1990s to 2010s · Africanspan

After the Cold War the West rediscovers African human rights

Reid tracks the swing from famine guilt to structural adjustment to the war on terror.

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1990s to 2010s · Africanspan

Elections spread across Africa without accountability following

Kerekou conceded in 1991. The Ivorian loser refused to leave in 2010. Reid says the ballot proves little.

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1990s to 2010s · Africanspan

Warlords trade minerals for guns as African states come apart

Reid reads the wars of these decades as nineteenth century politics returning with cheap rifles.

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1990 · Diasporayear only

The largest Haitian demonstration in New York is about blood

The Centers for Disease Control had barred Haitians from donating, and the community filled the streets.

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1990 · Haitianyear only

A radio story about a child servant becomes a school

Maurice Sixto told Ti Saintanise on Haitian radio and a Swiss organisation answered it.

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1990 · Datasetyear only

Forty six thousand assembly jobs in 1990 fall to five thousand by 1995

Sanctions after the coup against Aristide took the only growing sector in the economy.

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15 to 22 January 1990 · Haitianspan

Avril buys a crowd at three dollars a head, then shuts the press

Within a week the general who paid for his own welcome had put Haiti under a state of siege.

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February to 10 March 1990 · Haitianspan

An ambassador threatens a general's bank accounts and he resigns

Eleven parties demanded that Avril go. What moved him was a conversation about money.

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March to August 1990 · Haitianspan

The interim president reigns while the army goes unpaid

Armed men seized six nuns the day her cabinet was installed, and the oil ran out in August.

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4 March 1990 · Haitian

An accord puts the Council of State above the provisional presidency

Pascal-Trouillot takes the office while the council keeps the oversight.

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10 to 13 March 1990 · Haitianspan

A judge too close to Avril steps aside and Haiti gets a woman president

Ertha Pascal-Trouillot took the sash from a general who said the army awaited her orders.

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12 March 1990 · Haitian

The American ambassador compels Avril to resign and leave the country

The fourth military government in four years ends with a push from the embassy.

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13 March 1990 · Haitian

A judge of the supreme court takes the presidency for eleven months

She had already been the first Haitian woman to sit as a judge at every level of the courts.

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10 April 1990 · Diaspora

Fifty thousand Haitians cross the Brooklyn Bridge over a blood ban

Lower Manhattan stopped moving, and months later the federal agencies dropped the label.

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1990 · Haitianyear only

Aristide wins seventy percent and starts collecting import taxes

The tax office recorded a historic revenue increase, and the families who paid it began organising.

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Summer 1990 · Diasporaseason

Rara appears in Prospect Park on a Brooklyn Sunday

Hundreds of Haitians were dancing behind drums and bamboo trumpets in the middle of the park.

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Until the early 1990s · Haitianapproximate

Rural birth certificates carried the word peasant

Where a Haitian child was born decided which version of the state that child would meet.

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18 October to 16 December 1990 · Haitianspan

A priest enters the race in October and takes two thirds of the vote

Lavalas is the Creole word for the flood that scours a gully clean. It arrived in eight weeks.

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16 December 1990 · Haitian

Aristide takes 67.48 percent in Haiti's first observed election

A landslide that Dupuy calls a mandate and also a warning about Lavalas.

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16 December 1990 · Haitian

Haitians vote freely for the first time and choose a priest

Two thirds of the ballots went to a parish priest who had been in the race for eight weeks.

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16 December 1990 to 7 January 1991 · Haitianspan

Lafontant seizes the palace and a crowd burns the cathedral

Thirty seven died in a night that answered a coup attempt and an archbishop's sermon at once.

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16 December 1990 · Haitian

The man Haiti elected had been expelled by his own order

Ordained in 1983, thrown out of the Salesians in 1988 for preaching class struggle.

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January 1991 · Haitianmonth known

A Duvalierist tries to stop the inauguration and the churches pay

The coup failed in a day and crowds then turned on Catholic property across the capital.

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1991 · Diasporayear only

A book claims Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade

Published in Chicago in 1991, and still the first thing a reader finds on the subject.

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1991 · Haitianyear only

Baron Samdi is painted with Duvalier's face and blood streaming from his phallus

Edouard Duval Carrie put the dictator inside the spirit of the cemetery.

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6 January 1991 · Haitian

The army refuses to restore a macoute and the coup collapses

Lafontant held the palace and the interim president for a single day.

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20 January to 7 February 1991 · Haitianspan

Aristide takes the oath and retires six of the army's eight generals

A peasant woman handed him the sash. He then made Raoul Cedras chief of staff.

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February 1991 · Haitianmonth known

A priestess hands the new president his sash

Aristide swore the oath in Kreyol, four years after Catholicism stopped being the state religion.

