Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  The judge spoke with a microphone, but between the noise of the crowd and the noise of the generator powering the loudspeakers, I heard only words and phrases of his speech. He spoke for no more than twenty minutes, and of that, perhaps ten minutes were devoted to the judge waving at the crowd and waiting for it to calm down sufficiently that he might be heard. Then I heard him say that he was looking at a crowd of slaves. Master Hunger holds one whip and Master Corruption holds another. Master Empty Cooking Pot locks the chains on in the morning and Master Can’t Afford the Doctor counts heads at night.

  And Master Maxim Bayard is chasing down runaways.

  That’s why Master Maxim doesn’t want a road. Because he wants his slaves down home where he can keep an eye on them. Because Master Bayard knows what there is at the end of the road.

  Someone in the crowd shouts “Port-au-Prince,” and the judge shakes his head. The city at the end of the road—it’s a beautiful city, the most beautiful city there is. It’s a city where justice isn’t bought and sold. It’s a city where children aren’t hungry. It’s a city where the water is clean.

  At the other end of the long road was a city called Freedom.

  * * *

  Kay and Terry fought while the judge spoke. He just wanted her to be reasonable and get in the car, and she said, “Reasonable? You’re talking to me about reasonable?” He said, “Kay, it’s not the way you think,” and she said, “Don’t tell me what to think.” He said, “Kay, we’re getting in the car, and we are going to Port-au-Prince.” I don’t know what she said to him. The last thing I heard him say was that he loved her. Then there was a loud noise from the crowd, and when I looked back, Terry was standing alone. Kay had slipped out the back door of campaign HQ, maybe expecting Terry to follow her. But Terry had let her go.

  The judge finished his speech on the Place Dumas by asking the crowd to march with him to Port-au-Prince. The crowd had calmed down. The drums began to beat out a stately, almost funereal rhythm. Johel descended the stairs, and the crowd parted to let him pass. He crossed the Place Dumas. Terry walked beside him, a few steps to his right. The procession filled the Grand Rue, absorbing greater numbers as it went along until it filled the whole Grand Rue from Basse-Ville to the ice factory, a half mile or so long. They walked through the quartier populaire of Sainte-Hélène, with its dense, winding passages of cinder-block houses and the smell of shit coming from the black beach that served as the neighborhood’s latrine. At the rear of the procession were white Mission SUVS manned by UNPOLs, watching them.

  I walked with the crowd just as far as the iron suspension bridge over the Grand’Anse, a gift of the government of France back in the 1950s. The judge’s SUV was waiting for him at the far side of the bridge, the last paved road until Les Cayes, six hours to the south. I saw that Nadia was already in the car. The judge wanted to give another speech, but Terry whispered something in his ear. So Johel just waved at the crowd. Then he, Nadia, and Terry were gone in a cloud of white dust. Little children ran after them until they were out of sight.

  4

  The next day, Johel Célestin became a legend. He awoke as a minor Haitian politician, little known even in the Grand’Anse. By nightfall his name was known from Ouanaminthe to the Île-à-Vache, from Marmelade to Jacmel. If his name is still remembered today, it is because of what happened that August day in Port-au-Prince.

  I was not there, but I followed events on the radio. I was at the library the next morning when I heard the judge’s voice exhorting a crowd, and I knew that he was hitting all the right notes when Monsieur Duval, the librarian, put aside his book to listen. Then, when I stopped at the Marché Soleil to buy tinned anchovies, I heard the roar of a large crowd singing the Haitian national anthem. By now the streets of Jérémie had come to a halt as little clusters of voters gathered around each transistor radio.

  On Radio Vision 2000, the journalist on the spot estimated the size of the crowd on the Champs de Mars at about five thousand. Radio Metropole told us that the crowd fully filled the immense square. Signal FM said that women had begun to pass out, either from dehydration or from overexcitement. Radio Kiskeya reported that a fistfight had broken out but was quickly calmed.

  Now the announcers began to speak more quickly as the crowd descended the rue des Miracles, marching from the front gates of the Presidential Palace to the headquarters of the CEH. The marchandes who lined the streets around the Iron Market packed their wares and fled.

