Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy

CHAPTER 15. The Harlan County Incident

195 The Harlan County Incident “What’s wrong with the U.S.? Why do the bad guys always win?” —H A I T I A N S U P P O RT E R of exiled president Aristide “There are some important things that happened in Haiti that the Agency and the press never picked up,” said Mike Kozak. Two weeks before the Harlan County was scheduled to arrive in Port-au-Prince, Kozak, Despouy, and Caputo had a meeting with a group of Haitian senators that included Alliance senator Julio Larosiliere. “They told us that Colonel Michel François had proposed to stage a coup against the Malval government and block the whole process,” reported Kozak.1 General Cédras called the FADH general staff and all the commanders together and Colonel François presented his plan for a coup d’état. Cédras argued against it, saying that a coup would only provoke more embargoes and international pressure. François appealed to the officers’ nationalism, vowing that they had to protect Haiti from the blancs. When the issue was put to a vote, François lost. He then pleaded that they do something to save face. Colonel François argued that if the Haitian military allowed foreign troops to land in Haiti without a protest they would look like a bunch of wimps. CHAPTER 15 1 96 THE HARLAN COUNTY INCIDENT A deal was struck. Neither the FADH nor any elements controlled by the FADH would resist the UN trainers. But if other friends of the FADH wanted to organize a nonviolent demonstration at the docks, they could. “It’s interesting,” noted Kozak, “because this was the first time Cédras had won a struggle with François.”2 The next night General Cédras and his wife, Yannick, invited Kozak and U.S. chargé Vicki Huddleston to their house in Petionville for dinner . “It was the only time he exuded any confidence,” Kozak recalled. “He was ready to make decisions. He had his notepad out and instead of doodling on it, which is what he usually did, he was going down the list of current issues, saying: ‘All right, we’ll do that.’ He looked like a man in charge.”3 Kozak left Port-au-Prince on Friday, October 8, to spend the weekend with his wife in Miami and was scheduled to return on Monday to meet the USS Harlan County. “Things were so much on track,” remembered Kozak, “that I talked to Larry and Vicki on Sunday and we decided that I should go up to Washington to talk about the next steps.”4 The 560-foot USS Harlan County steamed into Port-au-Prince harbor at 2:00 Monday morning, October 11, 1993. On board were 193 U.S. and 25 Canadian military personnel. The captain of the ship, U.S. Navy commander Marvin E. Butcher, whose frame of mind was described as “hysterical ” by Vicki Huddleston, found his berth at the dock occupied by a rusting tanker of Cuban registry. He started sending frantic messages to Norfolk and Washington. Chargé Huddleston had turned over preparations for the docking to a U.S. Coast Guard commander who dealt regularly with Max Paul, a friend of Colonel François and the man who ran a port that in most parts of the world would pass as a junkyard. On Monday morning, Huddleston sent the Coast Guard officer back to talk to Max Paul. Reeking of rum and grumbling, Paul promised that the berth would be cleared by dawn the next day. By 7 A.M. Monday, a group of about sixty FRAPH members started arriving at the gate to the port. Some carried pistols and sticks, but most were unarmed. It was not the turnout that organizer Emmanuel “Toto” Constant had hoped for. “We were all scared,” he said later. “My people kept wanting to run away. But I took the gamble and told them to stay.”5 197 THE HARLAN COUNTY INCIDENT Also gathered at the entrance were two dozen reporters from CNN, ABC, the New York Times, and other major media outlets. At around 7:30 a convoy of cars and four-wheel-drive vehicles, including one carrying U.S. chargé Vicki Huddleston, approached. The demonstrators started jumping around wildly, waving their arms and screaming “À bas Caputo! À bas UN! À bas Malval! (Down with Caputo! Down with the UN...