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9 February to September 1991 · Haitianspan

Aristide governs around parliament and the officers start counting

A prime minister never submitted for approval, a youth delegation to Cuba, a crackdown on smuggling.

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17 February 1991 · Haitian

Preval sets out the Lavalas priorities to the National Assembly

Two weeks after the inauguration the new government states what it intends to do.

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September 1991 to September 1994 · Haitianspan

Forty one of fifty two rapes fall in the junta's final year

The weapon was added in the summer of 1993, around the accord that lifted the embargo.

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September 1991 · Haitianmonth known

Greene predicted Aristide would not last, and he lasted seven months

The coup sent more than forty thousand people to sea, with unknown numbers drowned.

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September 1991 · Haitianmonth known

Wealthy families buy the army eight months into Haitian democracy

Selected soldiers and policemen were reportedly offered five thousand dollars each to take part.

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27 September 1991 · Haitian

Aristide gives the bourgeoisie seven months and one chance

Dupuy reads the notorious speech as defensive, delivered by a president who knew.

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29 to 30 September 1991 · Haitianspan

The shooting starts at Freres and Sylvio Claude is burned alive

The radio stations went silent first, as they had before every Haitian coup.

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30 September 1991 · Haitian

An army unit under the police chief overthrows the government

Three ambassadors keep Aristide alive; the army keeps the country.

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30 September 1991 · Haitian

Cedras removes Aristide and rules for three years

The general the president had promoted in July led the coup that ended his first term.

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30 September to 1 October 1991 · Diasporaspan

Nobody would shoot the president, so they put him on a plane

A Venezuelan air force crew collected Aristide at three in the morning and Washington got a government.

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30 September 1991 · Haitian

Three years of military rule begin with sanctions that starve the poor

Bush cut aid on 1 October and trade on 29 October. The UN embargo followed in June 1993.

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October to December 1991 · Haitianspan

The junta finds a judge, a prime minister and one foreign friend

The Vatican was the only government on earth to recognise the men who removed the priest.

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September 1991 to January 1992 · Haitianspan

The assembly sector loses fifty thousand jobs after the coup

Value added in Haitian assembly plants fell from four million dollars to sixty thousand.

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2 to 5 October 1991 · Haitianspan

Washington calls the junta a pariah and the border stays open

The embargo was proclaimed with the Dominican frontier unsealed and the UN not bound by it.

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11 October 1991 to January 1992 · Haitianspan

An oil embargo, seven thousand boat people and a name nobody wanted

Rene Theodore's nomination lasted three weeks before a beating finished it off.

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November 1991 · Diasporamonth known

A camp at Guantanamo holds Haitians who tested positive

Razor wire, portable toilets, predawn sweeps, and a year and a half of it.

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November 1991 · Diasporamonth known

Two thousand people are held on the decks of Coast Guard cutters

After the coup against Aristide the ships that stopped Haitian boats turned into prisons with nowhere to unload.

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late 1991 to 1992 · Diasporaspan

A tent city goes up on an abandoned airfield at Guantanamo

Within days of a judge's order the navy was housing Haitians on a base the government called foreign.

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1992 · Africanyear only

UNESCO marks a slave route and Ouidah builds the monuments to go on it

Two famous trees on that road have no record before the decade the road was made.

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February to October 1992 · Haitianspan

Washington exempts the factories and Haiti paves the smuggling road

Fifty thousand assembly jobs gone, petrol at eighteen dollars, salmon on the tables of Petionville.

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24 May 1992 · Diaspora

Boats are sent back to Haiti without anyone being asked a question

The screening at sea, thin as it was, ended with a single order in an election year.

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19 June 1992 · Haitian

A leaf seller is arrested for calling out the name of a plant

Fo bazen was a medicinal herb, and it sounded exactly like false Bazin.

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around 1992 · Haitianapproximate

Asked to mark the quincentenary, Haiti's senior historian refuses

There was no discovery, he argues, because two hundred million people were already here.

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Autumn 1992 to 3 November 1992 · Diasporaspan

A million Haitians abroad make Haiti an American question

Remittances ran at 250 million dollars a year and the Black Caucus now had a Democrat to lobby.

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January to 8 June 1993 · Haitianspan

Clinton keeps the policy he attacked and the OAS mission fails

Caputo could barely leave his hotel. Bazin quit in June and the oil embargo went global.

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1993 · Datasetyear only

Florida microfilms the Paris run of a Saint-Domingue newspaper

A reel of film is why the runaway notices can now be read outside one reading room.

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1993 · Haitianyear only

The Neptune goes down and a Cite Soleil band sings the loss

More than two thousand people were aboard the ship between Jeremie and the capital.

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1993 · Haitianyear only

One executive's pay is 325,000 times the wage of the Haitians sewing his goods

Both figures came out of the same company's accounts in the same year.

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15 October 1993 · Haitian

Alerte Belance is cut apart at Titanyen and survives to testify

She came out of hiding because an accord had promised the president would return.

