CARICOM suspends Haiti weeks after Aristide is removed

The Aristide administration collapsed on 29 February 2004, the culmination of a four-year campaign that intensified after the contested legislative elections of May 2000. Smith argues CARICOM misread the situation badly, partly because it had been the only foreign presence at the internationally boycotted 2000 elections, which opponents mistook for an endorsement and which Colin Granderson said did tremendous damage to the organisation's credibility. After the removal CARICOM took firm positions on Aristide's Jamaican exile from March to June and on the interim government, and objected that the appointment of Gérard Latortue as interim prime minister had been initiated by Washington without regional consultation. Its own decision to suspend Haiti in March 2004 has not helped, Smith writes, since the isolation coincides with the damage of tropical storm Jeanne in Gonaïves and deepens Haitian cynicism about the region. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith argues that CARICOM's suspension of Haiti after the coup was counterproductive and that a hard line endangers future relations, a position he notes was already contested among heads of government.

An armed rebellion moved through Haiti in February 2004, and on the twenty-ninth Jean-Bertrand Aristide left the country aboard a United States aircraft. It was the second time he had been put out of the presidency. In 1991 the army did it and he spent three years in Washington. By 2004 there was no army, since he had abolished it, and the work was done instead by former soldiers and gang leaders who crossed in from the Dominican side and took town after town while the police stood aside. Girard places the departure inside a period of deep political division, which is the polite way of recording that Aristide had by then lost the students, the business class, the church hierarchy, most foreign donors and a large part of the movement that elected him. The plane carried him to the Central African Republic and eventually to South Africa. Haiti had produced another president whose exit was arranged in a foreign capital.

Clinicians reviewing outpatient charts at five community mental health clinics in the Boston area recorded whether a child had been separated from a parent or guardian. For Haitian children the note appears in fifty six percent of charts, against twenty seven percent for African American children and twenty two percent for white children. The separations were also much longer. The Haitian average came to forty four months, roughly double the twenty three months for African American children and the twenty months for white children, and the average Haitian child had been seven or eight years old when the separation started. That is the arithmetic of chain migration written into a clinical record. One parent goes first, works, sends money home and files the paperwork, and the child follows years later after being raised by a grandmother or an aunt. The clinic sees only the arrival. The four years happened in Haiti and reach the chart as a single line.

Historians divide the human story into history and prehistory, and the line falls where writing begins. Ehret throws the division out. The word was coined in a Europe that treated literate European civilisation as the standard measure, so any society that carried its past in oral tradition, in material culture, in language and in inherited practice was filed as existing before history, waiting in the dark for European documents to arrive and switch on the lights. Applied to Africa the effect is brutal. Tens of thousands of years of migration, metallurgy, crop domestication, state formation, art and philosophy land in a category whose name announces that they are not quite history. The same demotion covers indigenous America, northern Eurasia and Oceania. Whatever people have done, wherever they did it, is history, and the evidence is read with different instruments rather than lesser ones. This sits on a Haitian timeline because the ancestors of the people shipped to Saint-Domingue lived almost entirely on the wrong side of that line.