Istwa Nou

Before taking office Bill Clinton announced that he would go on returning Haitian boat people, reversing what he had said as a candidate. Aristide broadcast to Haitians asking them to stay where they were rather than take to the sea. The priest Antoine Adrien said plainly that the mixed signals from Washington were the reason nothing in Haiti could be settled. In mid January 1993 another OAS team arrived under the diplomat Dante Caputo, who hoped to place five hundred observers around the country. Crowds organised by supporters of the coup kept him nearly confined to his hotel. He met General Cedras and got nowhere. Marc Bazin gave up the de facto prime ministership on 8 June after almost a year in the job. The Haitian envoys Casimir and Longchamps then got the leaky hemispheric oil embargo made global at the United Nations in mid June, with an arms embargo alongside it. Caputo, now wearing a United Nations hat, summoned Cedras and Aristide to New York.

The two delegations came to Governors Island in New York harbour on 27 June 1993 and never sat in the same room. Dante Caputo carried proposals between them for three days. What emerged had Aristide name a prime minister, the sanctions lifted, the army and police reformed under a United Nations force, amnesty for the men who had staged the coup, and Aristide back in Haiti by 30 October 1993. The sanctions were the only pressure he held, and he surrendered them in exchange for undertakings to be honoured later by people who had broken every undertaking before. Cedras went home to a cheering crowd that expected fuel and imports. For prime minister Aristide named Robert Malval, a printer and publisher from the elite, who accepted in August and said he would serve only until 15 December. On 11 September macoutes walked into a memorial mass at Sacre-Coeur, took Antoine Izmery out at gunpoint and shot him in the street.