Governors Island trades sanctions relief for a paper restoration

Talks between Cedras and Aristide, brokered by the United Nations, opened in late June at Governors Island in New York harbour and closed on 3 July 1993 with a ten-point text. Its terms included the nomination of a new prime minister by Aristide and confirmation by a reconstituted National Assembly, suspension of the sanctions imposed the previous month, assistance for economic development and administrative and judicial reform, modernisation of the armed forces, and the creation of a new police force. Dupuy identifies the mechanism that made the document worthless: it lifted the pressure before the junta had performed, and it left the army in place to obstruct every subsequent step. Aristide's scheduled return on 30 October never happened, and the intervening months produced the killing of Antoine Izmery by armed attaches on 11 September.

On 24 May 1992 George Bush signed the order known as the Kennebunkport Order, which told the Coast Guard to carry Haitians found on the high seas straight back to Haiti without any screening at all. People who wanted asylum were told to apply at the American consular office in Port-au-Prince, inside the country they were trying to leave, and to be interviewed there by American immigration officers. Guantanamo Bay was overcrowded, attempts to place refugees on other Caribbean islands and in Central America had failed, and an election was months away. Bill Clinton called the policy cruel during the campaign and kept it once elected. After American troops returned Aristide to office in 1994 most of the Haitians at Guantanamo were sent home, the last of them in November 1995. The Cubans held there were admitted to the United States.

In 1992 UNESCO began a project on the routes of the slave trade, on the argument that hiding a history of that size blocks any reconciliation built on top of it. Ceremonies and monuments followed in Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast. In Ouidah it produced a festival of Vodun arts, and dozens of artists from Africa and the diaspora were commissioned to make sculptures. Their work now lines the road running from the town down to the beach where captives were loaded into canoes. One stop is a memorial said to stand over the common grave of people who died before embarkation. Another is the Tree of Return, where guides say the departing were made to circle three times so their spirits would come home, and another the Tree of Forgetting, which was supposed to strip their memories. Robin Law finds no trace of either tree in any record before the 1990s.

Archaeologists working in the Caribbean have often judged the size of a pre-Columbian settlement from the spread of pottery and stone visible on the ground. Work published by Versteeg in 1993 showed that the measure is unreliable, because what reaches the surface is a small and uneven sample of what was buried and does not mark the edges of the place where people actually lived. Many island villages have therefore been recorded as smaller than they were. The finding carries a second warning. A finished artefact is the end of a process, and reading only the end product hides the labour, the movement of materials and the shifts of style that made it. Caribbean sites were reworked continually, and careful mapping and excavation are what recover that. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the Taino settlements of Hispaniola were sized by the same rough method, and how many people met Columbus in 1492 has been argued over ever since.