  The journalists were now agitated. The marchers found the rue des Miracles barred by the PNH and a squadron of Nigerian riot police, several hundred helmeted men carrying shields and waving batons. Behind them were water cannons. In the middle of the block was CEP headquarters, a modest concrete bungalow surrounded by a high fence. Soon the marchers were throwing rocks in the direction of the police, who responded by lofting back bombs of tear gas. “C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre!” cried the voice on the radio. The marchers remained resolute, drifting back until the gas was taken up into the southern-swirling wind, then moving forward again to assault the CEH’s protectors.

  Terry would later claim that what happened next was his idea. He had scouted CEH headquarters a week earlier and noticed that while security was tight out front, there was almost no one protecting the rear flank of the building. Another part of the crowd disbursed onto the street running parallel to the rue des Miracles, where they found the back entrance to the CEH guarded only by a single unarmed security guard, who, seeing this immense crowd pullulating with testosterone, armed with machetes, and advancing on him, fled his post. The mob surged. Now the crowd was sweeping over the iron fence and swarming up the very sides of the building, Spider-Man style, pulling themselves up the drainpipes and into the open second-story windows.

  CEH headquarters had been empty that day, owing to the menace of the protest. Before long, the building was overrun. The marchers now had the high ground and began to rain down anything they could find on the PNH and Nigerian soldiers below, from tea bags to boxes of printer toner. Out through the window and down onto the narrow street went reams of paper and three-ring binders that contained the numerous reports of well-paid electoral consultants; from the office of the director general came photographs of his three boys and his diploma from the Université d’Etat d’Haïti, class of 1971.

  Soon the PNH and the Nigerians gave ground. The crowd, cheering, could hardly believe that the battle was over so quickly. CEH headquarters was now in Johel Célestin’s hands.

  * * *

  (Just where did those immense crowds in Port-au-Prince come from? I would wonder about this also, until, from Radio Toussaint Legrand, I heard the following story.

  (Arriving by air in Port-au-Prince, whether setting out from Miami or Jérémie, you fly low over the vast slum of Cité Soleil. In the midst of the squalor and the garbage, the pigs rutting in mud and the tin shacks, there is—your eyes will hardly believe it—a walled compound with an azure pool. The house figures on no deed or bill of sale, but it was every bit the property of a man named Ti Jean Roosevelt.

  (Ti Jean, under indictment in the Southern District of Florida and seeking the safe harbor of parliamentary immunity, wished to be the deputé representing Cité Soleil in Parliament—and he surely would have been, given the ironfisted control he had over the bidonville, if the CEH hadn’t eliminated his name also from the ballot. Not a property owner, they said.

  (In the weeks leading up to the CEP’s announcement of the electoral roster, Toussaint told me, Ti Jean and the judge, both men anticipating their elimination from the ballot, had talked long hours in Ti Jean’s compound in Cité Soleil. There, Toussaint told me, the two politicians agreed to unite Ti Jean’s soldiers with the judge’s voice.

  (That’s the crowd on the Champs des Mars listening to the judge.)

  * * *

  The sacking of CEH headquarters was, even by Haitian standards, dramatic news. Even as the protesters were settling themselves into CEH head
quarters, the airwaves were straightaway abuzz. Commentators on the national Right lamented the lack of an army to shoot the protesters, and commentators on the Left denounced the commentators on the Right, calling them Tontons Macoutes and fascists. Being so denounced infuriated the commentators on the Right, who wondered in what real nation demonstrators could seize a national treasure like CEH headquarters with impunity. A popular radio comedian joked that the demonstrators hadn’t meant to loot headquarters, they’d just been wandering around downtown Port-au-Prince looking for a lost goat. The phrase “Lost Goat” soon became synonymous with all manner of electoral malfeasance.

