15 to 18 September 1994 · Haitianspan
Carter talks past the deadline and the invasion becomes a landing
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On 15 September 1994 President Bill Clinton told Americans that his country had to act in Haiti, naming the murder of Jean-Marie Vincent and the rapes carried out under the junta. General Raoul Cedras answered from Port-au-Prince that he would sooner die than leave his country in dishonour. Nine warships already stood off the coast with an amphibious task force of eighteen hundred Marines aboard, and the carrier Eisenhower was steaming south with combat elements of the 10th Mountain Division. Into that situation walked Jimmy Carter, who had appointed himself envoy, with Senator Sam Nunn and Colin Powell alongside him. They worked on the junta through Saturday night and all of Sunday while Clinton granted one extension after another. At half past six on Sunday evening Clinton gave Carter thirty minutes. The junta signed. President Emile Jonassaint, eighty-one years old and old enough to remember the first American occupation, went on television before midnight to tell Haitians an accord had been reached. The landing set for one minute past midnight went ahead as a permissive entry.
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