US Returns Over 500 Refugees Fleeing Haiti Revolt

The United States, which faced a mass exodus of Haitians in the early 1990s, had warned that refugees picked up at sea would be returned to the Caribbean nation where rebels control half the country and have vowed to attack the capital.

The United States, which is helping Americans to safety, has been holding 531 migrants on U.S. Coast Guard boats in the Windward Pass, a stretch of ocean northwest of Haiti where boat people begin the 600-mile journey to Florida.

"As we speak now, they are being repatriated to Haiti," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters. "They are being taken safely and landed again in their home country."

Since an armed revolt against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide exploded on Feb. 5 in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, the Coast Guard has been monitoring the pass.

It said in a statement the Haitians were "rescued" in the last week from 13 boats and were being transported to Haiti on three U.S. cutters.

But Alison Parker of the New York-based group Human Rights Watch said: "The administration should not return refugees to a place where their lives are in danger."

The U.N. refugee agency also urged countries in the region to allow Haitian refugees in.

Aristide has warned that a further rebel advance could trigger an exodus of boat people.

The United States has failed to mediate a settlement and has rejected Aristide's plea for an international force to quell the violence. Washington, which restored him to power a decade ago after a coup, blames the former priest for fomenting the fighting and is now pressuring him to resign.

A concern of the Bush administration in an election year is to avert a migrant crisis in Florida, a state the president won by a razor-thin margin in 2000, political analysts say.

The administration has developed a contingency plan to send refugees to its naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where it also keeps detainees in its war on terrorism.

Some Democrats have complained the administration has responded too slowly to the crisis and urged it to send a U.S. force to Haiti to restore order.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=4458359§ion=news