  The special representative of the secretary-general of the United Nations issued his usual statement in times of crisis, calling on all “political stakeholders to refrain from violence and negotiate a good-faith resolution to the political crisis in accordance with the rule of law.” The president of the Haitian Sénat implored the president of Haiti to suspend Parliament and impose martial law; his rival in the Sénat demanded that the president resign. Reporters sought out Etienne Brutus, directeur générale of the CEH, and found him at his home, where he announced from his doorstep, reading from a handwritten text, that he and his colleagues in the CEH had acted in accordance with the law. He declared Johel’s accusation an assault on his honor. He called on the PNH to shoot the vagabonds, criminals, and gangsters who had “disrupted democracy.” A spokesman for the United States embassy declared that it considered Haiti’s electoral process “subject to Haitian law.” Followers of Haitian politics understood this to mean that the embassy had no rooster in this fight. Then the embassy sent an email to all American citizens in Haiti, advising them to avoid unnecessary travel in downtown Port-au-Prince.

  That afternoon, the judge spoke to the press from a conference room at the Hotel Montana. “We’re a nonviolent movement,” he said. “We don’t have guns, we don’t have knives, we don’t have bombs—we’ve just had enough. Enough of the dirty tricks. Enough of these electoral games.” The judge looked into the television cameras and said the phrase that would make him, in Haiti, famous: “Enough of the lost goats.”

  5

  The special representative in Haiti of the secretary-general of the United Nations was the point man for the international community in its efforts to keep the peace in Haiti, a job, the SRSG would sometimes joke, not unlike being appointed chairman of an international committee to make soup—only the Russians wanted to make borscht, the Spanish gazpacho, the Americans chowder, the French bisque, and they didn’t have much to work with but pepper, water, and ketchup. Everyone blamed him that the soup turned out lousy. Nobody asked the Haitians if they wanted soup at all.

  That morning, the SRSG received a phone call from the ambassador of the United States.

  “How are you, Anne?” the SRSG said.

  “Frankly, Dag, I’m exhausted.”

  The American ambassador is expected to do one thing: she must keep Haiti out of the newspapers. That is how her tenure in Haiti will be judged. If Haiti has not made the headlines while she is ambassador, she will be considered a success. She will have succeeded if American troops are not deployed to Haiti, if Haitian refugees are not flooding the beaches of Florida, if the president of the United States is not required to trouble his busy day with Haitian affairs. This morning Haiti is in the newspapers. The Associated Press put the story on the wires: ELECTION VIOLENCE FLARES IN HAITI. Then the story made The New York Times: ONGOING ELECTION VIOLENCE PARALYZES HAITIAN CAPITAL.

  “He was on the phone at three in the morning. He’s in a mood, Dag.”

  Every afternoon at the Presidential Palace is naptime. The president dresses himself in pajamas, pulls tightly shut the thick curtains, and cannot be disturbed. But he comes alive at night, pacing the long corridors of the palace. If you wish to deal with PoH, it must be done between midnight and dawn.

  The SRSG’s rise through the bureaucratic ranks had been lubricated by a special noise he makes. It comes from the back of his throat; it is somewhere between the sound of clearing his throat and sighing. It acknowledges the suffering of others without himself accepting any portion of the blame.

  The SRSG made his special noise, and the ambassador continued.

  “This can’t go on,” she said.

  The government of the United States felt it an embarrassment, having invested so many hundreds of millions of dollars in Haitian peacekeeping and Haitian nation building, to see the headquarters of the Haitian electoral process under siege. It was a personal embarrassment to the secretary of state, who not two weeks earlier in congressional testimony had mentioned “continuing and ongoing progress” in Haitian reform as justification of the administration’s policies in the Caribbean and Latin America.

  “We are under pressure here, Dag.”

  The SRSG hung up the phone and massaged his face with his fingertips. It was indeed a delicate situation—but it was to resolve situations like this one that there were peacekeepers, after all, and diplomats, and men like the SRSG, who make special noises. On the one hand, there was the president of Haiti, who was quite correct in denouncing the illegal occupation of the headquarters of the electoral authority. On the other hand (and the SRSG knew, from long experience, there was always a countervailing hand), you had these protesters who were also quite correct. How sad it was that they couldn’t vote. The tragedy of peacekeeping, he reflected, was that you are inevitably on the wrong side of someone who is in the right. Perhaps, he thought, that was the tragedy of life.

