Thirty hours a week of Haitian television in New York

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.

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.

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.

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.