sort everything out. So that psychology has to be changed.
The Maliki government seems to think it can fill the empty cabinet posts with Sunnis from outside your parties, rather than give in to your demands. This is not going to sort out the problem. [Our Sunni coalition] is an elected political entity, others are not. We have legitimacy, others do not. They could fill the blanks but they are not going to sort out the political problem.
One of the big sticking points is the deBaathification law now being considered; it allows all but the highest former officials back into public life. Isn’t that a step toward reconciliation? It’s better than the past. But the political process should be open for everybody except those people who opted for terrorism. The problem of reconciliation is a shortage of good will.
You’ve demanded a timetable for American withdrawal from Iraq. How soon would you like that to happen? Already, some of the 30,000 surge troops are leaving. We should have a timetable based on clear-cut benchmarks and parameters. But I am very much concerned about a security vacuum, so reform of the Iraqi security forces is very important. The state of our security forces right now in no way is going to allow for a major withdrawal. I was in Diyala recently and I can tell you there are many pockets of resistance. When I asked why, the reply was, there are not enough troops.
title: “Caught In The Middle” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-06” author: “Leigh Voorhees”
The U.S. military had an excuse: it’s not our job. “Our mission was to provide a cordon and allow the Haitian police to do their job,” said their spokesman. The last thing the military wanted was direct responsibility for keeping order in a country bedeviled for generations by vicious class and racial hatred. But the troops’ passivity infuriated the Haitians who were begging for help. By the next morning, passersby were muttering insults at U.S. troops, things like, “America caca.” And the episode looked awful on television for Americans at home. Less than two weeks into the U.S. “intervasion” of Haiti, a hastily conceived plan that called for cooperation between Haitian security forces and U.S. troops was a shambles.
It wasn’t for lack of effort. In full combat gear, U.S. troops last week ringed the city hall and Parliament building with barbed wire to protect the reinstatement of pro-Aristide politicians. They took over the state-controlled radio and television stations, and gave the city its first dependable electricity service in years. But huge as the U.S. military “footprint” in Haiti had be-come–almost 20,000 troops and enough vehicles and equipment to stretch from Philadelphia to Baltimore–its size alone wasn’t enough to step on those who wanted to kill or loot. The Haitians weren’t playing by the rules, forcing the Pentagon to stage what looked like a rolling coup. Instead of cooperating, the Haitian security forces were evaporating.
So the White House faced a painful choice between watching the country slide into anarchy or giving in to pressure from the Aristide lobby to have GIs keep order and try to disarm the goons. That’s “mission creep”-anathema to Congress, which is preparing to vote on setting a finn exit date of March 1. But “if the Haitians won’t carry out the police function, then presumably we will have to do it ourselves–there’s nobody else,” said one rueful Pentagon official.
The chimera of cooperation blew apart on Haiti’s north coast, the country’s traditional hotbed of political upheaval. The catalyst was the showdown on Sept, 24 between a 15-man U.S. Marine patrol and local police in the regional capital, Cap-Haitien. For several days Aristide supporters had used the U.S. military presence as a shield to taunt police. On the day of the shooting, one group of policemen made a show of contempt for a crowd of opponents by turning their backs and playing dominoes in front of the station house. A marine patrol drawn to the standoff took up firing positions in a line across the street. According to the marines, a Haitian officer in the doorway then raised an Uzi submachine gun in the direction of the patrol leader. The marine killed the Haitian with a burst from his M-16 carbine, and the other marines joined in, killing nine more men. The marine commander in Cap-Haitien makes no apology for the patrol leader’s quick trigger finger. “If you hesitate, you’re going to fire second,” says Col. Tom Jones. “The guy who shoots second doesn’t talk about it afterwards. I hope the lieutenant shot first.” Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the Haitian army commander, called it an atrocity.
Almost overnight, police and soldiers in the northern region fled their posts. “The bandit army ran away,” someone scrawled on the jail in the town of Cap-Haitien. “Thank you God.” Crowds gleefully looted the police stations. Then a warehouse was sacked. Local businessmen begged the Americans to take up patrolling on foot and to broadcast stay-calm messages from truck loudspeakers–and Colonel Jones agreed. “Cedras thought the marines were here to protect [the army] against the people,” says one pro-democracy priest, the Rev. Jean-Paul Edmond. “Now he sees it was the opposite. The people have taken back the streets.”
