Mr. Robinson's hoods.

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.

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.'"

Aristide supporters would prefer that these issues simply be buried. "You know, we really don't need another hatchet job on Aristide," says Barnes. "It's not in the U.S. interest at this point."

Neither is it in the U.S. interest to restore Aristide--which is part of the idea's appeal. "The proponents of Aristide," says one congressional staffer, "are people who want to undo the history of U.S. repression. If they thought an invasion were serving a national interest, they'd oppose it." Or, as Robinson told the conservative weekly Human Events years ago, "If the U.S. can provide arms to all of the right-wing, heinous regimes around the world, then it should be providing arms to liberation movements like SWAPO and ANC."

Aristide is a one-man "liberation movement." He regularly referred to the U.S. as the "cold country," considered it synonymous with "imperialism," and accused it of having "exploited our beloved country." Says Raymond Joseph, "If Clinton makes the mistake of taking Aristide back with military force, after he lands Aristide will start denouncing the United States for killing all those Haitians.... He'll tell the U.S., You get your damn troops out of here--fast."

For Robinson and his allies, who have spent their careers making the same angry demand, there couldn't be a happier ending.