Alan Whicker - Journey of a Lifetime

As usual when overwhelmed by armed men enjoying a little brief authority, I adopted an attitude of polite preoccupied condescension—like a prefect moving down upon a third-former whose mother is hovering. For a new and meaningful relationship with an unwelcoming armed guard, it helps to be slightly patronizing but brandishing a permanent smile. It also helps if you’re saying something like, “Do you mind standing aside, please. British television filming the President. Thank you so much, just back a bit more…” He doesn’t understand, but he gets your drift and suspects you might be Somebody, or know Somebody.

It is hard to shoot a man, or even strike him with your rifle butt, when he is smiling at you in a friendly way and talking about something foreign. It helps the odds.

The confident, cheerful attitude won through again. When they expect you to be humble and timid, a certain pleasant senior-officer asperity throws them off-balance. This is even more effective when guards or police or hoodlums don’t understand English.

To attempt their language, whatever it is, instantly places you in the subordinate position of supplication, and invites questions. Since adopting this haughty approach, I am pleased to say I’ve hardly ever been shot.

So we stood in the searing sunshine in what seemed like a sharpshooters’ convention, waiting for Papa. I became aware that one or two of the more heavily armed men had started talking about us and doubtless about our presence as interlopers upon their scene. Before they could get their little brief authority together, there was a distant roar of massed motorcycles.

The first arrival was, improbably, a chromium-plated Harley-Davidson, ridden by a large black dressed like a tubby boy scout. On his pillion was a younger man in a sort of beach gear. Presumably they were significant figures, but they didn’t seem to threaten my prefect, who was at that moment telling senior spectators to move back a bit to allow better pictures.

They were followed at a distance by a horde of regulation military outriders surrounding an enormous black Mercedes 600. This noisy group had come at least 600 yards from the palace gates. The limo stopped. A sort of tremor ran through the massed troops.

A couple of portly colonels with machine guns struggled out and stood to attention, quivering. After a long pause, a small stooped figure in a dark suit emerged, with a white frizz under his black homburg. Blinking behind thick lenses in the sudden silence, he asked in a whisper for what appeared to be the Mace of Haiti: the President’s own sub-machine gun. This was handed to him and, reassured, he restored it to a guard. His gestures were those of fragile old age, and he walked with a slight shuffle; yet this was the man who held a nation by the throat.

He noticed our white faces and camera instantly, but without acknowledgement. He had presumably been alerted by Joliecœur. After military salutes and anthems, he entered the small Red Cross building with his wife, Mme Simone Ovide Duvalier, a handsome Creole in a large white hat, closely followed by me, as usual brushing machine guns aside with a polite smile and a “ So sorry, do you mind?”

In the scrimmage Ted Morrisby and I managed to converge upon the President. In a way we were expected. We explained we had crossed the world to see him for an important programme, and after some hesitant queries received a murmured invitation to visit his palace next day. We fell back with relief from the small figure who seemed to wish us no harm.

Later we learned that his chargé d’affaires in London was a Whicker’s World enthusiast, and upon our request for visas had sent Papa Doc an approving telex.

Coming to power in 1957 with the support of the army, the astute Dr Duvalier had observed that dictators were always overthrown by their own armies—usually the Commander of the Presidential Guard—so he overthrew his, quite quickly.

He explained his military philosophy to me later, in an angry rasp: “Only civilians can own a country, not the military men. The military man must stay in his barracks and receive orders and instructions from the President, from the King, from the Emperor. This is my opinion, this is my philosophy. To have peace and stability you must have a strong man in every country.”

“A dictator?” I suggested. The hesitant soft voice rasped again: “Not a dictator, a strong man! Democracy is only a word—it is a philosophy, a conception. What you call democracy in your country, another country might call dictatorship.”

His Haitian army once had 20,000 men—6,500 of them generals. It was now reduced to ceremonial duties, and colonels. In its place the President created his Volunteers for Defence—the evil militia of Tontons Macoutes. This unthreatening phrase meant “Uncle Bagman” after the legendary giant bogeyman who strode the mountains stuffing naughty children into his knapsack.

In return for loyalty, Duvalier gave his army bully boys the right to lean upon the terrified populace, to tax and torment. Every nationalized hoodlum performed discipline duties with which Papa Doc did not wish to be publicly associated, and was licensed to kill. To provoke or deny any bogeyman intent upon stuffing his knapsack was to invite a beating, at least.

All hope drained from the nation during Duvalier’s years of sudden and unaccountable death, as Haitians submitted to the gangster army which stood over them, controlled improbably by Mme Rosalee Adolph, Deputy, wife of the Minister of Health and Population, who had since 1958 been the Supervisor General of the Volunteers: “They are not paid—though I am paid, because I am a Deputy. If we are attacked someone has to defend the Head of Government. I have always got my gun. It is always ready.”

The smiling little woman packed it, demurely, in her handbag. After she had proved her firepower we all went, obligingly, up a mountainside to see some of her volunteers in action. We had expected a mass of toiling figures but found only a handful working on a road, watched by twice as many whose duty, it seemed, was to watch. Tontons did not volunteer to work—they volunteered to supervise.

By then Papa Doc was believed to have executed 2,000 Haitians and driven 30,000 into exile and the rest into terrified silence. In that manacled land it seemed unlikely that there was anyone left to criticize, let alone attack. A missing Haitian would be unimportant and unnoticed, though the arrest or death of a foreigner could only be ordered by the President. There was little comfort in that, for he seemed totally unconcerned about international criticism.

A foreign passport was no protection. The Dominican consul was found with his throat slashed so ferociously that his head was almost severed. Cromwell James, a 61-year-old British shop owner, was arrested by Tontons and severely beaten—presumably for resisting extortion. It took ten days for his lawyer to reach him in jail, to find he had been charged with highway robbery! He died four days later: gangrene, from untreated wounds.

In a destitute land, such extortion yielded diminishing returns, for there were always fewer victims to be squeezed. When the Tontons began to demand money from foreigners the British Ambassador, Gerald Corley-Smith, complained. He was thrown out and the embassy closed. Duvalier renounced the convention of political asylum and raided other embassies to get at terrified Haitians hiding from the Tontons. Washington was curtly told to recall its ambassador, Raymond Thurston—who was Papa Doc’s financial crutch.

Though Haiti was officially Catholic, the church was also attacked. Archbishop Raymond Poirier was arrested and put on a Miami flight wearing a cassock and sash and carrying one dollar. Soon after his successor, the Haitian Bishop Augustus, was dragged from his bed by Tontons and not even allowed to put in his false teeth before he was deported. The Catholic Bishop and eighteen Jesuit priests followed him, as did the American Episcopal Bishop Alfred Voegeli, who had ministered to Haitians for twenty years. Papa Doc accepted the Pope’s excommunication with his usual equanimity and went on to ban the Boy Scouts.