Sergeants remove a general and a Duvalier man takes over

In September 1988 non-commissioned soldiers of the presidential guard threw out General Henri Namphy, three months after he had thrown out President Leslie Manigat. The revolt came from the ranks, and it was set off by the killing of worshippers at a Port-au-Prince church that soldiers had watched without moving. The men who made the coup could not agree on a leader. The figure who came out on top was Prosper Avril, an officer who had spent his career inside the Duvalier system, had managed the family's money abroad, and had sat on the first military council in 1986 until protests forced him off it. Haiti had now had four governments in thirty one months, each arriving on a promise to clear away the last regime and each staffed by men from it. Avril would hold on until March 1990. By then the pattern was familiar enough that Haitians had stopped expecting the next removal to change anything.

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.