New York lets students sit the Regents in Kreyol

In 1997 the New York State education authorities ruled that Haitian Kreyol was one of the official languages in which students could sit the Regents Examinations, the most prestigious school leaving qualification the state awards. The ruling followed litigation that Haitians in New York had brought against the state over its handling of bilingual education. Its practical effect was limited, because most Kreyol speakers do not read or write the language, having been schooled in French in Haiti or in English in the United States. Its symbolic effect was larger. A state education system had conceded that there was a Haitian population in New York substantial enough and organised enough to have to be counted. Haitians had arrived at that point through two decades of court cases and street protest over detention, deportation and refugee status, and the language ruling registered the political weight those years had accumulated.

Haiti's National Truth and Justice Commission was set up after the junta fell, to establish what had been done between 1991 and 1994. Its final report, Si m pa rele, appeared in 1997. On rape it had forty eight full time caseworkers at work across the country for several months, and they documented one hundred and forty cases of politically motivated rape. The report itself estimated that the Cedras regime had committed one thousand six hundred and eighty, and noted that support groups spoke of thousands of cases. The commission's own director later said in public that the body had accomplished nothing. The other main count was smaller still. A July 1994 report by Human Rights Watch and the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees rested on testimony from sixty six victims, together with twenty one cases investigated by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Twelve per cent of reported cases of sexual abuse under the junta involved victims who were minors.

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.