A priestess hands the new president his sash

Jean Bertrand Aristide took the oath of office as president of Haiti in February 1991 in Kreyol, and received the presidential sash from a manbo, a priestess of Vodou. Both acts were read exactly as he meant them. French was the language of the elite and Catholicism was its religion, official in law until 1987, and the new president used the language of the majority and the hands of their priesthood at the moment of assuming power. In 1995 he opened the gates of the presidential mansion and served food to beggars himself, turning a white house built on the model of the Petit Trianon into something that could be called a national palace. Underneath the symbolism sat a hard count. Five provisional governments held power between 1986 and 1991, and after the coup a military dictatorship under Raoul Cedras ran three separate administrations from 1991 to 1994.

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.

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.

On 16 December 1990 Haitians went to the polls in an election that international observers judged clean. It was the first time in the country's history that the outcome was genuinely open and the count genuinely honest. Since independence in 1804 Haiti had held rigged plebiscites and army managed successions, and the presidency had passed by coup far more often than by ballot. The winner was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a parish priest from the slums of Port-au-Prince who had entered the race two months earlier. He took roughly two thirds of the votes cast, about three times the share of his nearest rival, the World Bank economist Marc Bazin. The margin mattered as much as the result. A president chosen by that many poor voters carried a mandate for land reform, higher wages and the prosecution of the old regime's killers, and everyone who stood to lose by those things understood it the same day. Aristide would hold the office for seven months.