Warlords trade minerals for guns as African states come apart

Much of the armed conflict in Africa since 1990 has been a contest between armed entrepreneurs over minerals, people and territory. Richard Reid sets that pattern in a long history whose roots run well behind the immediate postcolonial decades. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 killed some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu and then spilled west, as Ugandan and Rwandan forces helped remove Mobutu from power and afterwards fell out with each other, leaving eastern Congo a permanent war zone of shifting identities. Somalia collapsed entirely, and the American led relief operation there ended in disaster. In Sierra Leone and Liberia the state gave way to leaders of ragged youth militias who exchanged precious minerals for weapons. Sudan signed a peace accord in 2005 while Khartoum backed killing in Darfur that many called genocidal. Sierra Leone and Liberia began to recover, and Liberia elected the first woman head of state on the continent in 2006. The United Nations has spent more on African wars since Rwanda. The continent has been awash in cheap weapons since the Cold War ended.

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.