A truth report of 1,200 pages reaches almost no one

The National Commission for Truth and Justice was created in March 1995 to account for what had been done in Haiti under the military government that held power from 1991 to 1994. It documented 8,652 human rights cases and its mandate forbade it to prosecute a single one of them. Its report ran to 1,200 pages and took its title from a Creole proverb, Si m pa rele, m ap toufe, meaning that if I do not cry out I will suffocate. Seven months after the report was finished it had still not been published, and only the recommendations were released. Human Rights Watch noted in September 1996 that victims had been given no official forum in which to tell their stories and that the courts had no access to the documentation. The United States held 160,000 pages of military and paramilitary records its troops had seized in Haiti, and did not turn them over.

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.

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 1960 South African police fired on an unarmed crowd at Sharpeville, and most of the dead were hit from behind as they ran. The government banned the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, which pushed the opposition underground and into exile. The ANC formed an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and in 1963 Nelson Mandela and his co-accused were sentenced to life. Resistance came back through trade unions and through Steve Biko's Black Consciousness movement. In 1976 police fired on fifteen thousand schoolchildren in Soweto who were protesting against the schooling designed for them, and parts of the country stopped being governable. Biko died in police custody. Botha declared a state of emergency in 1985. In 1989 F W de Klerk repealed the Population Registration and Group Areas acts, lifted the bans, and released Mandela in February 1990. The first election open to every adult was held in 1994 and Mandela won it. Political rights changed hands that year. The ownership of the economy did not move.