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102. The poor image of the new entrants projected by the mass media complicated the resettlement process, and for those not sponsored by relatives (about a third of the total),
the total), the vol- untary agencies had to work hard to find appropriate solutions. Nevertheless, by October 1980 - only a few months after the influx - 92 per cent of the whole group had been placed, and within a few months more, most of the other 8 per cent had left the holding camps. Several hundred people were found to have mental problems serious enough to require professional care in institutions, and a number of people found to have criminal records were transfered to Federal prisons.
103. During the crisis in March/April 1980, some of the re- fugees who had taken refuge in the Peruvian embassy in Havana were flown to Lima, following the Government of Peru's offer to 1 000 of them. There they were assisted by the Peruvian Red Cross, with the help of funds from UNHCR and the League of Red Cross Societies, and were assisted to obtain permanent resettlement offers. Others went to San José after the Govern- ment of Costa Rica offered temporary asylum and transit facili- ties to those within the embassy enclosure (and before President Castro put a stop
a stop to the arrangement, saying that all the re- fugees must go direct to their final destination).
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HAITI (THE REPUBLIC OF)
Whereas migration from Haiti has
Haiti has been an ongoing phenom- enon for decades, its level has increased
increased in recent years and in 1980 and 1981, Haitians have been reaching US shores in small boats at the rate of at least one thousand per month. There are indications that what started as an economic mi- gration common to many islands of the Caribbean basin has more compelling reasons for its continuation than sheer economic distress.
105. Haiti's population of just under five million is indeed the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, according to the World Bank, with a GNP of only $ 260 in 1979. At the same time, however, the country's human rights record under President Duvalier's autocratic rule increasingly gives cause for concern. Amnesty International in its Annual Report for 1980 states that respect for and observance of human rights deteriorated after elections held in February 1979, that arbitrary detentions, torture and harassment by the police and the paramilitary "tontons macoutes" came to be directed not only at political leaders, journalists and human rights activists, but also at all sectors of the population. The rights of assembly, association, expression, thought and information came to be severely repressed. The two political parties founded in 1979, the "Parti démocrate chrétien
chrétien haitien", founded by Sylvio Claude, and the "Parti démocrate chrétien du 26 juin", founded by Grégoire Eugène, were both forced to suspend their activi- A meeting of the Haitian Human Rights League was broken up by men armed with clubs, its president sustaining head injuries.
ties.