A massacre at Raboteau comes to trial six years later

On 22 April 1994 soldiers attacked Raboteau, a seaside neighbourhood of Gonaives, going after residents who supported the exiled president Jean Bertrand Aristide. At least six people were killed and many more were tortured. The case came to trial on 29 September 2000, under the government of Rene Preval. Twelve former soldiers and paramilitaries received life sentences. Raoul Cedras, Philippe Biamby and Michel Francois, who had led the coup of 1991 and were by then living abroad, were tried in absentia together with Emmanuel Constant of the paramilitary front known as FRAPH, and all four were condemned to life with hard labour. It was the one occasion on which a Haitian court reached the violence of the de facto regime and named the men responsible. Everything else attempted along those lines, including the truth commission set up in 1995, produced documents that went nowhere.

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.

From the 1980s the professional armies that African states inherited from colonial rule faced guerrilla forces armed as well as they were. Cheap automatic weapons, the AK-47 above all, broke a monopoly on firepower that governments had held since the 1890s. Movements that fought with surplus rifles in the 1960s had machine guns and rocket launchers twenty years later. Revolt in southern Sudan became the longest war on the continent. Eritreans fought thirty years for independence under the EPLF, while the TPLF in Ethiopia looked to Albania for a Marxism outside both blocs; their coalition brought down the Ethiopian dictatorship in 1991. Museveni's fighters took Kampala in 1986 and the RPF took power in Rwanda in 1994 as the genocide ran. All of them are still in office. Uganda's no-party system grew intolerant, Kagame used the genocide to close off argument, and Eritrea became one of the most repressive states on the continent. In Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone the gunmen had no politics at all.

In the Dominican presidential election of May 1996 Jose Francisco Pena Gomez took almost 46 percent of the vote. Fifty percent was needed to win outright, so a runoff against Leonel Fernandez was set for June. Balaguer was not a candidate this time and the campaign was less openly dirty than the one two years earlier, though Fernandez's party had already claimed that many registered voters were in fact Haitian nationals. Two weeks before the second round Balaguer announced that his party would unselfishly support Fernandez in order to keep the Dominican nation out of hands that were not truly Dominican. The combined vote of the two parties gave Fernandez 51.25 percent. Direct appeals to whiteness make little sense in a country where most candidates have some black African ancestry and where voters are themselves mostly of mixed descent. What both campaigns worked with instead was the implicit cue, in which a candidate's dark skin was made to stand for foreign origin.