A historians' association passes a resolution about the past

In March 1995 the council of the American Historical Association issued a policy resolution on Jews and the slave trade, decrying the misuse of historical evidence in the claim that Jewish merchants had dominated the Atlantic traffic in enslaved Africans. A learned society putting its name to a statement about a specific factual claim is unusual, and it shows how far this argument had travelled outside the seminar room. The resolution sat alongside a body of published rebuttal. David Brion Davis wrote on Jews in the slave trade in Culturefront in 1992 and again in the New York Review of Books in December 1994, and Eli Faber published a book setting out the records in 1998. The quarrel had begun on college campuses in the late 1980s. Within seven years it had produced a formal resolution from the main professional body of American historians.

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.

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.

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.