Round Five in Haiti

...At the same time, the State Department's refusal to give the civilian President any other encouragement bolstered those who were charging that he was merely Namphy's puppet...

...He had been more explicit than the other three candidates in promising to separate the police forces from the Army and to shake up the entrenched officer caste...

...He was little-known outside of Haiti before February 1986, when he advised JeanClaude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier to hang on in the face of widespread rioting— making our State Department's announcement that the dictator had fled a week premature...

...Anti- American...

...After the election was aborted on the 29th, Avril was back in command of the Presidential Guard, a formidable power base...

...A peasant strike against the food marketing network could cripple the capital in a few days...

...Manigat's fall was scarcely good news for Haiti's fractured democratic Opposition...

...Yetto rid the country of its poverty, illiteracy and corruption would require the kind of leadership Daniel Fignole provided in the 1940s and '50s...

...AFTER THE DUVALIERS Round Five in Haiti By Selden Rodman How many military coups will it take before Haiti, the most impoverished and badly governed nation in the Western Hemisphere, is stable enough for democratic elections...

...But in this game of lethal musical chairs there remains another key player, Colonel Jean-Claude Paul, the just dismissed commander of the 700-man Dessalines Battalion, located next to the Presidential Palace...

...Apparently the President's sympathy did not run so deep as to move him to deport Jean-Claude Paul...

...Avril was propelled to power September 17 after Namphy's arrest by a group of noncommissioned officers who were furious that the Army stood by during the Tonton Macoute massacre of Catholic communicants on September 11...

...When he told a reporter that there was only one voter in Haiti, the Army, he wasn't being facetious...

...Selden Rodman, a longtime contributor to The New Leader who has had a home in Haiti for the past 16 years, is the author of "Haiti: The Black Republic" and the just published " Where Art Is Joy: Haitian Art, the First Forty Years...

...On January 17 of this year, General Namphy staged a "controlled" election that resulted in the installation of Leslie F. Manigat as President...

...The NCOs were led by Sergeant Joseph Hébreux, and some of them wanted to make him president...

...Instead, the book—which gives some credibility to widely believed gossip, such as that concerning Baby Doc's alleged homosexuality and his wife's brazen adultery in the Palace— seems to have been taken as an affront to Haiti's good name...

...During my August visit to Haiti, my son and I were approached half a dozen times one night on the streets of Pétion-Ville Gust outside of Port-au-Prince) by hustlers trying to sell us cocaine and heroin...

...That left the civilian President without any troops, obliging him to surrender and accept exile...

...Unhappily, Haiti has not found his equivalent in the '80s...

...When the heat was on, however, he double-crossed the civilian President, joining forces with Namphy and Avril...

...During his decades of exile from Duvalierist Haiti, Manigat had lived in Caracas...

...A couple of days after the coup a noncommissioned officer at the Palace, speaking to a friend of mine, said that General Avril would be given 15 days to "do the job...

...After ruling 90 days as dictator, Namphy was in turn ousted on September 17 by a group of noncommissioned officers and consigned to the Dominican Republic as well...

...Three monlhs later he failed to come to Namphy's side, and Avril took power...

...Prosper Avril graduated at the head of his class from Haiti's military academy and has earned a law degree...

...But the most formidable nonmilitary figure in Haiti is Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, leader of a nationwide organization called Mouvement Paysan Papay—Papay being a village near Hinche on the Central Plateau where Chavannes lives and has his headquarters...

...I was told by friends who should know that it was indeed the almost certain victory of the Left-leaning Gourgue on November 29 that drove the military to act...

...On the subject of drugs, Manigat said: "Haiti doesn't have a drug problem...

...This would endear him both to the Americans and to that part of the Haitian elite not involved in the drug trade...

...I asked a prominent Haitian journalist in Port-au-Prince why Chavannes was being treated with such respect...

...The military, though, became increasingly irritated with Manigat when U.S...

