Hti: Asst. Sec. Noriega's interview with Nightline

INTERVIEW OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WESTERN HEMISPHERE AFFAIRS ROGER F. NORIEGA
BY CHRIS BURY OF NIGHTLINE
March 1, 2004. Washington, D.C.

MR. BURY:  Joining us now is Roger Noriega, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.  I just got off the phone with Congresswoman Maxine Waters.  She claims that she spoke to President Aristide this morning, and that he claimed he was taken against his will, and the words, according to Congresswoman Waters, Aristide said that he had been kidnapped.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY NORIEGA:  Well, that's, of course, nonsense.  He approached our ambassador.  He made the decision to resign.  He chose the destination, and he could or could not have not decided for himself whether to get on that plane.  Aristide has had his decade of deception, and we would have hoped that now he would put the interest in his people, first and foremost.

He did resign.  It's time to move forward.  You know Haiti.  You know Haitian people.  You understand that these people can do a lot if you give them a chance, and they deserve that chance now.

MR. BURY:  You said he made the decision.  Did the United States Government give him a hard shove in that direction?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY NORIEGA:  Well, I mean, the -- what we've said -- and it was very public, that he needed to consider his situation -- whether he could govern effectively, honestly, in a non-violent way.  He demonstrated in a very clear way in the final days by arming his thugs, by targeting innocent people, that he had no intention of, in these final days, governing effectively or honestly or more peacefully or responsibly.  And I think he made his situation more and more untenable.

MR. BURY:  Critics of the Administration say that the Administration, essentially, forced Aristide's hand by refusing to back the peacekeeping force by refusing to send in the Marines early enough that by the time violence reigned, the situation had become untenable, and therefore Aristide was forced to leave.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY NORIEGA:  Well, point of fact, the United States has for many, many years tried to help Aristide by -- through international support, initially, under the Clinton Administration, by support for building up institutions.  We, literally, put Aristide back in power.  In 1991, when I was working for the U.S. Government, at that time, I was part of a policy that said that he had to be restored to power.  We  had to make a decision whether we were going to put American leaves at risk, knowing what we know about President Aristide and expect that he would be able to make the most of that opportunity to govern effectively and honestly, non-violently.

It's clear that he -- by virtue of saying now that he was kidnapped that he's not a person that's very reliable, and a 10-year track record demonstrates that this was not a good opportunity for putting American lives at stake to merely prop him up.  We were prepared to support a political solution, but when that became clear that it was not going to be possible, we had to make a decision whether to do nothing when it comes to propping Aristide up, or do the wrong thing, which would have been putting American lives and counting on him making the most of this last opportunity.

MR. BURY:  So you encouraged him to go?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY NORIEGA:  We asked him to do the thinking about his situation.  At the very last moment, it was his decision.  I found it rather remarkable that he decided to leave, and that throughout the evening on Saturday I wholly expected that he would change his mind because he has been proven to be erratic and unreliable.  And by virtue of some of the statements that he is quoted as saying, assuming we can trust the interlocutors, he has proven, once again, that he's not a reliable figure.

MR. BURY:  At the same time, for all of his flaws, Aristide is democratically elected President, and there was a power-sharing agreement that you helped to negotiate.  Why not enforce that with the help of U.S. Marines or forces, if necessary?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY NORIEGA:  Well, we've done -- we did that all before.

MR. BURY:  You didn't send the troops this time -- on Aristide's behalf?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY NORIEGA:  No, no, we certainly didn't.  It was a conscious decision not to do that.  There was a good agreement that I went down to Haiti to try to sell to the opposition.  But quite frankly, the level of distrust for President Aristide was so high that these people were unprepared to join in that process.
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MR. BURY:  If the opposition is the one that was opposed to that power-sharing agreement, why then was Aristide held accountable for the failure of the opposition to go along?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY NORIEGA:  Well, the power-sharing agreement and the last ditch effort on our part is part of a -- of months of diplomacy, just recently, with the CARICOM effort and part of the years of diplomacy on our part to get Aristide to abide by his commitments to hold -- to not use criminal gangs and thugs to govern, to respect the rule of law, respect human rights, honor his commitments to the international community. So we had to make a judgment.  If the opposition was unprepared to accompany this process, did we have some sort of obligation to put American lives at risk, to, once again, test Aristide's ability to govern effectively? We made the decision that -- and -- that that was not a good bet.  As a matter of fact, if other countries wanted to put people in Haiti, they could have.  But the key countries that looked at this decided that it was not really fair to ask people to put their lives at risk merely to prop up Aristide once again.

This last sentence is interesting because it implies that Caricom leaders, with whom the U.S. had been dialoguing, had the choice of sending in their own forces but refused to do it just to prop up Aristide.