Aristide abolishes the army that removed him

Jean-Bertrand Aristide resumed the presidency on 15 October 1994 after three years out of the country. The United Nations lifted its trade sanctions, the 1987 constitution came back into force, and a Ministry of Women's Affairs and Women's Rights was created. On 6 February 1995 he did the thing that outlasted everything else in his record. He dissolved the Haitian Army and put a National Police in its place. The army had been the decisive political actor in the country since the Americans built it as a National Guard during the first occupation. Every coup after that ran through it, and it had removed him personally. His supporters called the abolition the removal of the obstacle to democracy. His opponents called it the destruction of the only body able to hold order together. Both descriptions turned out to be accurate. What Haiti had afterward was a small, underequipped, undertrained police force in a country where armed men had settled every serious political argument for a hundred and ninety years.

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.

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.

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.