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Istwa Nou

We Haitians have always known who we are and where we are going. Every generation sets out for it, and in every generation something interrupts our journey, our walk. Sometimes it comes from outside. Sometimes it comes from among us. Those interruptions are in this chronology because they happened; they're not who we are. We have never been defined by those off-road moments; and we have never internalized them.

We keep marching.

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The 1900s

1 entry · 1 year recorded Dechoukaj

1993

1 entry
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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Robert Malval held the title of prime minister and could not get into the ministries he nominally ran. What had been inside was carried off, down to the fixtures in the bathrooms. He proposed a conference in Port-au-Prince bringing together every party to the conflict. Foreign governments liked the idea and Aristide vetoed it, having learned at Governors Island what an agreement with the officers was worth. Malval resigned on 15 December as he had promised, was persuaded to stay on as caretaker, and was ordered by Aristide to start nothing new. A poor man in the capital told a reporter that the outside world should either bring the president back or admit that it had failed and leave Haitians alone. A member of the elite said the officers had no sense of nation and no care for what happened to Haiti, the group the writer Herbert Gold labelled the Morally Repugnant Elite. The United States, Canada, Venezuela and France demanded that Cedras go by 15 January. Cite Soleil burned.

Robert MalvalJean-Bertrand AristideHerbert GoldRaoul Cedras Port-au-PrinceCite Soleil
Where this comes from Heinl, R. D., & Heinl, N. G. (2005). Written in blood: The story of the Haitian people. University Press of America.HT-WIB-000724HT-WIB-000725

A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.

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