Part of the aftermath of the 1991 Haitian coup d'état | |
Date | 1991-1994 |
---|---|
Location | Guantanamo Bay Naval Base |
Participants | Haitian boat people Government of the United States |
Outcome |
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The Haitian refugee crisis, which began in 1991, saw the US Coast Guard collect Haitian refugees and take them to a refugee camp at Guantanamo Bay. [1] They were fleeing by boat after Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti, was overthrown and the military government was persecuting his followers. [2] The first camp reached a maximum of 12,500 people. [3] It was then reduced to 270 refugees who either had HIV or were related to someone who did. [4] The reduction was the result of the US policy adopting a strict policy of repatriation for both those found at sea and most of those living in Guantanamo. [5] The HIV+ refugees were quarantined in a section of the military base known as Camp Bulkeley and faced human rights violations. [3] They were brought to the United States after US District Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. ruled the camp was an "HIV prison camp." [6] [1]
In 1994, Guantanamo was again used as a refugee camp. [7] This time both Cubans and Haitians were detained. [8] Roughly 50,000 refugees were held at the camp. [9] There were several important court cases and policies made that determined conditions and often location for the refugees. Haitians stopped being held at Guantanamo the mid 1990s. [9] The number of Haitian asylum statuses granted varied throughout the use of the military base as a refugee camp. It was as high 30% in the early 1990s [10] and as low as 5% in 1994. [7] Those who were repatriated were handed over to Haitian officials who made a file of them including photos and fingerprints labeling them to be Aristide supporters which was a dangerous title to have at the time. [3] Guantanamo was chosen to be a refugee camp because it was in between the US and Haiti and also primarily existed outside the jurisdiction of US constitutional law. [3]
The first "boat people" landed in the US in 1972. This was in response to a brutal dictatorship by François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. As became the standard, Haitian refugees fleeing the dictatorship were met with "arrest, jail, the denial of asylum, and swift expulsion." The administration of US President Jimmy Carter was forced to take a different approach in 1980 because a large wave of Cuban refugees arrived and the US government could not treating the two groups with such different policies. Carter created a new immigration category called "entrants" for Haitians and Cubans "whose fate was to be decided at a later date by legislation" but who were allowed to be in the US. [2]
US President Ronald Reagan changed the policy in 1981 and sent the Coast Guard to intercept and repatriate Haitians fleeing by boat. He jailed the refugees who made it to the United States. Refugees continued to flee during the militant governments that followed the Duvaliers. [2] Jean-Bertrand Aristide was in power for eight months before being overthrown. During this time both human rights abuses decreased [11] and the number of people trying to leave decreased by one third. [2] Six weeks after Aristide was overthrown, at least 1,500 Haitians had been killed. [11] The number of refugees fleeing by boat skyrocketed to new levels as did the people fleeing into the Dominican Republic. In the entire decade before Aristide was overthrown, 25,000 Haitians were intercepted at sea; 38,000 were intercepted in the first year after he was overthrown. [2]
The US had well established methods of intercepting, jailing, and repatriating Haitians by the time the largest wave of people seeking refuge arrived. These policies were pursued by multiple US presidents because of American anti-Haitian biases that saw Haitian immigrants as a threat based on a combination of racism, nationalism, xenophobia, classism, and misperceptions that Haitians carried disease at higher numbers than other nationalities. [3]
The number of Haitian refugees fleeing the country by boat escalated to new levels after Aristide was overthrown. [2] The George H. W. Bush administration opted to continue the policy of repatriation that had been used for Haitian boat people previously when they were fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship. If the refugees made it to US soil, they would be protected from repatriation by international law. [4] The administration began redirecting the refugees to Guantanamo Bay after the Haitian Refugee Center won a court case that established a temporary restraining order against forced repatriation. [1] By November 1991, the Administration had to raise the previous cap of 2,500 refugees at Guantanamo. [12] On February 28, 1992, the House of Representatives passed a bill introduced by Romano Mazzoli to allow Haitian refugees to remain at Guantanamo for 6 months. [13] The camp continued to grow substantially until May 1992 when around 11,300 refugees were being held at the military base. The refugees were held on six subcamps in McCalla Airfield and Camp Bulkeley. There weren't enough supplies. Many refugees slept on cardboard or bare ground and others on cots. Each camp was surrounded in barb wire fencing. Refugees rotated through each camp as they passed or failed each exam on the way to asylum. However, refugees were not told the significance of the movement between subcamps. [3]
