Haitian creolists run a Kreyol list and then a Kreyol journal

A network of Haitian writers and linguists calling itself REKA, the Haitian Creolists Internet Network, ran a discussion list in Kreyol from 1998 to 2001, and at the start of 2002 began sending out a journal in the same language by email. The group used the list to write to Haitian officials objecting to how loosely the state handled policy on Kreyol and the resources put behind it. Kreyol is the language every Haitian speaks and the one in which very little is printed, so there are few places outside Haiti where a person can read or write it at length. Parham points to why REKA lasted while other Haitian groups online fell apart within months. Several of its founding members already belonged to an organisation with chapters across the United States and Canada, and they built the forum to extend contacts that existed on the ground before it.

In the early hours of 17 December 2001 about thirty heavily armed men drove pickup trucks into the grounds of the national palace in Port-au-Prince. Jean Bertrand Aristide and his family were at their private house in Tabarre and were unhurt. Presidential security, a police tactical unit and large crowds of the street groups known as chimeres drove the attackers out. Eight people died, five of them among the attackers. A former soldier named Pierre Richardson was caught at Terre Rouge and told reporters that the operation had been planned in the Dominican Republic by Guy Philippe and two other former officers, and that the opposition coalition had no part in it. Lavalas crowds burned the headquarters of Convergence Democratique and three other party buildings and set fire to the homes of Gerard Pierre-Charles and Victor Benoit. The opposition then argued that the government had staged the attack to make exactly that possible.

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.

Reniel Rodriguez Ramos worked through the stone tools from La Hueca and Punta Candelero to test whether the Huecoid and the Saladoid were one people or two. The test rests on a property of stone working. Techniques for making lithic tools change slowly and pass from one worker to another by direct instruction, which makes them the most conservative part of Caribbean material culture and a steadier marker of identity than pottery, where styles travel between communities that share nothing else. If the two groups belonged to a single culture, their stone assemblages should look alike. They did not. His results showed production methods holding steady across long stretches of time and differing between the two groups, which supports a picture of the early Ceramic Age Caribbean as several distinct cultures living at the same time in the same islands. Arguments about who the first islanders were have run on pottery for most of a century. This moved them onto harder ground.