American soldiers land and the elected president comes home

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 the Dominican presidential election of 1994 supporters of Joaquin Balaguer and national media outlets circulated pictures meant to fix the figure of the Haitian onto his opponent Jose Francisco Pena Gomez. One showed a destitute migrant with exaggerated lips crossing the frontier while a large white hand held him back. Another showed the Dominican side of Hispaniola with white feet running away from the black feet of the Haitian side. A third had Pena Gomez pointing and promising to order the country set on fire if he were assassinated. A fourth showed him dancing with Haitian supporters under a caption in misspelled Creole while Dominicans knelt beside them, one of them gagged. The fifth put his face over a map of the island dotted with Haitian faces, with a caption saying he hated the Dominican Republic over the 1937 massacre of Haitians and of his parents, that Clinton and the European countries would back him, and that he was not black, he was Haitian.

The court orders that stopped repatriation left the United States holding thousands of Haitians and no plan for them. Within three days of the first restraining order people were being taken to Camp Bulkeley, a remote corner of the naval station at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and housed in permanent shelters and tents. Bulkeley was small. Within a week navy construction battalions were putting up a far larger tent city on the abandoned airfield at McCalla for the nearly five thousand others coming off the cutters. Meanwhile the district court turned its restraining order into an injunction, the appeals court dissolved it, and the sequence repeated until the legal shape of the border had been redrawn seven times in a little over a month. Some order or other held the ships back for about six weeks. Guantanamo answered the government's problem. People could be kept there without entering the United States, on ground leased from Cuba, in a place lawyers for the government said American courts could not reach.

War in independent Africa has generally been internal, and armies have crossed borders rarely. The exceptions matter. Ethiopia and Somalia fought over the Ogaden in 1963 and 1964 and again in 1977 and 1978. In 1979 a Tanzanian army marched into Uganda and removed Idi Amin. After the Cold War ended, foreign military ventures increased again. Angola and the Congo became free for alls in the 1990s, with several regional powers protecting their interests and taking what mineral wealth they could reach. The war between Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1998 to 2000 was the largest conventional war anywhere in the world at that moment, fought with mass mobilisation and trenches over borders, identity and regional standing. West African troops in Sierra Leone and African Union deployments elsewhere turned peacekeeping into a business with political returns. At the same time governments arm insurgencies next door, Rwandans and Ugandans in the Congo, Chadians and Eritreans in Darfur, Eritreans in Somalia. Armies have become instruments of foreign policy as much as of internal control.