After the Cold War the West rediscovers African human rights

Richard Reid argues that the collapse of the Soviet bloc changed what Western governments said they wanted from Africa. Human rights, good governance and elections replaced anticommunism as the stated test. Guilt drove part of the shift. The Ethiopian famine of the mid 1980s became the defining image of the continent, and the failure to act in Rwanda in 1994, where about a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed while foreign governments watched, sat badly beside the readiness to intervene in the Balkans. The offer put to African states was that accepting structural adjustment, meaning political and economic liberalisation, would bring investment and World Bank money. Reid points out that intervention aimed at remaking African societies runs back to the abolition campaigns of the early nineteenth century. Bill Clinton toured the continent in 1998 announcing a renaissance. After September 2001 the old bargain returned, and governments that helped against Islamist movements found their conduct at home overlooked. Africa remained a problem for outsiders to fix, and the fixing carried no memory of how the problem was made.

In October 1994 Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, three years after the army had put him on a plane. The restoration was carried out by a United States military force acting under a United Nations mandate, with about twenty thousand troops entering the country. The officers left without fighting, having accepted terms in the hours before the invasion aircraft would have arrived. Three years of military rule ended. The manner of the return then shaped everything after it. An elected Haitian government had been put back in place by foreign soldiers, which meant that it owed its existence to a foreign decision and could be reminded of the fact whenever it suited. Aristide served the sixteen months left of his five year term, disbanded the army that had overthrown him, and handed power to Rene Preval in February 1996. From 1994 onward, Haitian sovereignty was a subject other governments considered themselves entitled to discuss.

In 1998 the National Coalition for Haitian Rights helped secure passage of a bill allowing forty thousand people who had fled the Haitian military coup of 1991 to apply for permanent residence in the United States. The organisation had been founded in New York in 1982 as the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees by Michael Hooper, a white American immigration lawyer, and had been a plaintiff in the court cases seeking constitutional protection for Haitians in detention. By 1998 it ran offices in New York and Port-au-Prince, held clinics to help immigrants naturalise, and joined coalitions with other migrant groups to move legislation. In Haiti it pressed for the prosecution of people who had committed abuses under the military government, which made it enough of a presence in Haitian politics that in 1999 the head of its Port-au-Prince office survived an assassination attempt.

At meetings in Kingston with CARICOM officials, Aristide appeared calm and tried to convince the regional leaders that the opposition was weak and posed no real challenge to his presidency. He willingly accepted the confidence-building measures the leaders proposed to break the stalemate, agreeing to disarm gangs and permit political demonstrations. The opposition, led by elite businessmen but drawing on a wide cross-section of Haitians, remained unwilling to accept any negotiation short of the president's immediate removal, and CARICOM's attempt to broker talks in the Bahamas failed. Smith argues that the resulting Kingston Accord drew severe criticism inside Haiti from people who had expected CARICOM to force a resignation, and hardened a local view that Aristide had manipulated the organisation to preserve the Lavalas hold on the state. He doubts earlier intervention could have changed the outcome.