WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (Reuters) - President Bill Clinton said in an interview published on Wednesday that he did not think Congress should grant U.S. citizenship to Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old Cuban shipwreck survivor.
Clinton told the Christian Science Monitor that the case of Gonzalez -- whose fate is being fought over by his Cuban exile relatives, who want him to stay in the United States, and his father, who wants him to return to Cuba -- should not be politicized.
``I don't think they should put themselves in the position of making a decision that runs contrary to what the people who have had to do all the investigation have done,'' Clinton said in the interview, conducted on Tuesday afternoon.
``I think that it would irrevocably lead people to the conclusion that this was much more about politics than it was whether that little boy ought to be taken away from his father,'' he added.
The boy was picked up on Nov. 25 in the sea off Florida after surviving two days and nights holding on to an inner tube. His mother and 10 other illegal immigrants died after the boat bringing them out of Cuba capsized.
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Service has ruled that the boy belongs with his father, who lives in Cuba and was divorced from the mother.
The execution of that decision has been delayed while the boy's U.S. relatives challenge it in court. His Miami relatives filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday to force the U.S. government to hold a hearing on whether he should stay.
CONGRESS COMPLICATES ISSUE
Further complicating the issue, Congress may consider a proposal to award him U.S. nationality.
``They're basically taking a position that if you live in Cuba, if we can take you away from your father, you're better off,'' Clinton said. ``The INS reached a different decision, having exhaustively looked a what was best for that child.''
``This poor little boy is 6 years old. He has scars from his mother's death of which he can only be dimly aware, and making a judgment about what is in his best interest and what is most likely to give him a stable, healthy, whole childhood ... ought to be made insofar as possible independent
of countervailing political pressures,'' he said.
Clinton said he had no sympathy for the Cuban government, accusing it of spurning chances to move toward a closer relationship with the United States and, like Cuban exiles in the United States, politicizing the boy's fate.
``It is tragic the way they have blown every conceivable opportunity to get closer to the United States. Just as we were making progress, they murdered those pilots,'' he said, alluding to a 1996 incident in which Cuba shot down two small airplanes flown by a Miami-based exile group, killing
four people.
``I have no brief for the Castro government or for many of their policies. I think the way (Cuban President Fidel Castro) has attempted to politicize this is also terrible,'' he said. ``It's not just the Cuban-Americans that have attempted to politicize it.''
Cubans have staged massive demonstrations in the streets of Havana demanding the boy's return, and exiles in the United States have countered with smaller protests insisting he stay.
21:40 01-19-00
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