  The SRSG invited Johel to lunch at his private residence in Bourdon.

  * * *

  I awoke around dawn to see the marchandes and their donkeys coming down from the hills, saddlebags stuffed with the first breadfruit and avocados of the season, or leading goats to their doom. These women were the Haiti that I loved best—indomitable, mystical, courageous. Nothing would have stopped their slow progression down the hill to market, certainly not politics: that was Port-au-Prince business, something that got the menfolk huddled around the radios all heated up. Even if Jérémie were in flames, they would have kept coming, setting up the breadfruit on a groundsheet, sitting patiently until the good Lord saw fit to send them a client.

  That morning, from his pulpit in the cathedral, the bishop called for calm. As always in moments of crisis, the cathedral was full, and the bishop advised his flock to avoid those old devil twins: rage and pride. Later, the town would discuss the sermon, trying to understand the political implications. The bishop had been a prominent supporter of the Sénateur: Was he again coming to his longtime friend’s assistance? Or had his speech been aimed at a narrower audience—the chief of the PNH, who took Communion from his habitual central pew? Was it a tailored message to this man alone, urging him to break with the Sénateur? Nobody supposed that in Haiti the Church represented God alone.

  At Monsieur Brunel’s borlette shop, there was a long line. Toussaint Legrand had told me that people were playing the lottery in record numbers that week, employing every numerological system they could devise, the numbers all originating somehow in either the name or the birth date of Johel Célestin. Then Toussaint asked me for money so that he could play the lottery himself, which I gave him.

  * * *

  The judge remembered something in the night, an incident from his childhood. When he was eleven and just recently arrived in America, he had been invited by a classmate, Reginald McKnight, to the public swimming pool. Johel, unusually for a Haitian kid, had learned the basic strokes in his home country, and he felt comfortable enough in the water that he could enjoy a summer’s afternoon horsing around and splashing in the crowded pool. But the afternoon turned nasty when Reginald McKnight and the other kids started jumping off the high dive and the judge, not realizing how high the high dive really was, had followed the boys up to the edge of the board, stared down at the water below, and froze. Kids down below were shouting, “Jump! Go! Move your fat ass!” The situation would have been all right if Joh
el could have just backed up and climbed down the ladder, but he couldn’t make himself do that either. That would have been humiliating. His fear of jumping and his fear of humiliation produced paralysis, and his body refused to move. He had never forgotten that sensation of being frozen on the edge of the board.

  That morning, the judge no longer wanted to be the sénateur from the Grand’Anse. He tried to summon up the passion that had motivated him. He repeated to himself, “What we need is a road.” He tried to remember that good, strong feeling back in Jérémie when the crowd was chanting his name, the way it felt when the people said “We need a man like you, Judge.”

  Terry was the first to see that the judge was off the reservation, mentally speaking.

  “You got your game, brother?” Terry said.

  The judge didn’t say anything—that said everything.

  “They’re going to try and roll you,” Terry said. “You got to get your game face on.”

  Still the judge didn’t say anything.

  “Talk to me, brother. Let me in. You can’t back down now.”

  But the judge didn’t feel that either—the connection with Terry, the way they used to feel driving down the back roads of the Grand’Anse. He wondered what Terry really wanted from him.

  Later that morning, Terry drove Johel up to the residence of the SRSG, honked the horn twice, waited for the SRSG’s security detail to sweep the car for explosives. Then he pulled into the long driveway leading to the large white house.

  Before the judge got down from the vehicle, Terry put his hand on his forearm. The look in Terry’s eyes was almost imploring. He said, “Nobody’s going to do this if you don’t do it.”

  The judge started to say something, stopped, started again.

  Terry said, “My daddy used to take me out camping up in Georgia, on the shores of Lake Lanier. That’s a big lake. Every spring, young birds would try and fly it.”