By late in the week the same spirit had rolled down to the capital. Most Haitians showed remarkable restraint. Heeding messages of reconciliation from Aristide and his allies, they passed up dozens of opportunities for revenge against supporters of the coup. But there was violence on both sides. And pressure on the Pentagon to notch up U.S. military involvement was unrelenting. Relief agencies appealed for help after food warehouses and a medical depot were sacked, prompting a decision in Washington to suspend shipments to feeding centers that sustain more than a million Haitians. In the city of Gonaives alone, 60 food-distribution centers were looted in 24 hours. “The U.S. military will not stand by and watch looting,” said an embassy spokesman.
In the capital Thursday, U.S. Army riflemen waded into a riot at the port that broke out after at least one hand grenade was thrown into a group of demonstrators celebrating the reinstatement of Port-au-Prince Mayor Evans Paul, who had spent three years in hiding. The GIs fired into the air so that ambulances could evacuate the victims, at least five of whom were fatally wounded. Then looting broke out near the scene of the blast. It began at a warehouse believed to belong to Police Chief Lt. Col. Michel Francois, who is allied with the Front for the Advancement of and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a political organization of paramilitary gunmen. Then an auto-parts warehouse next door was all but picked clean before U.S. troops intervened. Haitian police never showed up, and when the GIs left, the looting resumed. “The vacuum has to be filled,” said U.S. Embassy spokesman Stanley Schrager.
American MPs rushed to advise their Haitian counterparts on “how law enforcement works in a democratic society,” as one put it. But it seemed like a lost cause. Within minutes after one training team left the station house in Petionville, several policemen ran out, grabbed a man from a hostile crowd, beat him and dragged him inside. The attaches, a private army of 30,000 men licensed by the military to carry arms and act as police auxiliaries, were even more recalcitrant. Using nightsticks and guns on an ugly crowd “falls into the realm of legitimate police work anywhere in the world,” declared one attache at the Petionville police station. Another attache, Leo Lassi, loitered last week on the front porch of the FRAPH office downtown as others passed the time playing dominoes. “You treat people like a dog, and one day dog begins to kill dog,” he said. “Now we can’t walk in the streets. The people won’t allow it. They stone us.”
Who will leash the thugs? “Please turn in your weapons,” blared helicopter-borne loudspeakers over Port-au-Prince. Not surprisingly, a buyback program flopped; fewer than 800 weapons were traded in. After the anniversary-march fiasco, some U.S. military officers chafed openly at the constraints built into the cooperation agreement former president Jimmy Garter negotiated with Cedras. “We’re still bound by the political decisions, including working with the Haitian military,” said Col. Paul Tiberi, assistant to Lt. Gen. Henry Hugh Shelton, the mission commander. “Adjustments will be made” to the program of voluntary disarmament, Tiberi said, adding: “We’ll expand our presence here, but we can’t give you guarantees.”
At the Pentagon, analysts complained that U.S. troops had been put in the worst possible position. Had they invaded, the reasoning went, they could have taken control, swept up as many weapons as possible and defanged the attaches. Now, apart from Special Forces teams operating mainly in the countryside, few members of the expeditionary force have the language skills or training to make fine distinctions on what may be the ultimate “dirty battlefield”–or to establish the rapport demanded by the Carter deal. As the shoot-out in Cap-Haitien proved, the marines literally are trained to fire first and ask questions later.
Aristide and his allies pushed for stronger measures. Unless the attaches are neutralized, they said, GIs may soon become targets. After the Friday bloodshed, some Aristide aides turned on the White House, Ira Kurzban, an Aristide attorney, charged that the attack was calculated by U.S. officials to “maintain the balance of terror” in order to tie Aristide’s hands when he returns this month. Some would like to see U.S. soldiers go house to house, searching for arms caches if necessary. But the Clinton administration decided to have U.S. troops first order the Haitian police to disarm the attaches, intervening directly only if the police refuse, The New York Times reported. “It’s absolutely crucial that the paramilitary groups be disarmed,” says Michael Barnes, Aristide’s lobbyist. That kind of pressure gives the Pentagon fits. But the reason U.S. troops are there at all is that the White House has already gone along with the argument that the only way out of the Haiti mess is to wade in deeper.
Should the U.S. set a definite date next year for the return of U.S. troops in Haiti, or let the president decide when it is best to order the troops home?
47% Set a definite date 43% Let the president decide
Will the deal negotiated with Haiti’s military leaders lead to Aristide’s return to power and democratic government in Haiti?
This week: 37% Yes 33% No Last week: 50% Yes 27% No THE NEWSWEEK POLL, SEPT. 29-30, 1994, AND SEPT. 22-23, 1994
