Mr. Robinson's hoods - TransAfrica America executive director Randall Rubinson's bully tactics to change Clinton administration policy toward Haiti

National Review, August 29, 1994 by Rich Lowry

Nonetheless, with the battle in South Africa won, TransAfrica had been fading from view. Until the hunger strike. "The question was, would Randall's hunger strike along be enough to gain attention?" Leila McDowell, a partner at the PR firm McKinney & McDowell, told the Washington Post. "It could be a difficult sell. To guarantee coverage, we said, let's make it Randall and Susan Sarandon."

A raft of celebrities did join the publicity push. And McKinney & McDowell, which did $170,000 worth of work for Aristide in 1993 (Namibia, Mozambique, Lani Guinier, and the Rainbow Coalition are other clients), expertly massaged the media. When Robinson was hospitalized, "we called the press immediately," Miss McDowell told the Post. "The minute the ambulance was called."

Now that Robinson and the Black Caucus (members of which were getting arrested in front of the White House while Robinson fasted) have prevailed, what's in store for Haiti? "If Aristide returns on a U.S. invasion," says Larry Pezzullo, Clinton's former special advisor on Haiti, "there's a very good likelihood he will not work with the parliament, which has as much constitutional right to govern as he does. So Aristide well may end up ruling by decree, and we will be in effect supporting unconstitutional acts."

Aristide's failure to compromise was what doomed him the first time around. (Elected in December 1990, he survived in office only until September 1991.) Instead of reaching out to a not entirely friendly but legitimate National Assembly, the newly elected Aristide chose confrontation. "He, in my view, resorted to the pattern of behavior of dictators in the past," says Walter Fauntroy, former chairman of a congressional task force on Haiti.

Aristide's well-paid Washington lobbyists--the former Haitian president can spend freely from the roughly $30 million in frozen Haitian assets in the U.S.--vigorously deny this. Asked about a speech in which Aristide praised necklacing, former congressman and Aristide lobbyist Mike Barnes seems to know nothing about it. "He gave one speech in which he made a reference which has been assumed to be a reference to necklacing," says Barnes, whose firm of Hogan & Hartson was collecting $55,000 a month from Aristide earlier this year. "That speech took place after the coup had already begun. His life was in danger." There was no necklacing speech connected to the July 1991 trial of a political opponent? "You're getting your dates and speeches confused." So he didn't make that speech? "No."

But Haiti Observateur published at the time a transcript of the speech as broadcast on radio, and Aristide's rhetoric that day crops up often in discussions of his human-rights record. Puebla Institute President Nina Shea, who holds no brief for the Haitian military, testified before Congress last year: "After the conviction and sentencing in the political case of Roger Lafontant, Aristide gave his supporters a kind of pep talk:...'For 24 hours in front of the courthouse, Pere Lebrun [the name of a local tire merchant] became a good firm bed.... The Justice Ministry inside the courthouse had the law in its hands, the people had their cushion outside. They have their little matches in their hands. They have gas nearby.'"