THE WORLD - Former Haitian leaders beginning to stir - A deposed dictator and an exiled president are finding wistful backers. And others now down can't be counted out.

Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, still visible and sufficiently flush to fuel his promotional machinery from South Africa, nurtures the hopes of his supporters that he will one day come back to lead this country.

Closer to home, three coup leaders and an ex-president live in the shadows, aging and ostracized but not to be counted out in the seemingly boundless potential for political disruptions in Haiti.

Even as Haitians enjoy a respite from violence for the first time in decades, political forces given up for dead are showing faint stirrings of life. Some analysts dismiss the phenomenon as irrelevant musings of yesterday's men, but others point out that history here tends to repeat itself.

Nostalgia for the Duvalier era has made itself apparent in recent months with the establishment of the Francois Duvalier Foundation preserving the memory of the exiled Duvalier's late father, a celebration of what would have been the elder tyrant's 100th birthday in April and a sellout memoir of the president-for-life titled "The Misunderstood."

"More and more people are talking about the Duvalier period with positive memories," said Daniel Supplice, a teacher and historian who was a childhood friend of and political aide to the younger Duvalier, who fled to France in 1986 as pro-democracy forces fanned international condemnation of his human rights abuses.

"When Jean-Claude left, the population expected changes for the better," Supplice said. "On the contrary, things have only gotten worse."

Rural Haitians were removed from much of the repression trained on dissidents in the cities, so they felt little benefit from Baby Doc's departure and "couldn't care less about so-called democracy," he said.

"I've heard that Jean-Claude wants to return, maybe not as president but as a citizen," said Rony Gilot, who was Baby Doc's information minister and wrote the recent biography of the father.

"The Misunderstood" sold out its initial 1,000 copies within days of its February release, and a larger second printing is due out soon. Gilot, who still talks to the 56-year-old Duvalier in Paris by phone every few months, attributes the unanticipated interest in the late dictator's story to a nostalgia for a lost sense of order and national pride, but not for the stifling of personal and political freedoms.