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Holy Week 1993 · Haitianseason

A straw Jew with a cardboard laptop waits on a Port-au-Prince roof

The figure wore a suit jacket, a tie and sneakers, and was due to burn the next afternoon.

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8 April 1993 · Haitian

A straw Jew on a roof holds a cardboard laptop

The effigy burned every Good Friday had been given a briefcase and a pen in its pocket.

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27 June to 3 July 1993 · Haitianspan

Aristide trades the sanctions for a promise and a date

Three days of shuttling in New York harbour produced an amnesty for the men who took the palace.

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1993 · Indigenousyear only

What lies on the surface of a Caribbean site understates it

Versteeg warned that scattered potsherds are a poor guide to how big a village once was.

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1993 · Haitianyear only

The United States paid the informant who built the death squad

Toto Constant was on the CIA payroll from 1992 while FRAPH peeled faces with machetes.

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3 July 1993 · Haitian

Governors Island trades sanctions relief for a paper restoration

Ten points, an amnesty and a timetable the junta never intended to keep.

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3 July 1993 · Haitian

The accord that was signed in July was dead by October

Amnesty for Cedras, a return date of 30 October, and a justice minister shot on the fourteenth.

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22 July 1993 · Haitian

Aristide's government in exile convenes the Miami business conference

Two hundred members of the haute bourgeoisie meet the president they helped depose.

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October to December 1993 · Haitianspan

A prime minister with no office and a third Christmas without fuel

Even the toilet bowls had been carried off from the ministries Malval could not enter.

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11 October 1993 · Haitian

A crowd at Port-au-Prince turns an American troopship around

A hundred armed men shouting Somalia stop two hundred soldiers from landing.

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11 to 14 October 1993 · Haitianspan

A hundred armed men on a dock turn an American warship around

FRAPH watched the news from Mogadishu and worked out exactly what Washington would not risk.

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1994 to 2001 · Haitianspan

Income of 270 dollars a head in the richest colony's successor

Saint-Domingue made three quarters of the world's sugar in 1789. Haiti now buys sugar abroad.

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January to April 1994 · Haitianspan

Rape becomes policy and Washington changes its man on Haiti

Randall Robinson stopped eating, six congressmen were arrested, and Clinton lost patience.

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1994 · Caribbeanyear only

Cartoons in the 1994 Dominican campaign make one candidate the Haitian

Five images, each one working the same border, the same lips, the same threat.

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8 November 1994 · Haitian

Haiti installs a ministry for women and then moves it four times

The army was dismantled and a decree handed its headquarters to the new ministry.

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22 April 1994 · Haitian

A massacre at Raboteau comes to trial six years later

Twelve men were sentenced in person and four more in absentia, Raoul Cedras among them.

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May to September 1994 · Haitianspan

The Security Council authorises an invasion and Cedras will not go

Remittances capped at fifty dollars, flights banned, and paratroopers rehearsing at Fort Bragg.

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September 1994 · Haitianmonth known

Aristide returns under threat of an American invasion

Washington restores an elected president, trains a constabulary and leaves within two years.

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15 to 18 September 1994 · Haitianspan

Carter talks past the deadline and the invasion becomes a landing

Thirty minutes of grace, a fax to the White House, and an assault fleet stands down.

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15 September 1994 · Haitian

Clinton tells Americans why their army is going to Haiti

The intervention is framed as restoring democracy against the hemisphere's worst regime.

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18 September 1994 · Haitian

Cedras signs while the 82nd Airborne is already in the air

The paratroopers turned around in flight once the general accepted a date to go.

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19 September to 10 October 1994 · Haitianspan

American troops land to cheers and find no one left to surrender to

The Haitian army changes into civilian clothes and walks home, leaving its barracks open.

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October 1994 · Haitianmonth known

American soldiers land and the elected president comes home

Three years and two weeks after the coup, a foreign army carried out the restoration.

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15 October 1994 · Haitian

Aristide comes home to crowds and to a programme he did not write

The restoration dismays the coup's backers and binds the president to their creditors.

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15 October 1994 · Haitian

Aristide comes back to a palace stripped of its toilets and wiring

A billion dollars pledged over five years, and fifteen million a month needed immediately.

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15 October 1994 · Haitian

Aristide abolishes the army that removed him

Every coup since 1915 had run through one institution, and he dissolved it in a morning.

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November 1994 · Haitianmonth known

Women's groups ask who will investigate the soldiers who came to help

The letter went to the Justice Ministry and no investigation was ever opened.

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November 1994 to June 1995 · Haitianspan

Gordon drowns Jacmel while the restoration is being celebrated2 sources

Five hundred dead in a storm, in the same season as the return.

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1995 · Haitianyear only

Trouillot shows where in the process the silences are made

Four moments in the life of a fact, and power gets a vote at each of them.

