Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  “So what do you see yourself doing here?” the pygmy asked, his voice all high and reedy.

  “Investigations and interrogations,” Terry said.

  The pygmy scribbled out the first chapter of his memoirs. Then he looked up.

  “Do you speak French?” he asked in French.

  “A little,” Terry said in French. He’d had four years in high school.

  The pygmy wrote out Chapter Two.

  “Do you enjoy a challenge?” he asked—un défi.

  “No,” Terry said, thinking that a défi was a defeat.

  The pygmy went back to Chapter One and began to revise.

  “Thank you,” the pygmy eventually said.

  “My pleasure,” Terry said.

  The pygmy sent Terry to Jérémie.

  When he got to Jérémie, Terry had another interview, this time with the commandant of the UNPOLs, a tough nut of a Québécoise named Marguerite Laurent. You take a group of twenty-four men and women, and you’ll have your Morlocks and your Eloi: Marguerite Laurent took one look at Terry, at his beefy face and hands, those slow-moving eyes, and she figured Terry was Morlock. She asked him what he wanted to be doing, and when he said “Interrogations,” she assigned him to patrol.

  Driving patrol was rough, boring work. In Haiti, UNPOLs dress in full police uniform, carry arms, and drive vehicles marked POLICE, but they don’t have executive authority. Executive authority is the power to make decisions, to effect change, to govern, to rule. In Haiti the government retained sovereignty, such as it was, and between the government of Haiti and the United Nations there was the complicated symbiosis of an unhappy marriage, both partners simultaneously powerless, frustrated, and trapped. At any given moment, the government could insist that that man get the hell right out of her house—and the United Nations would. This ain’t no colony: no man be tellin’ me what to do in my own state, bought and paid for with nothing but a lifetime of sweat and blood. But if the United Nations left, the government would collapse—and don’t be calling me, baby, when you got yourself a coup d’état or a revolution or an assassination. With you, lady, it’s always you don’t be needing me till you be needing me. I hope you enjoy exile, Mr. President. Live it up. I’ll just be laughing at your sorry ass. So Terry and his colleagues couldn’t arrest a suspect or even have him in their possession: if he started to walk away, they’d have no executive authority to haul him back to the vehicle. The Haitian national police, the PNH, on the other hand, had executive authority, but no transport, so pretty much all Terry and his colleagues did was haul Haitian cops around so they could exercise their executive authority.

  Say you had a suspect sitting in the cell in the commissariat up in Beaumont. Say the guy’s been eating his neighbors’ goats for months. So one day his fed-up neighbors rope him up, beat his goat-nourished ass near to death, then lead him down to the juge de paix, who hears the case and remands this suspected goat rustler into the custody of the PNH, to be transported forthwith to the pénitencier in Jérémie, there to await trial on charges of goat thievery. But the two hundred or so PNH who police the 350,000 citizens of the Grand’Anse have a couple of motorcycles and a broken-down pickup truck—that’s all. So Terry and his colleagues spent most of their time driving members of the PNH from Jérémie out to one police station or another, then driving back with a goat thief or two in the rear. If all that sounds a lot like chauffeur service, that’s how it seemed to Terry too.

  There was a story Terry had told me: “So one time these two police in Dame Marie call the commissariat in Jérémie. They need a lift ASAP to Chambellan to execute a warrant. So we drive to Dame Marie, get Tweedledum and his brother Numbnuts, drive them up to this village, where they tell us to wait in the car. Situation is under control. The blan might get people riled, and so me and this guy Beyala from Cameroon, we sit there by the car. This is normal. This is every day on Mission. In goes one guy and gets laid, comes out, doesn’t even bother to tuck his shirt in. Then in goes the other guy to bust his nut. Two and a half hours on the road to get there, two and a half to get back. Twenty minutes while these guys do their thing. I don’t think that’s a good use of anyone’s resources. They’re paying me one hundred K plus to be a taxi driver.”

  “One hundred K plus?” I said.

  “Salary, per diem, hazard pay, et cetera.”

  “And that’s the job?”

