Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“Thank you, Terry, for that beautiful image,” Kay said.

“All I’m saying is that if you’re going to do this thing, do it. You’re not going to get a chance like this twice. Believe me, I know. And I want you to think long and hard how you’re going to feel in twenty-five years, you come back and the people are still dying and there’s still no road, and you think, Oh, I could have done that. ”

The judge started to say something and stopped, then started to say something else and stopped again. He looked at his wife, whose eyes tenaciously sought the floor.

As we were leaving, Terry reached for the check.

“It’s on us,” he said.

It had been understood that we would all share the cost of the meal, with its rich food and many bottles of good wine. One by one the other guests had offered to contribute and Terry had waved them off. Now Terry made a gaudy, immodest gesture of pulling his credit card out of his wallet and presenting it with a flourish to the waiter. The pleasure he took in our thanks thereafter was evident: he had switched for the evening from cigarettes to cigars, and he puffed grandly as we shook his hand, his ruddy face enveloped in great clouds of Cuban tobacco.

I looked at Kay. She seemed delighted by the gesture, by her husband’s audacity, by the story it told of their success and generosity. “It’s our pleasure, really,” she said when Johel protested. “The only good thing about having a birthday is taking your friends out.” When Nadia thanked her, she said, “We’re just so happy you could come, honey. We love you and Johel so much.”

Where had that warmth and fondness come from, that sudden transformation?

It had come from money.

UNPOL is the acronym for United Nations Police, sometimes also called CIVPOL, or Civilian Police; and as the acronyms suggest, the UNPOLs occupied some nether ground between civilian employees of the Mission and military units like the Uruguayans. The UNPOLs came to work dressed in uniforms — the uniforms of their national police force — but unlike the soldiers, they were in Haiti by choice.

Any nation can contribute a police officer to a United Nations Peacekeeping unit: just how many police officers a nation will contribute and to which mission is part of the intense and often inscrutable politics of the UN in New York. There is a lot of arm-twisting involved, and nations heavily invested in the outcome of a mission, as the United States is heavily invested in the success of the Mission in Haiti, will put lots of behind-the-scenes pressure on nations like Senegal or Sri Lanka to muscle up some manpower. (At one point, Senegal had 150 policemen in Haiti. The United States, by way of comparison, had 45.) More or less, the deal between the United Nations and the contributing nations is this: the contributing nation will continue to pay an individual police officer’s salary back home, but the UN will pay his housing and travel, plus a per diem and bonus for hazardous duty.* The UN, however, is generous in its assessment of expenses, and for police officers from poor countries, the expense money will often outstrip by far their salaries back home. So with frugal living in Haiti, cops from Burkina Faso or Sri Lanka or the Philippines, living six to a room and eating nothing but Top Ramen from the PX, can save quite a boodle on Mission. Policemen from the States, on the other hand, are often reluctant to head off to Haiti, so the base salary offered by the State Department through its contractors is significant: this, plus the expense money and hazard pay, is what enticed Terry White to Haiti. Every contributing nation has its own method of selecting UNPOLs. Qualifications are, professionally speaking, minimal: five years’ experience in law enforcement, basic physical fitness, a health exam, and working knowledge of one of the official languages, which in the case of the Mission in Haiti were French and English. UNPOLs from poorer nations tended to be at the end of their careers, assigned either as the capstone of long service or, rumor had it, as a result of bribery and corruption back home. Competition for a UN job could be quite intense. One of the ironies of the UN system is this: there are Haitian policemen serving all over the world as UNPOLs themselves, monitoring and mentoring law enforcement officials in places like Congo and Burundi, even as Congo and Burundi send their policemen to serve in Haiti.

* * *

When Terry White first came to Hades, he had an interview with the personnel office in Port-au-Prince. The guy who conducted the interview was a pygmy — no kidding! That’s the way Terry told it. From the contingent of Congo. He was perhaps five feet tall, with enormous glasses and a face as wrinkled as a walnut. He spoke very slowly, and whatever Terry said provoked a copious round of note taking. The interview lasted ten minutes.

“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.