He looks thin, I’ve heard. And old. Not the young, chubby tyrant who was smuggled out of the country with his spendthrift wife under cover of night, corpses smiling in unmarked graves around the country.

The infamous Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier returned to Haiti on Sunday, almost a quarter century after an American plane evacuated him to France, where he’s since been fighting with a Swiss bank over the millions he stole from Haiti’s national treasury.

In the wake of his departure in 1986, the streets of cities across the country erupted, with mobs publicly lynching Duvalier’s henchmen, bringing a bloody end the three decades of brutal dictatorship — father and son.

In the fall of 2007, President René Préval told reporters that Duvalier could return to Haiti but would face justice for the deaths of thousands of people and the theft of millions of dollars.

And yet, there he was, stepping off an Air France flight, dressed in a jacket and tie, greeted in the airport by a small gang of supporters.

Just when the country gets as unstable as a rickety rocking horse, it seems another bolt has been ripped from the frame.

So far, he’s said only that he wanted to be with his fellow countrymen on the anniversary of the earthquake, which killed more than 300,000 and left 1.5 million homeless.

But his timing also coincides with both the delivery of an independent report on last November’s messy national elections, and the original date of the second-ballot — since postponed to some time next month.

What does he have up his sleeve?

“We want him to be president because we don’t trust anyone in this election,” one of his supporters, Haiti Belizaire, told reporters in the crowd outside the airport Sunday. “He did bad things but since he left we have not had stability. We have more people without jobs, without homes.”

On walls still left standing around the capital, you can find pro-Duvalier graffiti alongside anti-Préval tags. Many people I’ve interviewed over the past year say his tenure, along with that of his father, Dr. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, was Haiti’s last era of prosperity, and they’d give up some freedom for a job and food.

Of course, none of them ever received an unlucky visit from a Tonton Macoute. None had a family member disappear in the middle of the night, taken to the torture chambers under the palace and never seen again. Most of the country’s population is under 21, and has no recollection of that era.

Let’s hope they don’t get a chance to experience it.

For all its messiness and allegations of fraud, Haiti still has a democracy.

A team of international experts delivered its report on November’s first-ballot to Préval last week. He still hasn’t publicly responded to it, but a leaked copy has been circulating: telling the president his hand-picked successor, Jude Célestin, should be ditched from the second ballot. Instead, its statistical analysis of ballot sheets revealed the third-placed kompas singer Michel Martelly had enough votes to bump him into second place.

Préval, not surprisingly, is dissatisfied with the report and questions its methodology, his aides have been saying privately.

So what next?

The capital of Port-au-Prince has been bracing for more political riots, since the ones in December calmed down.

What will the 800,000 people still living in ragged tent camps around the city make of all this? And how will the non-government organizations, most of which already enforce curfews for their workers and shut down at the threat of political violence, respond?

Will it mean the recovery from last year’s devastating earthquake, so slow to get started, will be even more delayed?

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There’s another former leader — of the opposite political persuasion — living far away in exile. If Baby Doc can return, can exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, too?

“I was shocked when I heard the news and I am still wondering what is the next step, what Préval will say and obviously what Aristide will be doing,” said Robert Fatton, a Haitian-born history professor at the University of Virginia and author of The Roots of Haitian Despotism.

“If Jean-Claude is back in the country I assume Aristide will be trying to get back as quickly as possible.”

Aristide was also flown out of the country by American pilots, after a coup erupted in 2004.

“If Haitian authorities allow Duvalier to return, can they thwart exiled President Aristide’s desire to come back to the country?” said Amy Wilentz, author of The Rainy Season, a book documenting the last week of Duvalier’s power and the rise of Aristide’s.

“Haitians need a steady hand to guide them through the earthquake recovery, not the ministrations of a scion of dictatorship,” she wrote in an email to AP.

“Let’s not forget what Duvalierism was: prison camps, torture, arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial killings, persecution of the opposition.”

A Duvalier supporter and politician said Baby Doc will speak publicly Monday. After he’s had some rest.

Whatever he says, it doesn’t bode well for Haiti.

A last sad twist to the story: the mass gravesites north of the city where some 200,000 earthquake victims were hastily buried served for years as the dumping grounds for the Duvaliers’ political opponents.

All those black crosses erected last week to remember the dead —they speak for more than good engineering and city planning codes. They speak for democracy.

With files from the Star’s wire services