A survey finds few in Port-au-Prince will say they serve the spirits

A survey directed by Francois Houtart and Anselme Remy in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince in 1997 asked people what religion they practised. Three and a half per cent said openly that they served Vodou. Just under fifty per cent answered Catholic and thirty nine per cent answered Protestant. Protestant denominations had been growing very fast in the capital, and part of the result records that growth. The rest of it records fear. Hurbon reads the low number as evidence that two centuries of pressure still worked, and that many Haitians would not put their name to a religion the state, the Catholic Church and the newer Protestant churches had all treated as shameful. He ties the finding to the constitution of 1987 and to the question it opened about whether the Haitian state can stand neutral between religions, which in his view has to be argued in public before anyone answers honestly.

By the time Parham finished her fieldwork, an email list known as the Corbett List had been running for eight years and included some of the most influential leaders of the Haitian diaspora. Human rights advocates used it to circulate petitions and to gather support for changes in Haiti. Word of the list travelled along ties that already joined advocacy workers, academics and missionaries, and those ties held it together. She sets it beside a website forum that produced an organisation which folded inside a year. Her conclusion is that online space for a scattered nation serves expression well and organising badly, unless the people in it are already connected somewhere on the ground. About half the respondents in one Haitian forum she studied worked with advocacy organisations, and thirty of forty Haitian community groups she catalogued had an email address, a website, or both.

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.

War in independent Africa has generally been internal, and armies have crossed borders rarely. The exceptions matter. Ethiopia and Somalia fought over the Ogaden in 1963 and 1964 and again in 1977 and 1978. In 1979 a Tanzanian army marched into Uganda and removed Idi Amin. After the Cold War ended, foreign military ventures increased again. Angola and the Congo became free for alls in the 1990s, with several regional powers protecting their interests and taking what mineral wealth they could reach. The war between Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1998 to 2000 was the largest conventional war anywhere in the world at that moment, fought with mass mobilisation and trenches over borders, identity and regional standing. West African troops in Sierra Leone and African Union deployments elsewhere turned peacekeeping into a business with political returns. At the same time governments arm insurgencies next door, Rwandans and Ugandans in the Congo, Chadians and Eritreans in Darfur, Eritreans in Somalia. Armies have become instruments of foreign policy as much as of internal control.