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1995 · Haitianyear only

Most of Haiti is locked out of its own courts by language

Eighty-five percent speak only Kreyol while the state does its business in French.

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1995 · Haitianyear only

The colony graded people by shade and the republic kept the scale

Independence removed the French. It left the criteria the French installed in place.

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1995 · Haitianyear only

A Haitian survey finds thirty seven percent of women report rape or sexual abuse

The United States embassy had cabled Washington that the reports were propaganda.

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1995 · Diasporayear only

Thirty hours a week of Haitian television in New York

Six cities carried the programmes and Montreal replayed the tapes.

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1995 · Haitianyear only

Haiti dissolves its army for the first time

Aristide replaced it with a police force while United Nations troops stood in the country.

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March 1995 · Diasporamonth known

A historians' association passes a resolution about the past

The AHA council decried the misuse of evidence in the claim about Jews and the slave trade.

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March 1995 · Haitianmonth known

A truth report of 1,200 pages reaches almost no one

Only the recommendations came out, which one advocate likened to a prescription with no diagnosis.

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September to 17 December 1995 · Haitianspan

Aristide keeps his promise to go and Preval wins on a quarter turnout

Eighty-eight percent of the twenty-eight percent of Haitians who bothered to vote.

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7 November 1995 · Haitian

Claudette Werleigh becomes the first woman to head a Haitian government

An office held since 1804 by soldiers and by men who governed with soldiers behind them.

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1996 to 2004 · Diasporaspan

An email list carries Haiti petitions for eight years

The Corbett List gathered leaders, academics and missionaries and outlasted every website studied beside it.

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1996 · Caribbeanyear only

A Dominican runoff is decided by an appeal to truly Dominican hands

Pena Gomez took almost 46 percent in May and lost the June runoff by two points.

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7 February 1996 · Haitian

One elected president hands power to another after 192 years

Preval takes the sash from Aristide, and the two men are enemies within the year.

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April to September 1996 · Haitianspan

Three laws in one year try to give the communes money

The councils created in 1987 had waited nine years for anyone to say what they were for.

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November 1996 · Haitianmonth known

A photographer is handed the job of raising the Baron from the dead

She had gone to a Port-au-Prince cemetery to take pictures and ended up doing the lifting.

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1997 · Diasporayear only

New York lets students sit the Regents in Kreyol

A symbolic win, since most Kreyol speakers had never been taught to read the language.

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1997 · Haitianyear only

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

Three and a half per cent admitted the practice, against fifty per cent Catholic and thirty nine per cent Protestant.

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the late 1990s · Diasporadecade

The designers of a Haitian website choose English first

Research into who would actually use it put Kreyol last.

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1997 · Datasetyear only

Haitians eat less in 1997 than they ate in 1962

Adult mortality rates were the highest in the hemisphere and rising at the end of the decade.

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1997 · Haitianyear only

Forty eight investigators document a hundred and forty rapes

The same report estimated 1,680 and its director later said the work had accomplished nothing.

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3 July 1997 · Caribbean

Patterson lets Haiti in and doubles CARICOM's population

Twenty-three years after the first application, a summit in Montego Bay let Haiti in.

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15 July 1997 · Haitian

A quarter of a million pilgrims bathe under the waterfalls at Sodo

Priests and priestesses cleansed the crowd with brooms while the water came down.

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1998 · Diasporayear only

A bill lets forty thousand who fled the 1991 coup stay

The group that won it had begun sixteen years earlier as a coalition for boat people.

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1998 to 2002 · Diasporaspan

Haitian creolists run a Kreyol list and then a Kreyol journal

REKA wrote to officials about the state's handling of the language and outlasted the forums around it.

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1998 · Diasporayear only

Six textbooks out of twenty-one mention the Haitian Revolution at all

A 1998 survey finds the event missing from most Western civilisation and world history books.

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September 1998 · Diasporamonth known

Georges wrecks the coast and Danticat puts 1937 into English

A massacre kept out of print for sixty years reaches readers as a novel from Brooklyn.

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1999 · Haitianyear only

A mambo says the repression stopped when the elections started

Protestant preaching against the temples went on, and the law now protected them.

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1999 · Diasporayear only

A Port-au-Prince bank becomes the first Haitian multinational

Unibank opened in 1993 and six years later had branches along the American east coast.

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spring 1999 · Diasporaseason

A student posts to a Haitian forum and gets no reply at first

Her second message, asking people to put their hands together for Haiti, started weeks of argument.

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15 March 1999 · Haitian

A US senator calls public health work subsidising witchcraft

Helms had read that a family planning campaign in Haiti was talking to Vodou congregations.

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9 December 1999 · Diaspora

Fifty thousand people have watched two men argue in a basement

More than any other play in the Haitian language, counted across both versions.

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