‘Baby Doc’ becoming an embarrassment

Press, 15 February 1986, Page 10

‘Baby Doc’ becoming an embarrassment

NZPA-Reuter Talloires, France France was yesterday confronted with an embarrassing legal battle with the ousted Haitian dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who has defied French demands that he leave the country by applying for political refugee status. Mr Duvalier, who is nearing an eight-day deadline for his stay in Talloires, an Alpine resort near the Swiss border, has filed a formal request for permanent refuge in France for himself and his relatives. The move is a slap in the face for France’s Socialist Government, which has insisted that the ousted President-for-Life is making only a transit stop on his way to a country willing to offer permanent asylum. Mr Duvalier, who fled Haiti on February 7 aboard a United States Air Force plane, has been cloistered in the hotel, a converted medieval monastery, behind strict secrecy. The French Prime Minister, Mr Laurent Fabius, said France would be rid of Mr Duvalier soon.

At least six African and European countries have rejected asylum requests. Liberia is the only country reported to have expressed any willingness to offer him a home.

Mr Duvalier’s request for refugee status, filed with the French Office for the Protection of Refugees, could lead to a complex and possibly long legal and administrative wrangle over the former President's rights. Sources close to the Duvalier entourage say Mr Duvalier, who speaks French and Creole, has ruled out going to speaking Liberia and has filed the refugee request to avert the possibility of immediate expulsion. France, acutely embarrassed by the presence of a man whose 15-year rule it has always condemned, says it took Mr Duvalier in at the request of the United States to avoid a blood-bath in Haiti. French officials describe the United States as the “lead manager” in the operation to get Duvalier out of Haiti. They say Washington is actively helping to find a country of permanent exile.

But United States officials have refused to

comment on unconfirmed reports that they might help France by accepting “Baby Doc” and his family on their own soil. A United States Embassy spokesman in Paris said the Duvalier family had never asked ,to go to the United States and had always insisted on France.

The red-and-blue Haitian flag banned 26 years ago when the Duvalier dynasty established its lifetime Presidency will become the nation’s official emblem, the new Government has announced.

The original flag, which becomes official on Wednesday, consists of two equal vertical stripes of blue and red, with Haiti’s seal in the centre.

The red-and-blue flag became the symbol of the protest movement that began on November 27 in the northern city of Gonaives and rapidly spread throughout the nation.

The late Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Jean-Claude’s father, replaced the blue colours of the Haitian flag with a black stripe in 1964, when the Constitution was amended to establish the lifetime Presidency.