Bush announced that the US would begin slowly emptying the refugee camps and instead solely return the Haitians trying to escape persecution back to Haiti through Executive Order 12,807 called the Kennebunkport Order in May 1992. [1] The order did not screen the Haitians for potential to seek asylum as earlier policies technically required. [6] The administration expressed fears of the camp inspiring Haitians to try to leave and favored a harsher policy to discourage escaping by boat. [10] As the claims of the refugees at Guantanamo were processed, the refugees were slowly relocated, brought to the US, or often repatriated throughout the end of Bush's presidency. [4] From its beginning until March 1992, 34,000 refugees had passed through the camp. Permission to pursue asylum in the US was given to roughly a third of them. [11] A small group of refugees was kept at Guantanamo. [4] The remaining refugees at Guantanamo were approved for filing for asylum but tested positive for HIV or had family of those who tested positive and therefore continued to be held at Guantanamo at a section of the base known as Camp Bukeley. [3]
Bill Clinton had campaigned against the forced repatriations during the 1992 US presidential race. He changed his mind shortly before taking office in 1993 and instead continued the Kennebunkport Order policy of forced repatriation. He wanted to stabilize Haiti and reinstall Aristide through force in part to discourage more people from fleeing. [14] Meanwhile, 270 refugees remained in Camp Bulkeley due to their connection to HIV. [15] They were brought to the US after a legal battle headed by the Haitian Centers Council. [1] The HIV camp closed on July 18, 1993. [6]
Less than a year later, Guantanamo was again opened to hold refugees in June 1994. [7] The new camp held first Haitians then Haitians and Cubans. [8] Cubans only began to be sent to Guantanamo after Clinton reversed a nearly 30-year-old policy of immediate amnesty for Cubans arriving to the US. [16] However, the Cubans were treated noticeably better than the Haitians. [17] In an effort to decrease the size of the camp, the US tried to convince other countries in the Caribbean or Latin America to accept either Haitian or Cuban refugees. [18] Up to 21,000 Haitians were held in Guantanamo at one time during this wave of the Haitian refugee camp. [19] More than 30,000 Cubans were detained at once at the camp. [9] The main problem for the camp in sustaining so many people was primarily infrastructure such as water, electricity, and sewage, not space. [20] Roughly 10,000 Haitians agreed to return home after President Aristide was returned to power in October 1994. [21] However, 6,000 were forcibly repatriated against their wishes. [22] By December 1994, 5,000 Haitian refugees were still at the camp. [19] The UNHCR voiced disapproval of the US policy of forced repatriation of Haitians and suggested it was outside international refugee law in early 1995. [23] Haitians remained at Guantanamo until at least May 1995. [9]
Camp Bulkeley began under US President George H. W. Bush in late 1991 [4] and ended under Bill Clinton 1993. Camp Bulkeley was used to hold 270 refugees approved for asylum who tested positive for HIV or were related to someone with HIV at the camp. The presence of HIV/AIDS meant they were not allowed to come to the US according to a 1987 law. Simultaneously, they could not be repatriated to Haiti due to international law protecting approved asylum seekers. [3] The US said the camp was a humanitarian endeavor. [1]
Karma Chavez wrote, "These refugees lived in deplorable conditions, were subjected to violence and repression by the US military, deprived of proper medical care, and left without any legal recourse of rights." [4] According to the research of A. Naomi Paik, the food was rotten and the camps were squalid and lacked proper infrastructure for sanitation. Boredom filled each day. Medical procedures happened without consent administration of including Depo Provera, a long term birth control. "The refugees question[ed] whether the U.S. state intended for them to live longer or die sooner," wrote Paik. [3]
The treatment of these refugees is part of a larger discrimination against Haitians though a Center for Disease Control enforced association with the disease and the nationality. [11] The CDC identified the Haitian nationality as being an at-risk group of HIV. ACT UP was a major advocacy group for ending the detention of HIV+ Haitians in Guantanamo. [4]
On March 26, 1993, U.S. District Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. ruled that the "government either had to provide medical treatment for those with the AIDS virus or send them where they could be treated" [15] for what he famously deemed a "HIV prison camp." [1] The Clinton Administration that replied saying 36 refugees with HIV would be brought to the US. As the first part of the follow-through on Judge Johnson's ruling in early April 1993, 20 Haitians, 16 with HIV and 4 relatives came to the US. Those with low immune cell counts received the highest priority for leaving the detention camp. [15] In early June 1993, Judge Johnson ordered that the remaining refugees be taken away from Guantanamo within ten days to two weeks. [24] The camp finally closed on July 18, 1993. [6] Half of the Haitian survivors of Camp Bulkeley had died by 2013. [1]
In January 2010 United States Air Force reservists were deployed to help victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and some of those reservists worked to prepare the Guantanamo base to receive more Haitian refugees. [25]
Largely due to the politics of the Cold War, the US supported the Haitian government under the Duvaliers and simultaneously did not support the Cuban government under Castro. Because of these international relations, the US encouraged Cuban refugees to come to the US but denied this option to Haitian refugees. The US called the Haitian refugees "economic migrants" and was therefore able to reject asylum obligations. [1] Also, there was racial discrimination separating the treatment of Haitians and Cubans as found in the US Court of Appeals, Second Circuit with Haitian Centers Council v. McNary in 1992. [6] The treatment of the two groups was frequently compared.