...Chavannes was arrested there while I was in Haiti and appeared in court on August 22 to answer charges of incitement to riot...

...But once the pleasure-loving millionaire "President for Life" and his rapacious wife took flight—because their desperate resort to Dessalines' famous advice, Coupez têtes, brûles cailles...

...This August, on my third trip to Haiti in nine months, I talked with friends who had been close to Leslie Manigat...

...He was not held...

...He managed to shuffle the commanding officers and then placed Namphy under house arrest because the General insisted on making some reassignments of his own—one of which would have in effect kicked Jean-Claude Paul upstairs...

...If Graham Greene's lurid descriptions of the terror under Papa Doc's Tontons Macoutes in The Comedians 30 years ago tended to frighten tourists away, what, it is asked, will be the effect of Abbott's charge that Baby Doc and Michelle staged a voodoo ceremony in the Palace on the eve of their departure at which live babies were sacrificed...

...The inexperienced 27-year-old deferred to Avril without hesitation, but he has since made himself a fixture in the new President's Palace office...

...had boomeranged— Avril was called back to the Palace in his old role as adviser—this time to General Namphy...

...As the November 1987 election drew near, Avril was oneof the "Duvalierists" fired by Namphy to please Leftist presidential candidate Gérard Gourgue, the f rontrunner and the supposed beneficiary of American protection...

...It is also conjectured that Manigat fell because Washington, irritated by Paul's proximity to the well-meaning, idealistic President, failed to renew aid to Haiti...

...Why should they now deny it to a democratic, honest, competent government like mine...

...But they have refrained from attempting to mobilize their constituencies— no doubt out of fear for their lives...

...A slippery figure, Paul is currently under indictment in Miami on drug-trafficking charges...

...Last November 29, troops under the command of General Henri Namphy—who 21 months earlier engineered the demise of the three-decadeold Du valier dynasty and named himself interim President—joined with Duvalierist Tontons Macoutes to shoot up what Haitians had hoped would finally be their day at the polls...

...The fact is that Manigat came close to prevailing over the military in June...

...That sort of thing...

...I asked...

...Abbott concludes with a chapter excoriating Namphy for standing by while the Macoutes and his soldiers turned last November's election into a bloodbath...

...His appointment of the upright Major Hérard Abraham to replace Namphy as commander in chief of the Army, and of an 11-man Cabinet containing only one military man, was well received at the U.S...

...President Avril's credibility would be greatly enhanced if he handed over the acknowledged drug purveyor in the capital, Colonel Jean-Claude Paul, to the courts in Miami...

...It was Paul who enabled Manigat to "retire" Namphy...

...Radicals among the Roman Catholic clergy, with Radio Soleil as their outlet, could still be heard...

...The birth of a Castro-like movement is deeply feared...

...Is Chavannes Communist-oriented...

...Embassy in Port-au-Prince...

...Abbott has made the first serious effort to document what the Duvaliers did during their 30-year stranglehold on Haiti, and how they did it...

...The job, he left no doubt, was disarming the Tontons Macoutes—who outnumber the regular Army 2 to 1— once and for all...

...In contrast to Paul, Prosper Avril has over the years kept a low profile...

...Many Haitians believe that Paul's support of Manigat early on dissuaded Namphy from deporting the Colonel...

...The officer corps closed ranks and Colonel Paul, apprehensive about being isolated in a firefight, decided to desert Manigat...

...For whatever reasons, he is anti-Macoutes...

...Like Panama's General Manuel Noriega, he has no intention of showing up in court and seems ready to do whatever is necessary to avoid being extradited...

...Immediately afterward Prosper Avril—former head of the Presidential Guard and now a Lieutenant General— was declared by the Army to be President of Haiti...

...In November 1987 four opposition parties—headed by Gerard Gourgue, Marc Bazin, Sylvio C. Claude, and Louis Déjoie—had an estimated 90 per cent ofHaiti's2.8 million registered voters behind them...

