By Tony Best From The New York Carib News

Historians and analysts don’t rate Prof. Leslie Manigat as one of Haiti’s great political leaders.

Not at all! As a matter of fact, they often berate as a “tragic” presidential figure, who loved political intrigue more than anything else and in the end it cost him the country’s leadership which he had craved and to which he was elected in 1988. Still, many nationals of the Creole-speaking nation view have kind words for the man who took over the leadership after winning a disputed election that many contend was rigged. In the end he was in office for less than a year, ousted in a military coup d’état by the same soldiers with whom he had reportedly conspired but whom he had sought to demote for insubordination once he was in office.

Still, many Haitians have kind words for him not as President but as a prominent and respected academician of the latter half of the 20th century, describing him and as outstanding intellectual.

Interestingly, it was the latter assessment of the elected President that the Institute of International Relations of the University of the West Indies endorsed as the school’s Director, Dr. Andy Knight, paid tribute to Manigat’s after his death late last in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.

Reflecting on the Manigat’s academic career, Dr. Knight said that he had “made a significant contribution to the development of tertiary education in the Caribbean” when he headed the Institute during the 1973-78 period.

As Dr. Knight explained it, the former director of the Institute “with his intellectual capacity mentored several groups of graduate students in international relations” and they in turn benefitted from his excellence in the classroom and the scholarship he took to the school in Trinidad and Tobago.

“Prof. Manigat played an influential role in formulating and articulating the vision and mission of the Institute which served to transcend linguistic and geographical borders.

“His passing has left us a profound sense of loss and the Institute of International relations joins with the people of Haiti and the academic community of the region to extend our deepest condolences to his wife, Mirlande, children, relatives and friends.”

According to Haitians in New York, Manigat, the son of a Haitian Army General, who once ran for the country’s presidency, =earned the anger of many nationals because he contested an election called by the country’s military autocratic military rulers but which was boycotted by the major political parties. Before the 1988 election, protestors took to the streets to vent their anger at the soldiers, who responded with bullets killing almost 40 persons. To this day, said Rico Dupuy, a Haitian spokesman in Brooklyn, members of the Diaspora insist he knew something about the massacre and went along with it. However, there wasn’t any hard evidence to support that charge.

“The allegation and suspicion followed him for the rest of his life,” said Dupuy.

Manigat wrote several outstanding books and he taught at key universities in North America, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. In 2004, he was awarded the Haiti Grand Prize for Literature and two years later he was unsuccessful when he made another run for the presidency.

His wife, Mirlande, was a presidential candidate in the 2010 election, running on the ticket of her husband’s political party. She too was unsuccessful.

For more on this story go to: http://www.nycaribnews.com/news.php?viewStory=4690

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