Namphy removes the president he installed four months earlier

Leslie Manigat became president of Haiti in February 1988 on the strength of an election run by the army. In June he tried to act like a president, moving against the officers who had put him there, among them the barracks commander then under indictment in Miami for cocaine trafficking. On 20 June General Henri Namphy removed him and took the palace directly, suspending the constitution approved the year before. Manigat went to Santo Domingo. The lesson was plain enough to anyone who had watched the previous two years. Haiti had a charter approved by ninety nine percent of those who voted, an elected president and a body of law limiting what soldiers could do, and none of it weighed anything against one general's decision. The armed forces the Americans had built during their occupation between 1915 and 1934, which the Duvaliers had held in check by arming a rival militia, were now the only institution in the country able to settle a political question.

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.

The constitution promulgated in March 1987 was designed backwards from the thing it meant to prevent. Haiti had spent twenty nine years under a president who could not be removed, so the new text moved the running of the government to a prime minister answerable to parliament and left the president as head of state. It set out fundamental rights, made the judiciary independent, and handed elections to a body outside the army. It recognised Kreyol as an official language beside French, which acknowledged the ninety percent of the population who spoke no French at all. It was the most ambitious charter written in the country's one hundred and eighty three years. It was also written by and for a population that had never lived under the arrangements it described. Charters in Haiti had been discarded roughly once a decade since 1804. Whether this one could hold against the army, the old militia and the families who financed both was the question the next four years answered.

Haiti voted on its new constitution in March 1987 and nearly ninety nine percent of those who turned out approved it. The charter had been drafted after the fall of the Duvaliers by a commission elected the previous October. Among its provisions was one that had waited since independence in 1804. French had been the sole official language of the republic for one hundred and eighty three years, in a country where roughly nine people in ten spoke only Kreyol, the language that had formed on the plantations. The 1987 text gave Kreyol official standing alongside French, and the constitution itself was printed in both so that a voter could read what he was voting for. That decision reached further than any of the political clauses. A law nobody can read is a law written for somebody else. Making Kreyol official meant the state had to answer, on paper at least, in the language its citizens used to argue, pray, trade and complain.