A Philadelphia garbage barge unloads its ash at Gonaives

The Khian Sea was a Liberian registered barge carrying fourteen thousand tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia. In January 1988 it arrived off Gonaives, the town on the northern coast where Haitian independence had been declared one hundred and eighty four years earlier. The crew told the authorities the cargo was fertiliser and began unloading. About four thousand tons went onto the shore. When Haitian officials established what the ash actually was and ordered it reloaded, the ship left in the night with the remainder still aboard, and that remainder was later tipped into the Indian Ocean. The ash stayed at Gonaives for twelve years. In April 2000 roughly two thousand five hundred tons were finally lifted and shipped back to a landfill in Pennsylvania, where it had been produced. A country is treated as sovereign in proportion to what it can enforce. Haiti in 1988 could not enforce the removal of a pile of poison from its own beach, and nobody stopped the ship that left it there.

On 10 April 1990 an estimated fifty thousand Haitians walked over the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan and surrounded city hall. The target was the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, which had classified Haitians as a group at risk for AIDS and kept the classification after the scientific evidence had gone against it. Traffic did not move. Taxis were hard to find because so many drivers were Haitian and had taken the day off to march. The same day brought demonstrations in Miami and outside the American embassy in Port-au-Prince, and delegations went on to Washington to meet federal officials. Some months later the agencies stopped describing Haitians as a risk group. The march then travelled back along the radio and the telephone. In towns like Port Salut, people who had never left Haiti repeated one sentence about it for years afterwards: the demonstration was so big that the bridge shook.

Haitians were to elect a president on 29 November 1987 under the constitution they had approved in March, and it was to be the first vote in thirty years that the army did not control. Gangs loyal to the old regime spent the night before shooting people and knocking the radio stations off the air with grenades. In the morning voters queued at a school on Avenue John Brown, five blocks from the palace. An army convoy stopped, its officers spoke with the armed men waiting nearby, and drove on. The gunmen went into the school and killed everyone they found, finishing with machetes. About twenty bodies were left. Similar attacks ran across the capital. By midday the military council had cancelled the election and dissolved the electoral council that had organised it, explaining that this would allow Haiti to have a president freely chosen by the people. The United States suspended all aid. Nothing moved in Port-au-Prince for days.

The article closes its evidentiary sequence with an official memorandum advising Congress that the Haitian government had given full cooperation and should continue to receive assistance. Only months before Jean-Claude Duvalier's fall, the United States was still certifying his compliance with the standards it had set. The contradiction the article draws out is procedural rather than moral. The same government whose documented abuses were on record was declared eligible for aid, while Haitians who fled it were denied refugee status on the grounds that Haiti was not communist, so migrants from Cuba and Vietnam were labelled refugees and Haitians were labelled migrants. An immigration official is quoted explaining that Cubans could not be deported because no agreement existed with Castro, while in Haiti's case the United States had made an agreement with a dictator to intercept and return them.