  “Mentoring, monitoring, and support. That’s support. You gotta believe, brother, I know something more about law enforcement than how to drive a four-by-four pimpmobile, but that’s what the job was.”

  “That must have been frustrating for you,” I said.

  “I was going out of my skull.”

  “What did you expect you would be doing?”

  “Making things better.”

  But what bothered Terry more than anything was the offense to his pride: almost two decades in law enforcement, and he was the moron who sat in the car. The PNH had a unit doing nothing but investigations and interrogations, the Police Judiciaire, and Gilles, the French guy assigned to monitor, mentor, and support them was a motorcycle cop back in the old country. Terry had known motorcycle patrolmen back home, and French motorcycle cops—let’s just say about the same level of mental acuity as their American counterparts. On those long drives up into the mountains Terry had time to brood.

  * * *

  Every morning when the UNPOLs saw one another they shook hands. The office would start filling up at about half past seven, and each newcomer would seek out and shake the hands of those already arrived. Then the Africans felt it impolite to begin the day without asking after one another’s families and affairs at home—even though they had seen one another just the evening before. All the UNPOLs quickly adopted this custom, even when shaking non-African hands. They would look deeply into one another’s eyes, like women.

  “I hope you slept well, monsieur.”

  “Not badly at all. But the heat!”

  “I trust your wife is well?”

  “Very well, grâce à Dieu! I spoke with her just last night. And yours?”

  “Ça va! Ça va!”

  “And the affairs of your country?”

  “There is talk of a coup. And yours?”

  “Tranquille!”

  All this produced considerable bonhomie and also demanded quite a bit of time: the first half hour of every workday was consumed with handshaking and salutations, and in the evening, equally elaborate farewells.

  The only one who couldn’t stand that crapola was Terry. The others would be shaking hands and bouncing their heads and smiling and being as friendly as a guy trying to unload a used Buick, and Terry would be waiting out in the patrol car, keys in hand. Once, to this guy Beyala from Cameroon, he said, “Doesn’t anyone around here want to get something fucking done?”

  “Du calme, Monsieur,” said Beyala. “Dans le chaleur, toujours du calme.”

  First stop was always the commissariat, where a dozen PNH were lounging in the morning sun. The PNH were playing dominoes and getting their shoes shined. Every now and again the PNH would impound a stolen goat or a pig, and these animals were tethered out front, munching on the dying crabgrass. When the animals got big enough, the PNH would barbecue the evidence. There was a fire truck parked out front too, a gift from the people of Taiwan: whenever Taiwan needs to clinch a close vote in the General Assembly, the Taiwanese buy Haiti a shiny fire truck or a bulldozer. This really ticks off the other Chinese, who make a fuss and threaten to veto the Mission’s mandate in the Security Council. In the end, the diplomats squawk and gibber, and every year the mandate gets extended. In any case, the fire truck hadn’t much changed the quality of life in Jérémie: a few years back, one of the local political parties burned down the house of a member of a rival political party. The Taiwanese fire truck drove over to the scene of the crime, but the pump didn’t work—no water—and the local population turned on the firemen and beat them. The fire spread and destroyed most of the old
wooden houses on the waterfront. Since then, the fire truck just stayed at the commissariat when there was a problem—not that it could have gone anywhere anyway, as the PNH had no gas.

  Terry and Beyala wait half an hour, until one of the PNH gets himself ready to head up to the mountains. Then they’re off.

  The roads in the Grand’Anse are terrible. There were a few that were paved, but all in all, probably no more than two or three kilometers, max. Otherwise, every road was half big rock, half dirt. You couldn’t even hope to go on these roads if you didn’t have a healthy four-by-four. There were huge divots, holes big enough to swallow a rhinoceros, and places where the road was simply washed away and you just had to make your way along the side of a mountain as best you could. Terry and the other UNPOLs had a good car—a solid Nissan Patrol, painted white, letters U N on the side—but Terry’s back after about a week began to hurt something fierce. He felt every divot and pothole like an electric shock somewhere around his sacrum, a rivulet of pain running over his ass and down the back of his leg. He was starting and ending his days with 800 mg of ibuprofen. He’d get on the phone with Kay back home, and she’d know just from the way he was breathing that his sciatica was killing him.

