A migration law makes cane workers people in transit

From 1929 the Dominican Republic gave citizenship to anyone born on its soil unless the parents were in transit, a phrase that covered the children of diplomats and of people in the country for ten days or less. In 2004 the General Law on Migration, numbered 285-04, added temporary foreign workers, migrants whose residence permits had expired, people brought in without authorisation and anyone unable to prove lawful residence. Since almost all the workers recruited for the cane fields were Haitian, the new categories caught Haitian families more than any other group. Registry offices had been refusing birth certificates to children of Haitian parents informally for years, a practice well documented by the 1990s and fought by Dominican civil society. After 2004 the refusals had a law behind them, and the children of people who had cut cane for decades were treated as though they had just crossed the border.

On 5 February 2004 the FLRN seized Gonaives, the town where independence had been proclaimed two hundred years and one month before. Cap-Haitien fell on 22 February. By the end of the month the rebels stood at the edge of Port-au-Prince. Aristide resigned on 29 February and left the country, saying afterward that the American ambassador James Foley had forced the resignation and that he had been carried off against his will. Washington called it a rescue. Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre became interim president and invited American, French and Canadian troops in to hold the capital. In March the United Nations authorised MINUSTAH, a peacekeeping force under Brazilian command that stayed thirteen years. Aristide settled in Pretoria. Whether his removal corrected a democracy or interrupted one has never been agreed, and the argument has the shape of most arguments about Haitian sovereignty, with Haitians on both sides of it and foreign governments holding the aircraft.

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.

The debt began with loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s for projects that never paid, and compounded when governments borrowed again to service what they already owed. Export prices fell, terms of trade worsened, and states lost the revenue to run themselves. Africa's total debt went from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion by 1997, and interest on unpaid arrears took a growing share of national output that would otherwise have gone to schools and clinics. Western aid averaging 12 billion dollars a year through the 1990s was a stopgap, and it gave the donors an unprecedented voice in the internal policy of sovereign countries. The money came with conditions attached: liberalise, privatise, cut state spending on health and education. The campaign to cancel the debt was the newest in a line of public causes that began with the movement to abolish the slave trade, and like the missionary appeals of the nineteenth century it treated the continent as a condition to be corrected.