TEN YEARS AFTER.(The Talk of the Town)

In 1994, President Clinton sent twenty thousand American troops to Haiti for a novel purpose in the history of American military interventions: to restore an elected government to power. Promoting democracy has become one of the Bush Administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq, but ten years ago invading Haiti on behalf of democracy was a deeply unpopular decision. At first, the unusual display of political courage was rewarded with success: President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been elected by a wide margin in 1990 but was overthrown by a military junta several months later, was reinstated with almost no American casualties. The Haitian military, which had plagued the country with coups and violent misrule almost continuously since Haiti gained independence from France, in 1804, was disbanded. So were the paramilitary death squads, known as the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, whose acronym sounds like "hit" in French. American and international forces began to retrain Haiti's notoriously corrupt police. Within two years, almost all the American troops were gone. In this country, people's attention had already moved on.

To understand what has happened to Haiti since 1994, consider the fate of a stockpile of vintage American M-1 and M-14 rifles in the central coastal town of Gonaives. Having been provided in previous decades to the Haitian armed forces, the weapons were confiscated when the Army was abolished. But the ex-soldiers were never reintegrated into society, and Aristide refused to risk his survival on the fragile new National Police. Instead, he created and armed militias loyal to him and his Lavalas Party. Members of these gangs are known as chimeres, after a fire-breathing monster of Haitian mythology; in Gonaives, the local Lavalas militia took the initiative to name itself the Cannibal Army. In 2000, the Aristide government reportedly handed over the rifles to the Cannibal Army in order to protect polling places in a Presidential election that the opposition was boycotting because of governmental manipulation in earlier parliamentary elections. Once Aristide was reelected, the Cannibal Army moved on to extortion, drug running, and terrorizing the opposition.

Last fall, the Cannibal Army's leader was killed, allegedly by an Aristide supporter. Gonaives, a city with an insurrectionary history, began to seethe. In early February, the Cannibal Army became the Artibonite Resistance Front, and launched a full-scale revolt. "We are fighting Aristide with the weapons he gave us," the rebels' leader, who is the brother of the slain man, said. In the past few weeks, the revolt has spread to towns across Haiti's north. The turncoat militiamen have been joined, ominously, by figures from the dark past--death-squad leaders who have returned from exile and seem bent on seizing power. The turbulence is threatening famine in a country whose economy, never showing much of a pulse, has been almost obliterated by an American-led block on loans that has been in force since 2000.

Politics in Haiti is an all-or-nothing contest. Personal relationships and power determine the winners. The American intervention in 1994 seemed designed to help free Haiti from the logic of its own history. But the return to power of an elected president--a priest who raised ...