  All along the road, every couple hundred meters, there were big hand-painted signs explaining in French that this was the site of some international development project. A project outside Gommier to help farmers affected by hurricanes, paid for by the government of Japan and executed by the World Food Program. A pilot project to protect the banks of the Roseaux River, paid for by the European Union. The construction of a national school in Chardonette, paid for by the European Union. UNESCO was rebuilding the Adventist college Toussaint Louverture. In a large open field, the Inter-American Development Bank was proposing to build sixty latrines. The project had been scheduled to begin a few years back and would last four months, but the field was still barren and rocky when Terry drove by. USAID began a hillside agricultural program: nowadays the hill was nothing but rocks and stones. The IADB was rehabilitating the water supply of Carrefour Charles. There was a program to encourage the production of yams, paid for by the United Nations Development Program. A faded sign, almost falling down: CARE was putting in place a program designed to guarantee food security.

  Two hours of bad road later, Terry White, Beyala, and a PNH were in Beaumont. Beaumont was like the set of some spaghetti western set in a tropical country populated only by dirt-broke black people. A single street, wooden houses, some drinking establishments, folks splay-legged in front of their houses, chewing idly on toothpicks, the ladies in kerchiefs, the gentlemen in big straw hats, tethered donkeys raw to the withers standing there under the burden of an overstuffed saddlebag or a few bags of charcoal, nobody moving, the day hot. Flies buzzing, and every eye is on you.

  Terry parked out in front of the local police station, where the chef was a little guy with glasses covered in a film of dust and the apologetic air of a disorderly professor, as if he had expected the blan tomorrow or the day after that, or was it yesterday.

  The chef rose with a start when they came in; then, gathering his wits about him, he extended a long, strong hand. The other PNH was unshaved, fat, chewing on his own tongue as if it were a piece of gum. Now he was sitting on a three-legged stool, trying to balance with only moderate success on just two legs while Terry inspected the register.

  The names of the suspects and their crimes were written in beautiful cursive, like the names on the Declaration of Independence. The PNH are supposed to write down everybody they arrest and everybody they let go. You subtract the latter from the former, and the remainder should be rotting away in the dank, dark cell. It’s not tricky, Terry figured. It really wasn’t. He looked at the register, and he looked at it twice.

  “Where is Neolién Joassaint?” he said.

  They booked him in two weeks ago, still haven’t let him go, still haven’t charged him with a crime, still haven’t transported him to the prison in Jérémie. But he wasn’t in the cell either—Terry looked. In theory, that’s extrajudicial detainment.

  “Neolién Joassaint?”

  “Here,” Terry said. “Look. He’s on your books.”

  The chef looked at the other guy. The other guy looked at the chef.

  “The juge de paix ordered him released,” the chef finally decided.

  Now, this is a pretty darned important detail. You take a prisoner into your custody, you should write down when you let him out. If you don’t do that, he takes off for the hills, how do you know the PNH didn’t bury him out back of the station? What they were trying to build in Haiti was a system of justice, effective bureaucratic procedures with checks and balances, allowing the police, on the one hand, to maintain public order and safety, but allowing the public, on the other hand, to audit the work of the PNH. Neither dictatorship nor anarchy.

  “Did he sign the thing for his liberation?” Terry not remembering the word for “receipt.”

  “Of course!”

  “Can you show it to me?”

  The chef let out an exasperated sigh. He pulled the whole drawer out of his desk, overturned a massive pile of papers on the floor, papers going back decades, little red bugs scurrying from the light. He started looking through the papers one by one, squinting at each.

  Terry went out for a smoke with Beyala while he looked.

  “It is not like this in my country,” Beyala said.

  “Bullshit,” Terry said.