...But Manigat's failure to either deport Namphy or hold him hostage in the Palace gave the civilian President's opponents a chance to pounce...

...In addition, a State Department spokesman soberly welcomed his statement that human rights will be respected...

...How is that...

...Whether Manigat had promised that the balance of the funds—traditionally used to "support" government payrolls, including those of the military— would be released by Washington, or whether it was merely assumed that they would be, his failure to deliver weakened him...

...Avril is known to have visited the United States the week before he took power, prompting ami-Yankee Haitians to charge that he is the CIA's man now that General Regala is out of favor in Haiti...

...The United States supported a full program of aid to the corrupt Duvalier dictatorship," he said...

...Perhaps because to have done otherwise would have touched off a nationwide revolt," he said...

...I sympathize and would like to help Washington in any way I can...

...Your country admittedly has an enormous one...

...No, I don't think so...

...Only to the extent that he opposes your so-called 'humanitarian aid,' which plays havoc with the peasant economy...

...This enhanced his independence from the Armed Forces, who had sponsored his election...

...History has repeatedly shown that the impoverished, long-suffering Haitian peasantry will tolerate military rule only so long as it guarantees minimal safety and stability...

...When I talked with Manigat in the Palace last March, he seemed curiously passive and blamed the American Embassy for his evading the problems that were threatening him...

...Cut off heads, bum huts...

...They clarified for me what really happened in the period just prior to that fateful June 19 when he was deposed...

...Interestingly, even in the period leading up to the latest coup freedom of the press and of the radio were not overtly curtailed...

...Others insist that Manigat was done in by his expedient deals with Namphy's second-in-command, Brigadier General Williams Regala, and with François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier's cruel police chief, Franck Romain (until recently the mayor of Port-au-Prince, at present holed up in the Dominican Embassy...

...Of course, muchmoreis needed...

...On June 19, a week after Manigat put him under house arrest, Namphy was picked up at his home by one of Brigadier General Prosper Avril's tanks and taken to the Presidential Palace, where he sent Manigat packing to Santo Domingo...

...Avril thus hoped to forestall an invasion that he thought his old enemy, Roger Lafontant, Baby Doc's former interior minister, was planning to mount from Canada, and he was unhappy that Namphy and Regala had not let him in on their plot to get rid of Duvalier...

...Failure to do so could mean a swift end for his regime...

...assistance was not resumed, except for the "humanitarian" part distributed to the very needy through such agencies as care...

...His intimate connections with ruling circles there made it possible for him, as President, to procure oil at bargain prices when American aid was canceled following the election gunfest...

...Perhaps Namphy hoped a show of tolerance might influence Washington to restore full aid, or perhaps the situation was simply a reflection of the General's contempt for the power of the written and spoken word...

...Since Namphy's removal, there have been some faint political stirrings: Two of the opposition leaders, Claude and Déjoie, have publicly called for the holding of elections within the next 12 months...

...Perhaps, too, Avril worried that his serving as accountant for Baby Doc's fortune might be used as an excuse to remove him from the Army's chain of command in Duvalier's absence...

...IN the month before the Avril takeover, advance copies of a forthcoming book by Elizabeth Abbott entitled Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (to be published this month by McGraw Hill) became the focus of amajor assault in the Port-au-Prince newspapers—an assault the Namphy government countenanced and perhaps inspired...

...The critics are especially angered by the fact that the author of Haiti happens to be General Namphy's sister-in-law, and that she collected her damning stories while serving as Reuters' correspondent, presumably with access to official documents and sources of gossip in the Palace itself...

...But the most urgent task facing Avril is disarming the Duvalierist thugs...

...Those bags of rice distributed free by care, for example, have caused the Haitian rice-growers' prices to fall catastrophically...

...He is a smart man—on that all agree...

...The four candidates have remained free amid the turmoil of the past year...

...One might think that Namphy and his cronies would have been delighted to see the public's attention diverted from their own crimes to earlier and more atrocious ones committed by the regime they helped topple...