A judge too close to Avril steps aside and Haiti gets a woman president

The 1987 constitution sent the presidency to a member of the Cour de Cassation, and the judge next in line, Gilbert Austin, was thought too close to the departing general to be able to govern. Austin removed himself. The post went instead to Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, at forty six the youngest judge on the court, appointed to it by a liberal justice minister during the years of the military council. Prosper Avril had agreed to leave office while refusing to leave the country, where he would have served as a rallying point for the right. American pressure settled that too, and on Monday at dawn a United States Air Force plane carried him and his family to Florida. Pascal-Trouillot was sworn in on 13 March 1990 as the first woman to head the Haitian state. General Herard Abraham handed her the blue and red sash and said that the army awaited her orders. In a white linen suit she told a cheering crowd that she wanted nothing except to serve the country. Elections were set for December.

Mutinous soldiers stormed the National Palace at half past five in the evening on 30 September 1991 and took Aristide prisoner. There was talk of shooting him where he stood, and nobody would do it. He was walked across the square to army headquarters instead, and from there the officers bargained with foreign embassies until they agreed to let him leave the country. He reached the airport by half past ten, met by the American and Venezuelan ambassadors, and waited among scores of jeering soldiers until a Venezuelan air force plane landed just before three in the morning. He flew to Caracas and on to Washington. Over the following days he gathered the members of his government who had escaped or who happened to be abroad, at the Haitian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Jean Casimir was his envoy there, Fritz Longchamps spoke for him at the United Nations, and the exile organisations in New York went back to the work they knew. Haiti now had two governments.

Legislative elections on 20 January 1991 passed without incident and with light turnout, leaving Aristide to face a chamber he did not control. Rumours in late January that Lafontant would be freed from jail brought barricades and burning tyres to the poor quarters; four macoutes were lynched and six people died as the army cleared the streets. Aristide left as planned for two days of talks in France with Francois Mitterrand. George Bush stayed away from the inauguration on 7 February 1991 and sent his ambassador and his health secretary instead. Aristide, thirty seven years old and from Port Salut, took the oath and accepted the blue and red sash from a peasant woman, then went to the cathedral for the traditional Te Deum while the ruins of the church burned a month earlier still smoked a few hundred yards away. He retired six of the army's eight generals with thanks for their service and named Raoul Cedras chief of staff. The next day he announced that Fort Dimanche, the Duvalier torture prison, would become a museum.

On Sunday 11 September 1988 more than a thousand people were at mass at Saint Jean Bosco in Port-au-Prince, many of them wearing white to protest against Henri Namphy's plan to rewrite the 1987 constitution. The priest was Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Armed men in red armbands, most of them former members of the Duvalier militia, came into the church, accused the congregation of being communists, opened fire and set the building alight. The attack went on for three hours. An army barracks stood directly across the road and the soldiers in it did nothing. At least twelve people were killed and eighty wounded. Aristide was not hurt. The following day several of the attackers appeared on state television, described what they had done and announced that they would do it again at any mass he said. That broadcast finished Namphy. His own soldiers removed him within the week. Aristide came out of the affair a national figure.