Haiti: General Without an Army

By Michael S. Serrill.

President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot was at home with her family when an army tank driver knocked on her door at 10 p.m. As gunfire echoed in the distance, he told her there was trouble and that she would be safer at the presidential palace, three miles away in Port-au-Prince, the capital. On the way, the driver stopped to pick up a second passenger, a heavyset, balding man whom Pascal-Trouillot could not identify in the dark. Only after arriving at the palace did the President learn that her companion was Dr. Roger Lafontant, former head of the Tontons Macoutes militia, and that she was his hostage in a coup attempt.

Lafontant forced Pascal-Trouillot to resign and named himself provisional President. He told reporters that his putsch had the full backing of the military, blustering that President-elect Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the radical priest chosen by an overwhelming majority last month and scheduled to take office Feb. 7, was a "nobody."

But Lafontant, a gynecologist who was the muscle behind the regime of exiled dictator Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier from 1981 to 1985, turned out to be a general without an army. In an unprecedented gesture of support for democracy, the Haitian military, led by army Chief of Staff General Herard Abraham, declared its allegiance to the government. Less than 12 hours after the coup began, soldiers stormed the palace, freed Pascal-Trouillot and dragged off Lafontant and 15 of his henchmen in handcuffs.

The coup was quashed too late, however, to prevent a bloody and destructive outburst of public anger. A mob scaled the 10-ft.-high walls of Lafontant's Port-au-Prince compound, killing a dozen suspected Tontons Macoutes holed up inside. Infuriated at what was seen as support for the coup makers by the conservative Roman Catholic hierarchy, crowds torched Haiti's 220-year-old cathedral and destroyed the Vatican embassy, stripping the papal nuncio down to his shorts before he was rescued and assaulting his chief aide with a machete.

By the time it was over, more than 70 people had been killed in four days of violence. Aristide helped to calm the rioting throngs by calling for "vigilance without vengeance." In hiding after several assassination attempts, he should benefit from the capture of his main enemy, which leaves the Macoutes without a central leader. But the public is still suspicious of the army's loyalties, and has demanded a search for Lafontant's accomplices.

The military's backing for the constitutional process was anything but certain when Lafontant initiated his coup. The swaggering ex-Interior Minister had defiantly returned from five years of exile in July, but the army had failed to act on a warrant for his arrest, even after he declared that Aristide would never take office as President. The defeat of the takeover attempt apparently owes a great deal to U.S. diplomacy. Ambassador Alvin Adams and other officials have spent months trying to convince the military that staying out of politics is in its best interest. When the soldiers heeded the advice last week and sent Lafontant packing, Adams called it a "glorious day for democracy." Aristide should now have his chance to halt Haiti's long spiral into chaos.

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/Port-au-Prince