Elections spread across Africa without accountability following

Competitive elections have become common across Africa since 1990. In Benin the Marxist ruler Kerekou accepted defeat at the polls in 1991 and won office back legitimately in 1996. A popular rising in Mali ended military dictatorship, and the elections held since have survived deep poverty. Botswana has held contested votes and watched incumbents retire since 1966. Ghana transferred power peacefully on a razor thin result in 2008, on the eve of an oil boom. Richard Reid treats a tally of elections as a poor measure of democratic depth. Nigerian votes are still bought by those with cash. The loser of the 2010 Ivorian election simply refused to leave. Kenya's 2007 result produced killings and an internationally brokered power sharing deal. In Ethiopia the ruling front suppressed the opposition after the disputed 2005 vote and took ninety nine percent of parliamentary seats in 2010. Museveni in Uganda, Kagame in Rwanda and Isaias in Eritrea all came out of liberation armies, and all of them treat political control as something they earned by fighting.

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.