ArcaMax

In Haiti, history repeats itself — repeatedly.

And for what remains of Haiti’s troubled government, history seems to keep getting worse.

Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry and Kenyan President William Ruto signed an agreement in early March to fast-track a long-delayed deployment of Kenyan police officers to confront spiraling violence in the island nation.

But a day later the Kenyan government put the brakes on the deployment. The feckless Prime Minister Henry, long propped up by Washington, resigned overnight.

Kenya would have to pause the deployment, they announced, and would reevaluate once a new Haitian government is in place.

If only it were that easy. As tough as it may be to install a new Haitian government, it too often has been harder still to keep one in place.

The news reminded of my last trip to Haiti. With a group from the Committee to Protect Journalists, on whose board I was a member, I met in early 2004 with then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a charismatic priest from the slums who first was elected in 1990 with about two-thirds of the vote.

Jubilant Haitians hoped in Aristide’s first go-round in the 1990s that he would bring calm and prosperity to the poorest country in this hemisphere. Members of the country’s military and other elites were not so sure. Their skepticism proved prescient. He lasted less than a year before he was pushed out by a coup.

Haiti lurched between military and elected governments for the rest of the 1990s. Finally, Aristide, still popular with the poor, was re-elected in 2000, this time bringing a tougher attitude and a troubling new reliance on criminal gangs.

But that peace proved fleeting too. In late February 2004 gangs loyal to Aristide went on a rampage and unleashed chaos in the streets of the capital Port-au-Prince. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s pledge of support for a proposed international peace plan was roundly rejected.

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