The special treatment of Cuban refugees decreased when they were being held at Guantanamo. [1] Nevertheless, considerable disparities continued. The Cubans had the advantage of having a strong political block already in the US that advocated for the Cubans in Guantanamo. [22] For example, the US said it would encourage voluntary repatriation for Cubans; however, Haitians were forced to repatriate. [26] In another example, 200 Haitian unaccompanied children were left at Guantanamo long after the Cuban children of the same position were brought to the US. Very few of the Haitian unaccompanied minors were allowed to enter the US. By April 1995, only 23 of about 300 children had been accepted. All of the unaccompanied Cuban children were admitted to the US. [9] HIV testing was not required for Cubans or other non-Haitian groups emigrating to the US but was mandatory for Haitians immigrating to the US. [11] The differences between the two groups challenged the treatment both groups were receiving.
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, officially known as Naval Station Guantanamo Bay or NSGB, is a United States military base located on 45 square miles (117 km2) of land and water on the shore of Guantánamo Bay at the southeastern end of Cuba. It has been leased to the United States with no end date since 1903 as a coaling station and naval base, making it the oldest overseas U.S. naval base. The lease was $2,000 in gold per year until 1934, when the payment was set to match the value of gold in dollars; in 1974, the yearly lease was set to $4,085.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a Haitian former Salesian priest and politician who became Haiti's first democratically elected president. As a priest, he taught liberation theology and, as a president, he attempted to normalize Afro-Creole culture, including Vodou religion, in Haiti. Aristide was appointed to a parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies to become a priest. He became a focal point for the pro-democracy movement first under Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and then under the military transition regime which followed. He won the 1990–91 Haitian general election, with 67% of the vote.
The Mariel boatlift was a mass emigration of Cubans who traveled from Cuba's Mariel Harbor to the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980. The term "Marielito" is used to refer to these refugees in both Spanish and English. While the exodus was triggered by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy, it followed on the heels of generations of Cubans who had immigrated to the United States in the preceding decades.
Operation Uphold Democracy was a multinational military intervention designed to remove the military regime led and installed by Raoul Cédras after the 1991 Haitian coup d'état overthrew the elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The operation was effectively authorized by the 31 July 1994 United Nations Security Council Resolution 940.
The wet feet, dry feet policy or wet foot, dry foot policy was the name given to a former interpretation of the 1995 revision of the application of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that essentially says that anyone who emigrated from Cuba and entered the United States would be allowed to pursue residency a year later. Prior to 1995, the U.S. government allowed all Cubans who reached U.S. territorial waters to remain in the U.S. After talks with the Cuban government, the Clinton administration came to an agreement with Cuba that it would stop admitting people intercepted in U.S. waters.
Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) is a U.S. military joint task force based at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba on the southeastern end of the base. JTF-GTMO falls under US Southern Command. Since January 2002 the command has operated the Guantanamo Bay detention camps Camp X-Ray and its successors Camp Delta, Camp V, and Camp Echo, where detained prisoners are held who have been captured in the war in Afghanistan and elsewhere since the September 11, 2001 attacks. From the command's founding in 2002 to early 2022, the detainee population has been reduced from 779 to 37. As of October 21, 2022, the unit is under the command of U.S. Army Brigadier General Scott W. Hiipakka.
