Obituaries : Emile Jonassaint; Haitian President

Emile Jonassaint, 82, who briefly served as Haiti’s president during its recent military dictatorship. Jonassaint was president of the Constitutional Assembly in 1986 and 1987 and also served as a Haitian Supreme Court justice. He was named president of the troubled country in May, 1994, by the military dictators who had seized power in a 1991 coup that sent President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile. In the five months before Aristide returned to power, Jonassaint oversaw one of the military government’s harshest periods, when it invoked a state of emergency and expelled about 100 United Nations and Organization of American States human rights observers. Unlike the ousted military leaders, Jonassaint remained in the country after resigning the presidency. On Tuesday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.