A Haitian survey finds thirty seven percent of women report rape or sexual abuse

Through the coup period from 1991 to 1994, rape was used systematically against women in Haiti as an assertion of the regime's authority. Human rights reporting at the time regularly understated the gender specific character of the violence, presenting attacks on women as punishment aimed at their male relatives and partners. The United States embassy in Port au Prince cabled Washington to say that the Haitian left, including President Aristide and his supporters, consistently manipulated or even fabricated human rights abuses as a propaganda tool, and offered the sudden epidemic of reported rapes as its example. In 1995 the Haitian Center for Research and Action for the Promotion of Women surveyed 1,705 women. Thirty seven percent said they had been raped or otherwise sexually abused, or that they knew someone who had. The independent National Commission on Truth and Justice investigated at length and described the raping as a politically orchestrated campaign conducted amid intimidation and savage repression of opposition to the state.

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.

By 1995 New York carried thirty hours of Haitian television a week. Miami carried eight, New Jersey four, and Boston, Chicago and Hartford two each. The best known programme made by the diaspora in New York was a magazine show that ran on one public channel in 1988 and 1989 before moving to another. Its producer, J. Raynal Louis, also made a teenage show, an education show that covered bilingual teaching, a programme about the United Nations, an arts hour, and monthly programmes for Asian American and Jewish American audiences. Three of his programmes were in French and Creole for African and Haitian immigrants, among them a Creole talk show and a community news show. Some were broadcast simultaneously in Miami and the tapes were shown again in Montreal, so a Creole programme made in Brooklyn was watched in three countries.

At a CARICOM summit in Montego Bay attended by president René Préval, the Jamaican prime minister P. J. Patterson announced that Haiti would be granted full membership. The application had been lodged on 10 May of the same year. Patterson called the decision historic and argued it would help build democratic structure inside Haiti through contact with sister nations. Others were sceptical. Jerry Tardieu described it as a dramatic break from twenty years of subregional integration built almost entirely on historical and political homogeneity and judged it more politically motivated than economically justified. Smith notes that Haitian membership raised the combined population from roughly six million to fourteen million, which made the single market proposal more attractive, and that Haitian intellectuals complained that the Préval administration had done almost nothing to explain CARICOM to Haitians. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith argues that describing Haiti as a French-speaking country, as CARICOM's accession debate did, misstates the case, since fewer than fifteen percent of the population speak or comprehend French and proper integration would require formal recognition of Kreyòl as a CARICOM language.