Trouillot shows where in the process the silences are made

Michel-Rolph Trouillot published Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in 1995. The argument is mechanical. A silence can enter the record at four separate points: when something happens and someone does or does not make a record of it, when records are gathered into an archive, when an archive is worked up into a narrative, and when narratives are ranked for importance. Power operates at all four, and it needs no conspiracy to do so, only the ordinary habits of clerks, curators and publishers. His central case is his own country. The Haitian Revolution was unthinkable to the people watching it happen, so they described it as something else, and the histories written afterward inherited the mistake rather than correcting it. I keep this book on a Haitian timeline because most of the entries around it survive only because somebody chose to file a paper. The missing ones went missing for reasons that can be traced, and Trouillot supplied the method for tracing them.

The Haitian army removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the presidency at the end of September 1991 and the boats began leaving. The United States would not send the people it stopped straight home as it had before, and it would not bring them ashore in Florida either, so the Coast Guard cutters became sea based jails while diplomats hunted for a third country willing to host the screening. By late November close to two thousand Haitians were crammed on the decks, some of the ships on patrol, others tied up at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay alongside an amphibious landing ship also being used to hold people. No third country agreed. On 17 November the cutter Confidence left Guantanamo with more than two hundred Haitians who had been screened out, and the next afternoon it put them on the docks at Port-au-Prince. Lawyers for the Haitian Refugee Center went to a federal judge in Miami that same day and obtained an order halting further returns.

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.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide landed at midday on 15 October 1994 with two aircraft full of dignitaries behind him. Almost no Haitian saw him touch the ground. The airport was sealed and helicopters carried him straight to the National Palace, where a crowd had been waiting since dawn for a look at Titid. He spoke from behind a sheet of bulletproof plastic, quoted Martin Luther King, said the dream of democracy had become real, and asked that every weapon fall silent. Then he shook hands with General Jean-Claude Duperval and inspected an honour guard. The building he had come back to was picked clean of its telephones, its air conditioners, its light fittings and its toilet bowls. He carried pledges of close to a billion dollars over five years, none of it available for three to six months, while the government cost about fifteen million dollars a month to run. Something like two hundred thousand small weapons stayed in macoute hands. Smarck Michel became prime minister and Leslie Delatour took the central bank.