Haiti - Moving towards democracy?

The article provides an overview of the political development in Haiti sinc e 1957, with special attention to the development since the fall of the dic tator Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Dec) in 1986. Since then, the situation ha s vacillated between dictatorship and democratisation. The elections in 1990 were won by the radical Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas movement. We made some reforms as president, but was ousted by a military coup in September 1991. The military government was responsible for the killing of between 2,000 an d 3,000 people. It was forced to step down by international pressure and th e arrival of U.S. military troops in September 1994, and Aristide came back to power. In 1995, for the first time in the history of Haiti, an elected president s tepped down to let another elected president be sworn in. The new president , Rene Preval, was a close associate of Aristide. Since 1997 there has been much turmoil in the political development in Haiti. Finally, in March 1999 , there was an agreement between Preval and some of the opposition parties to have elections. These elections were finally arranged in May and July. T he offical results show an overwhelming victory for the party of Aristide, Lafanmi Lavalas, but the results are disputed by the opposition parties. Th e Organisation of American States, GAS, contested the formula to determine winners of the parlamentary elections.