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

ON FRIDAY, March 25, Al Gore met with deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to implore him to be flexible in negotiations with the Haitian military. For months the Administration had maintained that a solution to the crisis depended on compromise by both sides; Aristide would have to accept political opponents in his government in exchange for his return.

But the 41-year-old Catholic priest wouldn't have to suffer such indignities much longer. On April 12 Randall Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, began his hunger strike protesting Administration policy. Two weeks later, President Clinton was preparing to demand the unconditional resignation of Haiti's military leaders and saying of Robinson, "I understand and respect what he's doing. ... He ought to stay out there." He did--denouncing the Administration's moves as insufficient.

The next week, Clinton foreign policy aides Samuel Berger and Morton Halperin visited Robinson's bedside. Two days after that, Robinson was hospitalized for dehydration, prompting another flurry of press attention. Finally, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake called to ask if Robinson would relent if Clinton announced he was abandoning the repatriation of Haitian refuges. And Lake asked Robinson if he'd like to accompany Gore on Air Force Two to attend the inauguration of Nelson Mandela.

It's hard to imagine a rout more complete. During his 27-day strike, Robinson denounced Clinton's special advisor on Haiti, Larry Pezzullo, for showing "contempt" for Aristide; Pezzullo was sacked. Robinson said that Haitian rulers "must be forced to resign before Aristide can be reinstalled"; Clinton soon said the same. Robinson said pressing Aristide for more concessions was "absurd"; the Administration stopped. Robinson decried the repatriation of refugees as "racist"; the policy was changed. Robinson advocated "comprehensive new trade sanctions"; they were adopted.

And now that an invasion of Haiti looks like the only way to restore Aristide without compromise or concession, Randall Robinson can anticipate a sweet success: the installation of an anti-Western demagogue by the force of American arms. With Robinson and allies in the Congressional Black Caucus calling the shots on Haiti, American foreign policy has effectively been turned over to its traditional opponents.

"They were against the invasion of all the countries that the U.S. invaded the past 15 to 20 years," says Raymond Joseph, editor of the exile weekly Haiti Observateur. "And now those same people want an invasion of Haiti to bring back 'democracy.' It happens that the person they're bringing back ... is a left-wing budding dictator."

Robinson, the archetypal Aristide supporter, has spent most of his 15 years of Washington activism denouncing American power as oblivious to the aspirations of the oppressed. "America under Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and all those in between," he has said, "has never given an African a single bullet to win a single freedom."

A Harvard Law grad with a reassuring voice and stately build, Robinson founded TransAfrica in 1977 on just $20,000. The group toiled away until 1984, when Robinson hit it big with a classic piece of media showmanship: an occupation of the South African Embassy that kicked the antiapartheid movement into a new, highoctane phase, with himself at its head.

But while one man, one vote was Robinson's passion in South Africa, elsewhere it didn't matter so much. TransAfrica supported the Communist MPLA government in Angola and the Cuban troops that buttressed it. "The Cubans have provided a tremendous service to Angola," Robinson claimed, "and they are appreciated in Africa for having done so." TransAfrica embraced Julius Nyerere's one-party state in Tanzania, defended the Marxist government in Mozambique, and was slow in criticizing the murderous Mengistu regime in Ethiopia.

In the Caribbean, the apple of TransAfrica's eye was Maurice Bishop's Grenada. TransAfrica extolled the short-lived dictatorship's "unique experiment in articulating and practicing participatory democracy at the grass roots and progressive social change." In June 1983, Bishop was the keynote speaker at TransAfrica's annual Washington dinner. Reagan's invasion later that year prompted hand-wringing from Robinson about America's "long record of big-stick interventionism--putting in governments we like, taking out ones we don't."

This sort of advocacy won TransAfrica funding from unsavory sources, according to a report by the Washington-based Capital Research Center. Cuba contributed $4,750 from 1985 to 1988. Angola's UN Mission chipped in more than $3,500 in 1988 and 1989. Libya donated $1,000 in 1983. Nigeria's UN mission and the embassies of Swaziland, Tanzania, and Somalia--all anted up too.

Thanks to its anti-apartheid cachet, TransAfrica has milked mainstream funding sources as well. Joining Cuba in the rush to contribute was the Adolph Coors Company. Today TransAfrica has a $1.2-million budget, up from $500,000 in the late 1980s. Bankrolled by celebrities and by bigname firms like Reebok, Philip Morris, and Coca-Cola, last year TransAfrica moved its offices into a renovated DuPont Circle mansion.