A political scientist gets four months in the palace

Leslie Manigat was sworn in as president of Haiti on 7 February 1988, exactly two years after Jean-Claude Duvalier's plane left. He was born in August 1930, trained as an educator and political scientist, and had spent much of the dictatorship abroad, teaching and writing about the country he could not return to. His presidency ran four months. On 20 June 1988 General Henri Namphy removed him, suspended the constitution approved the previous year and governed directly. The sequence showed where power in Haiti actually rested. The army had been created by the United States during the occupation that began in 1915. The Duvaliers, distrusting it, built the Tonton Macoutes as a counterweight and kept the two in balance for twenty nine years. With the militia broken and the family gone, nothing stood beside the officer corps. Constitutions, ballots and inaugurations carried on, and they carried on for exactly as long as the generals found them convenient.

In 1990 the Haitian Centers Council was among the principal organisers of the biggest demonstration Haitians had ever held in New York City. The target was a policy of the Centers for Disease Control that barred Haitians from giving blood. The agency had listed Haitian immigrants as probable carriers of the virus that causes AIDS, and the label followed Haitians in the United States through the whole of the 1980s, into their housing, their work and their children's schools. The council itself had been formed in 1982, when the Haitian Neighborhood Center in Manhattan, Haitian Americans United for Progress in Queens, Charlemagne Peralte and the Flatbush Haitian Center in Brooklyn and two other centres created an umbrella body. It went on to sue the New York Board of Education over underfunded bilingual programmes and to lobby Congress for asylum for the forty nine thousand Haitians who fled after the coup of 1991.

Haitians were to elect a president on 29 November 1987 under the constitution they had approved in March, and it was to be the first vote in thirty years that the army did not control. Gangs loyal to the old regime spent the night before shooting people and knocking the radio stations off the air with grenades. In the morning voters queued at a school on Avenue John Brown, five blocks from the palace. An army convoy stopped, its officers spoke with the armed men waiting nearby, and drove on. The gunmen went into the school and killed everyone they found, finishing with machetes. About twenty bodies were left. Similar attacks ran across the capital. By midday the military council had cancelled the election and dissolved the electoral council that had organised it, explaining that this would allow Haiti to have a president freely chosen by the people. The United States suspended all aid. Nothing moved in Port-au-Prince for days.

Trouble began on 29 September 1991 at the army base at Freres outside Port-au-Prince and at the Cafeteria barracks. The radio stations went off the air. In Cayes that night Sylvio Claude, an opposition leader who had survived years of Duvalierist prisons, was burned to death after leaving a political meeting. The next morning soldiers opened fire on Aristide's house in the suburbs of the capital, where he was resting after his trip to the United Nations. Troops still loyal to him reached the house around noon with an armoured personnel carrier. The French ambassador, Jean-Rafael Dufour, rode beside him for the six miles to the National Palace while the convoy was shot at along the way. Somewhere in the course of the same day Roger Lafontant was killed in his cell at the national penitentiary, and it was said afterwards that the order had come from Aristide in the last hours he held the office. Seven months of elected government in Haiti had ended.