  Terry had been on patrol with police from a dozen countries, and everybody said their country was better than Haiti. If you listened to the Africans, you’d think Cameroon, Tanzania, Niger, and Benin were little Switzerlands, they were so efficient; the people were so honest; the ladies so fat and lovely. Sri Lanka was swell. No place beat Nepal. The Philippines were fantastic. Only Haiti sucked.

  Twenty minutes later the chef still couldn’t find the receipt. No one had a clue whether the PNH beat the guy to death and buried him, or whether he escaped and they were too embarrassed to mention it, or whether he was released legitimately.

  Terry wrote all this down in his notebook. That’s all he was expected to do: take notes. That’s all he had the power to do.

  Thus he had monitored.

  Next came “mentoring.”

  That’s when Beyala suggested that they buy some envelopes, organize the receipts by month. The chef put his lips together, then inhaled through his nose. He shook his head sadly.

  “Unfortunately, we do not have the means to acquire office supplies,” he said.

  The words “office supplies” sounded soft and effete in his mouth.

  “Haiti is a very poor country,” he added.

  The way Terry saw it, poverty was like a fast-running river sweeping every Haitian and his responsibilities downstream. The poverty of the nation excused every personal fault. C’est pas faute mwem, the Haitians said: It’s not my fault.

  Beyala looked stern. “In my country, if we have no money to buy envelopes, we use our personal funds,” he said. “We care about our job. For us, it is a pleasure to do one’s duty.”

  The chef nodded, as if he had absorbed an important lesson. Pleasure equals duty.

  Then Beyala lectured on handcuffs and their proper use. The UNPOLs were supposed to give a little speech to the locals about some aspect of good policing. Somebody gave the UNPOLs the lesson in their Sunday meeting, then they spread the gospel all week long. This week it was handcuffs. Last week it was the role of the juge de paix. The week before that it was arrest warrants. The guy chewing his tongue on the stool zoned out. His eyes went glassy—no exaggeration, like he had a 103-degree fever. The chef nodded his head seriously.

  “The handcuff, what is it?” Beyala began. “It is a tool for the control of the prisoner. When the prisoner is handcuffed, he is in your charge and entirely your responsibility. What are the three circumstances under which the handcuff is to be employed? Alors…”

  Long silence sometime thereafter i
ndicated to all present that Beyala was done.

  They have mentored.

  Now it was time to “support.”

  Out came the prisoners. An old guy, a young guy, both handcuffed with the plastic flexi-cuffs the UN gave the PNH. (“The prisoner may be restrained only when the liberty of his or her hands might constitute a menace to the security of others…”) They looked docile enough, but the young one was accused of threatening to kill his uncle in a beef over a pig. The old one had gone and rooted around in some other guy’s field like a wild boar—he was charged with dévastation de champs. No one knew why; in Haiti, no one ever knew why. The old one looked guilty, like a dog with his head in the garbage.

  The fat PNH stopped chewing on his tongue.

  “Au revoir, Messieurs!” he said to the prisoners. “You are going to travel today like a pair of princes!”

  When they finally got back to the commissariat, the PNH took the prisoners inside, where they passed out of Terry’s life forever.

  They have supported.

  * * *

  During Terry’s first few months in Jérémie, a couple of other plum posts on the org chart came open. There was the coordinateur. Reporting and Planning. Mentoring Support. Admin, Logistic, and Personnel. The guys who did riot prevention. There were maybe three dozen cars in the whole Grand’Anse—and even Traffic would have been a step up. Guys who had less experience than he had, guys who didn’t even know how to turn on a computer, were getting those jobs. Traffic went to that little Indian guy, Sunderdarbashan, who was best friends with Marguerite Laurent; when Marguerite Laurent saw him, she wrapped her arm around him and said, “Go get ’em, buddy.” That kind of shit drove Terry crazy. He didn’t think that was how an office should be run, on the basis of whether Marguerite Laurent thinks you’re a cutie-pie.

  After the Sunderdarbashan incident, Terry got into it with Marguerite Laurent.

  “What is it going to take for me to get treated with some respect around here?” he said.

  Terry could be a forceful guy, and the way he said it, in retrospect, was maybe a little heavy-handed, like he was trying to intimidate her.