Gérard Jean-Juste was a Haitian Roman Catholic priest and rector of Saint Claire's church for the poor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was also a liberation theologian and a supporter of the Fanmi Lavalas political party, as well as heading the Miami, Florida-based Haitian Refugee Center from 1977 to 1990.
Jean-Claude Bajeux was a Haitian political activist and professor of Caribbean literature. For many years he was director of the Ecumenical Center for Human Rights based in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and a leader of the National Congress of Democratic Movements, a moderate socialist political party also known as KONAKOM. He was Minister of Culture during Jean-Bertrand Aristide's first term as President of Haiti.
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Camp Bulkeley is an encampment within the United States Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. Camp Bulkeley was constructed between 1943–45. Originally, the camp was constructed to house Marines that were permanently stationed at the United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay. Later, the camp was named for Vice Admiral John D. Bulkeley, who was in charge of the base during 1964, when Cuba had accused the United States of stealing water.
Guantánamo Bay is a bay in Guantánamo Province at the southeastern end of Cuba. It is the largest harbor on the south side of the island and it is surrounded by steep hills which create an enclave that is cut off from its immediate hinterland.
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Operations Safe Haven and Safe Passage were operations by the United States Joint Task Force designed to relieve the overcrowded migrant camps at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Safe Haven established four camps on Empire Range, Panama, to provide a safe haven for up to ten thousand Cuban migrants. Safe Passage then returned the migrants to Guantanamo after the crowded conditions could be alleviated. These migrants had attempted to enter the United States illegally by crossing the Florida Straits in summer 1994. The operation was conducted under the command of General Barry McCaffrey and the direction of Clinton administration.
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Operation Sea Signal was a United States Department of Defense operation in the Caribbean in response to an influx of Cuban and Haitian migrants attempting to gain asylum in the United States. As a result, the migrants became refugees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The operation took place from May 1992 to February 1996 under Joint Task Force 160. The task force processed over 50,000 refugees as part of the operation. The U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy rescued refugees from the sea and other migrants attempted to cross the landmine field that then separated the U.S. and Cuban military areas. Soldiers, Airmen, and Marines provided refugee camp security at Guantanamo Bay, and ship security on board the Coast Guard cutters. This mass exodus led to the U.S. immigration implementation of the Wet Feet Dry Feet Policy. The mass Cuban exodus of 1994 was similar to the Mariel boatlift in 1980.
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The 1991 Haitian coup d'état took place on 29 September 1991, when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, elected eight months earlier in the 1990–91 Haitian general election, was deposed by the Armed Forces of Haiti. Haitian military officers, primarily Army General Raoul Cédras, Army Chief of Staff Philippe Biamby and Chief of the National Police, Michel François led the coup. Aristide was sent into exile, his life only saved by the intervention of U.S., French, and Venezuelan diplomats. Aristide would later return to power in 1994.
The 1994 Cuban rafter crisis which is also known as the 1994 Cuban raft exodus or the Balsero crisis was the emigration of more than 35,069 Cubans to the United States via makeshift rafts. The exodus occurred over five weeks following rioting in Cuba; Fidel Castro announced in response that anyone who wished to leave the country could do so without any hindrance. Fearing a major exodus, the Clinton administration would mandate that all rafters captured at sea be detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
Haitian boat people are refugees from Haiti who flee the country by boat, usually to South Florida and sometimes the Bahamas.
Cuban boat people mainly refers to refugees who flee Cuba by boat and ship to the United States.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Senior Airman Michael Strobel clears land for the placement of tents in anticipation of Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Lawyers representing Haitian refugees asked a Federal judge in New York to block the new policy of returning all Haitians stopped at sea. Judge Sterling Johnson Jr., of the United States District Court in Brooklyn, will hear arguments on Friday. Judge Johnson, a Bush appointee, has previously ruled in favor of the refugees at Guantanamo in a continuing suit demanding their right to counsel.
Three weeks ago, Guantanamo was visited by a group headed by Mr. Sutton, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Representative Charles B. Rangel, the Harlem Democrat who has been a leading advocate of efforts to obtain asylum for the 7,000 Haitians being held in a tent city at the base. The Haitians were plucked from boats by Coast Guard cutters after fleeing their homeland, which has been torn by violence in the wake of a September coup that overthrew the elected Government of the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
More than 8,000 Americans at sea, and about twice that many Haitians in the camp, are waiting for something to happen, preferably something that will let them go home. If nothing else, their very presence continues to exert pressure on the United States to intervene in Haiti if a political settlement cannot be found.