Six heads of state in four years

Prosper Avril overthrew Henri Namphy on 17 September 1988, the third change of government in Haiti in seven months. Avril, born in November 1937, was a career officer who had served both Duvaliers. He held the palace until 10 March 1990, when pressure forced him out and he handed over to General Herard Abraham. Abraham passed power to a provisional government under Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, a supreme court judge born in August 1943 and the first woman to head the Haitian state, whose task was to get the country to an election. Between the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in February 1986 and the vote of December 1990, Haiti had six heads of state in four years. That rate of turnover matched the worst stretches of the nineteenth century. It also made a plain point about the transition. A dictator can be removed in a morning by a crowd and an aircraft. The institutions that stop the next one take longer than that.

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.

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.

Before building Haiti Global Village, Henri Deschamps and his assistants studied what a Haitian internet would have to look like. Their conclusion was that its first language would be English, with French second and a small amount of Kreyol. The reasoning was demographic. The heaviest users would be Haitians living in English speaking countries, above all the United States, along with their children born abroad. Deschamps described the project as a bridge home for people who had left because they had to and who meant to return one day. The site was laid out as a town, with a central square named for Toussaint Louverture, a bulletin, a poll and a set of small squares called anba tonel, after the shelters put up in the Haitian countryside where people sit and talk. The choice had a cost. Users writing from Europe objected, and the exchange revealed that many of the American born posters could read neither French nor Kreyol.