1988, June: (The Manigat-Paul Alliance and the Namphy Counter-Coup: Boxed In on All Sides, Manigat Allies with the Disgraced Colonel Paul Who Unlike the Pope…

1988, June: (The Manigat-Paul Alliance and the Namphy Counter-Coup: Boxed In on All Sides, Manigat Allies with the Disgraced Colonel Paul Who Unlike the Pope Has Divisions, Namphy Ordered Transferred and Placed Under House Arrest, the Alliance Collapses Within Two Days as Namphy’s Subordinates and Prosper Avril Turn the Tables, Namphy Drunk and Depressed Announces on Television the Army Is Taking Over, Manigat Packed to Santo Domingo After Barely Four Months to Ponder History at the Concord Hotel, and Namphy Declares Constitutions Weren’t Made for Haiti): Boxed in on all sides and already compromised in the eyes of those with whom he had spent most of his life, Manigat did what any tactician would do — he made an alliance. That he chose as his partner the even more disgraced Colonel Paul was perhaps unfortunate, but unlike the Pope, Colonel Paul did indeed have the divisions. Opportunity came when Namphy, perhaps sensing something was afoot, ordered Paul’s transfer; in response, Manigat had Namphy placed under house arrest. The alliance was short-lived — angering Namphy’s subordinates, and some said Prosper Avril, whose hand they saw behind it all, who had initially sat on the sidelines while Namphy was removed, within two days Manigat had the tables turned on him. Namphy, angry and depressed, was in his cups when informed of the sudden resurgence of his fortunes. Not even taking time to sober up, he made an angry television announcement in the early hours of the morning to a weary nation that the army was taking over in name as well as in fact. Leslie Manigat, having been in office barely four months, was promptly packed over the border to Santo Domingo, there to ponder the vagaries of Haitian history in the relative comfort of the Concord Hotel. Engaging in a postmortem on his government, the professor revealed that General Namphy had never read the 1987 constitution. In an interview with Le Figaro, Henri Namphy declared that constitutions were not made for Haiti. The Manigat-Namphy affair — an intellectual undone in forty-eight hours by the very forces he had theorized about for twenty-five years, a general who had never read the constitution he was sworn to uphold, and an exile’s postmortem delivered from a Santo Domingo hotel room — compressed into a single episode the entire tragedy of post-Duvalier governance: the forms of civilian rule adopted and discarded with the same casual brutality that had characterized every Haitian political transition since Dessalines, the constitution treated not as fundamental law but as a disposable prop in a power struggle whose real grammar remained what it had always been — the command of armed men.